Because of the universality of COVID-19 and its impacts, it is easy for leadership to empathize with the stress, grief, and turmoil experienced by their workers these last two years. But does simply sharing these emotions truly help? A recent article in the Harvard Business Review examines what the authors—Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, and Marissa Afton—coin “the empathy trap.” Simply put, this trap is the distorted emotional block arising when business leaders begin and end their assistance by vicariously experiencing employees’ distress.

At first blush, empathy seems like a positive, beneficial response to a worker’s plight, and as an immediate reaction, it does demonstrate understanding for the individual’s difficulty. In the professional context of a business, however, there are at least two things that can go awry in such attempts to care for your workforce. The first is the inaccuracy of mere empathy. When you deeply imagine and take on other people’s pain, you inevitably use your own unique historical experiences to inform what that emotional injury might feel like, and quite often—even though the experience of that discomfort is powerful—it can only approximate what the affected individual is actually enduring. In an effort to close the distance in understanding, you in fact distort the true ordeal, which can alienate employees from leadership when they don’t feel heard and understood.

Counterintuitively, the best way to understand someone’s pain is to find some distance from the experience of the distressing emotion—without ignoring the problem. The authors suggest the simple strategy of asking, “What do you need?” This basic inquiry does not make assumptions about any particular feeling or experience, yet it still demonstrates a desire to help. It also empowers the affected individual by asking them to educate the listener, which can be a powerful antidepressant as well as a practical path toward a solution.

Once you have patiently listened and gained accurate information, you may feel tempted to become a “fixer”—to immediately act on the problem. What maximizes operational productivity, however, may not be helpful in more personal situations. Sometimes, the solution lies simply in the act of listening, because a great deal of distress originates with the sense of not being heard.

The second potential problem with empathy is it doesn’t just put us in a similar emotional state; the intensity of sharing a feeling can inhibit our own clarity and ability to respond. Some sources call this state “secondary traumatic stress.” As the HBR authors put it, “empathy may cloud our judgment, encourage bias, and make us less effective at making wise decisions.” Emotions are valuable, but as they intensify into despair, they can often lead to hasty, ill-advised, fight-or-flight decisions. In other words, it doesn’t help someone who is confused and suffering if you become confused, too.

In my forthcoming book, Genuine Kindness, I focus on a form of empathy that communicates compassion while still allowing for the necessary emotional distance that can help coach affected individuals toward personally meaningful solutions. Maintaining boundaries is not the same as being aloof or indifferent. On the contrary, it honors an injured party by making room for their problems, without assumptions or biases. “Feeling someone’s pain” has understandably become a disingenuous cliché, because not only does it too quickly presume to understand something specific to the affected individual, it also tacitly ends the conversation—as if to say, “Isn’t it enough that I sympathize? I don’t have to actually change anything, do I?”

Feeling pain without focusing on clear responses won’t solve anyone’s problem, and in the business world, it certainly won’t improve morale, ameliorate grievances, or respectfully accommodate unique problems. “Being there” for someone does not require experiencing their same emotions. A little distance can help people who need the reassurance of a competent, grounded manager or colleague. At the same time that you maintain appropriate emotional boundaries, you can remain in proximity, offering the gift of full attention without the distortions of total empathy.