I think you are one of the rare people that really understand other people.

You listen. You care. You put people first.

That’s the empathy part of being an expert defender.

A design leader who hears the perfect loop – the reason they are needed – needs also to know when they are over-doing it. Aiming to “leave no one behind” can tip into silence. Empathy turns into avoidance. Avoiding hard conversations. Avoiding required critique. Avoiding the thing that might make someone else uncomfortable. And to their mind, hurting the team. It’s a familiar instinct for expert defenders, who in many ways feel empathy in their DNA.

CDOs and other design leaders take on the weight of empathy a thousand times a day.Balance the team’s happiness with the work’s edge.Work’s edge with stakeholder expectation. Stakeholder expectation with team’s happiness. And somewhere empathy can run too far. Run to protect team cohesion over work quality. Empathy without friction can feel cosy. Cosy rarely leads to better design. The signs you might be stuck in perfection from too much empathy: Editing your notes so no one will be challenged or inconvenienced preferring consensus over shared understanding Coddling high risk, high value critique because someone is “early in their journey” Remaining quiet when you know you need to say something Challenge is not cruelty. Honesty is not harsh. Struggle is not unhealthy.

Strong design cultures don’t coddle, they create standards. And the perfection loop rewards the designer who hems themself in to keeping the peace.

But progress requires leaning in to friction. It does not mean abandoning empathy, quite the opposite.Use empathy to listen and to feel, not to justify.Use empathy to uncover context, not to mute crispness.Use empathy to give room for stretch, not just comfort. Tension is design culture’s oxygen. And tension is not toxicity. Toxicity is one that pretends to truth, by not saying the real thing. Expert defenders are scared of that, scared of rupturing trust.

Trust doesn’t break from honesty. Trust breaks from a lack of it. When the expectation remains, no one grows, and performance plateaus. Let your empathy drive high standards. Let it prod people to reach them. Let it honour their potential, not just their current state. Because what your team really needs is not more cosiness but the clarity to reach for more."