Empathy - A Crucial Leadership Skill Overlooked
Let’s face it, when it comes to the celebrated skills of successful leadership, empathy is rarely included in such a list. And if it’s on the list, then in the leadership realm we label empathy as a “soft” skill implicitly giving it less importance. It even sounds if you have empathy you’re too “soft” or “nice”. We may need to come up with another term instead of “soft” skills because there is nothing “soft” about soft skills. Because they’re actually very “hard” to acquire and apply correctly. And the payoffs can be dramatic.
Let’s start with a definition of empathy: The ability to understand and be aware of the thoughts, perspectives, and emotions of another person. The capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.
Why is empathy good for business and people?
1. Empathy helps you create trust
With empathetic leaders people know that their feelings and thoughts will never be simply overlooked or ignored. They see and feel that you care. That doesn’t mean you will do what they say but it means you acknowledge their perspective. That in itself creates trust between the leaders and the team regardless of whether their leader can or will take any actions based on that perspective.
2. Empathy creates meaningful conversations which helps the leader provide the right support
I love this quote: “As a leader, you should always start with where people are before you try to take them where you want them to go.” – Jim Rohn, Entrepreneur and Author
When you lead with empathy you relate to your teammates not only on an intellectual level, but on a human level as you make real efforts to understand them. That’s not always easy, and it’s actually an art to create this space.
3. Empathy is practical
Empathy has the power to turn a confrontational conversation into a collaborative one — which is crucial for any leader who wants to have impact and success. A successful leader works well with people from different teams, departments, and cultures. To be able to do that, you need to strengthen your empathy and listening muscles. The result is having engaged teammates that are more likely to do their best. And you will feel great about being able to bring out the best in them.
4. Empathy helps you to get to the root cause of poor performance
Having empathy allows leaders to first understand and then help struggling employees improve and excel. You can bring people from the firing list to the promotion list. I believe there are rarely “difficult” people who don’t want to make a meaningful contribution. Except for maybe 5% of the population or even less, people usually respond positively to coaching and getting better if they know you actually care. In general poor performance is tied to their previous experience and how supported they felt (or not).
After reading this, you may ask, given all these benefits, why don't we make this skill a priority in organizations? Well, one reason (or excuse) is that empathy is regarded as an emotion, and emotions in most workplaces are still regarded as a weakness. That’s very sad because contrary to popular belief we (humans) by nature are not self-centred. Research into mirror neurons has shown that we’re wired to connect. We’re social beings that need to interact with each other. Empathy is a fundamental part of this, and it shouldn't be ignored in our workplace setting.
Also, let’s not forget that people model after their leaders. An organization hums with the vibrations generated by their leaders. This is a key part of how leaders create culture. By bringing empathy into your style you are messaging to all that this is an important part of how we all behave.
Needless to say that empathy is not the only attribute of a successful leader. Another key element for a leader’s success that goes hand-in-glove with empathy is keeping your people accountable. I’ll explore accountability in more depth in a future article.