An employee is underperforming, projects fall behind schedule, and quality begins to slip, while colleagues scramble to pick up the slack. The manager weighs their options: let them go, perhaps, but then the employee mentions they’ve got four kids, a partner out of work, and a lease they’re barely holding on to. People don’t clock in as clean slates; they walk in with stories, some shared, most hidden, and every so often those stories demand to be heard.
This scenario mirrors when I was a leader of my middle school’s debate team when we hit a wall: one of our core members started missing research deadlines and skipping meetings. Our coach and the rest of us scrambled to cover his cases before the upcoming state qualifier, and the team’s momentum was slipping. My first instinct was to bench him, to make the “professional” move and protect our win-loss record. But then, in the hallway, he told me his mom had been rushed to the hospital, and he was the only one at home to look after his little sister. In that moment, the sheet of judge scores and “on-time preparation” checkboxes lost their authority; I had to choose between enforcing team rules or giving him grace to handle a family crisis.
When the situation involves stories that make us uncomfortable or evoke our compassion, the math gets fuzzy, because the question is no longer whether we can afford to keep them, it becomes: “Can we afford to feel anything about it?” We don’t like to admit that. We prefer clean decisions and insist that the workplace is about output, not emotion.
We outsource tough choices to AI, letting software flag “weak links” and metrics like click rates and deadlines drive the call, because it spares us guilt. But it’s blind to grief, burnout, or a single dad’s struggles; efficient, yes, but you can’t reduce a divorce to a productivity percentage. This is the crux of the matter: when we delegate decisions to algorithms and metrics alone, we strip away the humanity that gives those numbers context and meaning.
Opting out of AI doesn’t get us off the hook; it only makes the job harder. Who gets grace? Who doesn’t? Does a parent with a newborn deserve more leniency than a colleague managing chronic illness? What about someone caring for an aging parent versus someone going through a mental health crisis? Once feelings are on the table, you’re forced into ethical triage; you’re not just managing a team anymore, you’re managing invisible, competing griefs.
When that feels too uncomfortable, we retreat behind policy. The rules say what they say. This isn’t personal; it’s procedure. Except it is always personal. Because letting someone go doesn’t just affect them; it ripples through families, teams, and trust. And if we pretend it doesn’t, we build workplaces that are clean on paper but hollow in practice.
That’s the culture we’ve started to normalize: one that rewards performance and punishes vulnerability, no matter how many “mental health days” are in the handbook. A culture that encourages you to “bring your whole self” to work, just as long as that self doesn’t get in the way of the calendar invite.
So people learn to package their pain, make it digestible, and express it in an upbeat Teams message. They cry in the car, not in the meeting. They show up half-there and call it resilience. And companies call that a win.
But what we lose in that process is hard to name, and even harder to replace. We lose the humanity that makes work more than a transaction. Without humanity, motivation fades, collaboration falters, and organizations become little more than mechanized output mills, stripping away the innovation, loyalty, and sense of purpose that sustain long-term success.
And here’s the kicker: even with all our models and metrics, the most critical decisions still come down to one thing, human judgment. Someone, somewhere, has to pull the lever.
Because the worker with four kids isn’t a thought experiment.
And that’s the dilemma.
The moment you care, you compromise. The moment you don’t, you dehumanize. There’s no clean solution, only trade-offs we pretend aren’t moral. We dress up detachment as professionalism. We call compassion a liability. We build cultures where feelings are welcome, but never powerful enough to interfere.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether feelings belong at work; it’s whether we can survive without them, and what kind of place we’re building if we try. Human connection fuels creativity, builds trust, and sustains morale. Burnout spikes and turnover soar when we view colleagues as data points rather than people. Employees who feel seen and valued bring their best ideas, solve problems collaboratively, and stick around longer. Humanizing the workplace isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation of sustainable success.
We must choose to design systems, both human and algorithmic, that center empathy as a core metric, not an afterthought. By embedding compassion into every policy, workflow, and AI decision, we reclaim the humanity behind the numbers and ensure that performance is measured not just in outputs but in the well-being, resilience, and dignity of the people driving those outcomes.
Because eventually, the day might come when you are that employee. And you’ll want someone to hesitate.
