Apparently, I Was Too Empathetic to Be a Strong Leader
Why I started Ameliorza — and why empathy, accountability, power, and difficult truths all belong in the same conversation.
Carol Warne | Founder, Ameliorza
21 August 2026
Apparently, I was too empathetic to be a strong leader.
A client once told me I was too empathetic to be a strong leader. I’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years, but not because I was worried they might be right. I kept coming back to the assumption underneath it: that empathy and strength are somehow opposites.
I don’t believe that for a second.
In fact, empathy is my superfuckingpower.
It’s one of the reasons I notice what’s happening underneath the obvious workplace story. I notice when somebody has stopped speaking up. I notice when the rules seem to change depending on who’s involved. I notice when a decision might be perfectly defensible on paper but is being handled in a way that damages trust. And I notice when everybody in the room seems to know there’s a problem but nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud.
None of that means I think empathy requires endless agreement, weak boundaries, or avoiding hard decisions. I can understand why somebody did something and still think what they did was unacceptable. I can care deeply about an employee’s experience and still expect them to behave appropriately. I can understand the pressure a manager is under and still expect them to use their authority fairly. I can empathize with someone and still tell them no.
That combination — humanity without throwing judgement out the window — is a big part of why I started Ameliorza.
I’d seen what happens when distrust becomes normal
One of the things that stayed with me from my years in workplaces was watching distrust take hold until it stopped looking unusual.
Managers started assuming employees were trying to get away with something. Employees started assuming management had already made up its mind. People documented conversations because they didn’t trust that what had been said would be remembered fairly later. A new interaction wasn’t really a new interaction anymore; it arrived carrying the weight of everything that had happened before it.
Then everybody wondered why the culture felt terrible.
We’re very quick to call these things communication problems, and sometimes they are. But sometimes communication is just where the damage shows up. The actual problem is that people don’t trust each other anymore, and nobody has dealt with why.
I’d seen old boys’ clubs too. Not always the cartoon version. Often it was much quieter than that: who had access, who got the benefit of the doubt, whose mistakes were treated as understandable, who was allowed to be “direct,” who was considered difficult, who was assumed credible before the evidence had even been looked at.
And, of course, there were protected insiders. Most people who’ve worked long enough know exactly what I mean. The person everybody learns to work around because dealing with them would be inconvenient. Maybe they’re senior. Maybe they’re a star performer. Maybe they’ve been there forever. Maybe they have the right relationships. Whatever the reason, everybody eventually figures out that the normal rules don’t quite apply.
Sometimes gender is part of that. Sometimes race is. Sometimes it’s tenure, hierarchy, friendship, personality, informal power, or proximity to someone important. Sometimes it’s a messy combination of several things at once.
That messiness matters, because workplaces are full of it. And I got increasingly frustrated with training that pretended they weren’t.
We have an incredible talent for making ugly problems sound respectable
One of the things Ameliorza is deliberately willing to do is use the harder word when the harder word is actually supported.
Sometimes misogyny gets softened into a “communication issue.” Favouritism gets dressed up as trust. Retaliation becomes tension. Exclusion becomes fit. A decision that was effectively finished before anyone was asked for input gets called consultation. Leadership avoidance gets mistaken for patience.
Sometimes the softer description is accurate. Sometimes it isn’t.
That distinction matters to me because I don’t want Ameliorza to become a company that just uses provocative language and congratulates itself for being bold. Stronger words aren’t automatically more truthful. If we’re going to call something misogyny, racism, retaliation, favouritism, or anything else, the evidence has to support it.
You still have to ask what actually happened. What do we know? What are we assuming? Did the standard change depending on the person? Does power matter here? What responsibility sits with the manager, the employee, and the organization? And, after all of that, what needs to happen next?
That’s the discipline behind the blunt language.
The policy usually isn’t the hard part
It’s easy to write “treat people with respect” in a policy. It’s much harder to decide what respect requires when an employee is furious, the manager genuinely disagrees, and everybody involved thinks they’re the reasonable one.
It’s easy to say leaders should be fair. It gets harder when the person causing the problem is extremely valuable to the business. It’s easy to tell employees to speak up. It’s harder to talk about what happens after they do, especially if they raise an important concern badly, behave badly themselves, or want an outcome the organization can’t reasonably give them.
Those are the situations I’m interested in.
I don’t want training that automatically makes the manager the villain and the employee the hero. I don’t want the reverse either. A manager can misuse power. A manager can also make a legitimate decision somebody hates. An employee can raise something the organization desperately needs to hear and still be accountable for how they behave. Someone can have been treated unfairly and still have responsibilities of their own.
Real workplaces aren’t populated by perfect victims and cartoon villains. They’re populated by people, which makes everything considerably less tidy.
If a workplace standard only works when one person is obviously right and the other is obviously wrong, it’s not going to be much use in the moments that actually need it.
I also got tired of training being asked to do work that belonged to leadership
This one matters a lot to me because, yes, I’ve now built a workplace learning company.
Something goes wrong, so a course gets assigned. A policy gets recirculated. Everyone signs something. Maybe there’s a town hall or a new initiative. Then the organization waits for things to improve.
Training can absolutely help people build skills, understand expectations, practise judgement, and handle difficult situations better. That’s why Ameliorza exists. But training can’t make an organization hold a protected person accountable. It can’t repair a ridiculous workload. It can’t change an incentive system that rewards the wrong behaviour. It can’t make a leader follow through, and it can’t turn employee feedback into action if nobody intends to act on it.
Training is not the alibi.
I want Ameliorza to equip people properly and then be very clear about where the organization’s responsibility begins. If the problem is structural, leadership has to deal with the structure. If the standard isn’t being reinforced, someone has to reinforce it. If people are being asked to speak up and the organization repeatedly teaches them that speaking up is pointless, another course isn’t going to fix that.
That’s why I didn’t want to build another generic HR training company
I didn’t want a giant catalogue of interchangeable courses that people click through, pass, forget, and never use again. I didn’t want the business to depend on me showing up and delivering the same workshop over and over. And I didn’t want organizations renting my judgement by the hour.
I wanted to build learning that’s there when the difficult moment happens.
That means clearer standards instead of vague aspirations. Realistic situations instead of perfect textbook examples. Different responsibilities for managers, employees, and organizations instead of pretending everyone has the same role. Practical tools people can come back to. And, where it matters, evidence that tells an organization something more useful than whether everybody reached the final screen.
I care whether people can actually use what they learned. Can a manager receive difficult information without immediately becoming defensive? Can an employee raise a concern responsibly? Can someone separate what they know from what they think they know? Can a manager explain a decision clearly, including a decision the employee doesn’t like? Can people recognize when power is affecting the situation? Can the organization tell when an individual issue has become something bigger that leadership needs to own?
That’s much closer to what I mean by workplace learning.
And we’re going to talk about the things workplaces usually avoid
When I look at where Ameliorza is going, I see a growing body of learning about the things people recognize immediately because they’re already happening at work: power, misogyny, racism, favouritism, retaliation, protected insiders, informal influence, employee silence, weak accountability, difficult management decisions, bad employee behaviour, double standards, leadership avoidance, and the problems everybody knows about but nobody seems willing to own.
We’ll talk about the customer who behaves terribly and the employer that expects the employee to absorb it. We’ll talk about the meeting everybody calls consultation even though nobody’s mind is genuinely open. We’ll talk about what happens when somebody treats a coworker’s identity or dignity like a debate topic. We’ll talk about AI and the temptation to pretend a machine made the decision so nobody has to take responsibility for it.
Not because controversy is a business model. It isn’t.
We’re going there because these things actually happen, and when they do, somebody still needs to know what good judgement looks like.
The goal isn’t safer training. It isn’t louder training for the sake of being loud either. It’s clearer training: learning that can name what’s happening without getting sloppy about the evidence, teach people what to do next, preserve legitimate management authority, expect employees to own their conduct too, and keep the organization firmly in the picture.
That’s the thread connecting everything we’re building.
People deserve dignity. Managers need legitimate authority. Employees need a meaningful voice. Standards should be explainable and applied fairly. Power matters, evidence matters, and accountability has to travel in more than one direction. And organizations don’t get to outsource their responsibility to HR, a policy, or a training course.
That’s why empathy belongs in Ameliorza. It’s why difficult truths belong here too. And it’s why I care so much about turning those truths into something people can actually use.
I didn’t start Ameliorza to make workplace problems sound nicer.
I started it because I think we can get a hell of a lot better at seeing what’s really happening, judging it fairly, and doing something useful about it.
And that’s where we’re going.
— Carol
Founder, Ameliorza
A client once told me I was too empathetic to be a strong leader. I’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years, but not because I was worried they might be right. I kept coming back to the assumption underneath it: that empathy and strength are somehow opposites.
I don’t believe that for a second.
In fact, empathy is my superfuckingpower.
It’s one of the reasons I notice what’s happening underneath the obvious workplace story. I notice when somebody has stopped speaking up. I notice when the rules seem to change depending on who’s involved. I notice when a decision might be perfectly defensible on paper but is being handled in a way that damages trust. And I notice when everybody in the room seems to know there’s a problem but nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud.
None of that means I think empathy requires endless agreement, weak boundaries, or avoiding hard decisions. I can understand why somebody did something and still think what they did was unacceptable. I can care deeply about an employee’s experience and still expect them to behave appropriately. I can understand the pressure a manager is under and still expect them to use their authority fairly. I can empathize with someone and still tell them no.
That combination — humanity without throwing judgement out the window — is a big part of why I started Ameliorza.
I’d seen what happens when distrust becomes normal
One of the things that stayed with me from my years in workplaces was watching distrust take hold until it stopped looking unusual.
Managers started assuming employees were trying to get away with something. Employees started assuming management had already made up its mind. People documented conversations because they didn’t trust that what had been said would be remembered fairly later. A new interaction wasn’t really a new interaction anymore; it arrived carrying the weight of everything that had happened before it.
Then everybody wondered why the culture felt terrible.
We’re very quick to call these things communication problems, and sometimes they are. But sometimes communication is just where the damage shows up. The actual problem is that people don’t trust each other anymore, and nobody has dealt with why.
I’d seen old boys’ clubs too. Not always the cartoon version. Often it was much quieter than that: who had access, who got the benefit of the doubt, whose mistakes were treated as understandable, who was allowed to be “direct,” who was considered difficult, who was assumed credible before the evidence had even been looked at.
And, of course, there were protected insiders. Most people who’ve worked long enough know exactly what I mean. The person everybody learns to work around because dealing with them would be inconvenient. Maybe they’re senior. Maybe they’re a star performer. Maybe they’ve been there forever. Maybe they have the right relationships. Whatever the reason, everybody eventually figures out that the normal rules don’t quite apply.
Sometimes gender is part of that. Sometimes race is. Sometimes it’s tenure, hierarchy, friendship, personality, informal power, or proximity to someone important. Sometimes it’s a messy combination of several things at once.
That messiness matters, because workplaces are full of it. And I got increasingly frustrated with training that pretended they weren’t.
We have an incredible talent for making ugly problems sound respectable
One of the things Ameliorza is deliberately willing to do is use the harder word when the harder word is actually supported.
Sometimes misogyny gets softened into a “communication issue.” Favouritism gets dressed up as trust. Retaliation becomes tension. Exclusion becomes fit. A decision that was effectively finished before anyone was asked for input gets called consultation. Leadership avoidance gets mistaken for patience.
Sometimes the softer description is accurate. Sometimes it isn’t.
That distinction matters to me because I don’t want Ameliorza to become a company that just uses provocative language and congratulates itself for being bold. Stronger words aren’t automatically more truthful. If we’re going to call something misogyny, racism, retaliation, favouritism, or anything else, the evidence has to support it.
You still have to ask what actually happened. What do we know? What are we assuming? Did the standard change depending on the person? Does power matter here? What responsibility sits with the manager, the employee, and the organization? And, after all of that, what needs to happen next?
That’s the discipline behind the blunt language.
The policy usually isn’t the hard part
It’s easy to write “treat people with respect” in a policy. It’s much harder to decide what respect requires when an employee is furious, the manager genuinely disagrees, and everybody involved thinks they’re the reasonable one.
It’s easy to say leaders should be fair. It gets harder when the person causing the problem is extremely valuable to the business. It’s easy to tell employees to speak up. It’s harder to talk about what happens after they do, especially if they raise an important concern badly, behave badly themselves, or want an outcome the organization can’t reasonably give them.
Those are the situations I’m interested in.
I don’t want training that automatically makes the manager the villain and the employee the hero. I don’t want the reverse either. A manager can misuse power. A manager can also make a legitimate decision somebody hates. An employee can raise something the organization desperately needs to hear and still be accountable for how they behave. Someone can have been treated unfairly and still have responsibilities of their own.
Real workplaces aren’t populated by perfect victims and cartoon villains. They’re populated by people, which makes everything considerably less tidy.
If a workplace standard only works when one person is obviously right and the other is obviously wrong, it’s not going to be much use in the moments that actually need it.
I also got tired of training being asked to do work that belonged to leadership
This one matters a lot to me because, yes, I’ve now built a workplace learning company.
Something goes wrong, so a course gets assigned. A policy gets recirculated. Everyone signs something. Maybe there’s a town hall or a new initiative. Then the organization waits for things to improve.
Training can absolutely help people build skills, understand expectations, practise judgement, and handle difficult situations better. That’s why Ameliorza exists. But training can’t make an organization hold a protected person accountable. It can’t repair a ridiculous workload. It can’t change an incentive system that rewards the wrong behaviour. It can’t make a leader follow through, and it can’t turn employee feedback into action if nobody intends to act on it.
Training is not the alibi.
I want Ameliorza to equip people properly and then be very clear about where the organization’s responsibility begins. If the problem is structural, leadership has to deal with the structure. If the standard isn’t being reinforced, someone has to reinforce it. If people are being asked to speak up and the organization repeatedly teaches them that speaking up is pointless, another course isn’t going to fix that.
That’s why I didn’t want to build another generic HR training company
I didn’t want a giant catalogue of interchangeable courses that people click through, pass, forget, and never use again. I didn’t want the business to depend on me showing up and delivering the same workshop over and over. And I didn’t want organizations renting my judgement by the hour.
I wanted to build learning that’s there when the difficult moment happens.
That means clearer standards instead of vague aspirations. Realistic situations instead of perfect textbook examples. Different responsibilities for managers, employees, and organizations instead of pretending everyone has the same role. Practical tools people can come back to. And, where it matters, evidence that tells an organization something more useful than whether everybody reached the final screen.
I care whether people can actually use what they learned. Can a manager receive difficult information without immediately becoming defensive? Can an employee raise a concern responsibly? Can someone separate what they know from what they think they know? Can a manager explain a decision clearly, including a decision the employee doesn’t like? Can people recognize when power is affecting the situation? Can the organization tell when an individual issue has become something bigger that leadership needs to own?
That’s much closer to what I mean by workplace learning.
And we’re going to talk about the things workplaces usually avoid
When I look at where Ameliorza is going, I see a growing body of learning about the things people recognize immediately because they’re already happening at work: power, misogyny, racism, favouritism, retaliation, protected insiders, informal influence, employee silence, weak accountability, difficult management decisions, bad employee behaviour, double standards, leadership avoidance, and the problems everybody knows about but nobody seems willing to own.
We’ll talk about the customer who behaves terribly and the employer that expects the employee to absorb it. We’ll talk about the meeting everybody calls consultation even though nobody’s mind is genuinely open. We’ll talk about what happens when somebody treats a coworker’s identity or dignity like a debate topic. We’ll talk about AI and the temptation to pretend a machine made the decision so nobody has to take responsibility for it.
Not because controversy is a business model. It isn’t.
We’re going there because these things actually happen, and when they do, somebody still needs to know what good judgement looks like.
The goal isn’t safer training. It isn’t louder training for the sake of being loud either. It’s clearer training: learning that can name what’s happening without getting sloppy about the evidence, teach people what to do next, preserve legitimate management authority, expect employees to own their conduct too, and keep the organization firmly in the picture.
That’s the thread connecting everything we’re building.
People deserve dignity. Managers need legitimate authority. Employees need a meaningful voice. Standards should be explainable and applied fairly. Power matters, evidence matters, and accountability has to travel in more than one direction. And organizations don’t get to outsource their responsibility to HR, a policy, or a training course.
That’s why empathy belongs in Ameliorza. It’s why difficult truths belong here too. And it’s why I care so much about turning those truths into something people can actually use.
I didn’t start Ameliorza to make workplace problems sound nicer.
I started it because I think we can get a hell of a lot better at seeing what’s really happening, judging it fairly, and doing something useful about it.
And that’s where we’re going.
— Carol
Founder, Ameliorza