The Empathy Advantage
Some people find that empathy comes naturally to them. They have no trouble seeing things from the perspective of a colleague, client or stakeholder. Others can find it hard to step into the shoes of other people. The ability to show empathy helps you to connect with others. Instead of judging or labelling, you work hard to see things through their eyes which leads to deeper, more connected relationships.
Daniel Goleman, an authority on emotional intelligence (EQ) in the workplace, notes that “no matter what leaders set out to do—whether it’s creating a strategy or mobilizing teams to action—their success depends on how they do it. Even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.”
Berkley University defines empathy as “the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling”. Since business is essentially personal and being able to build strong relationships internally and externally is essential, empathy is a must-have skill, not something that’s just nice to have.
Imagine trying to influence staff to work harder, to collaborate with each other or persuade a client to purchase your services without empathy – you’re not going to be effective. When you communicate with empathy you connect quickly and easily, at a deeper level, that builds trust, earns respect and helps you establish mutually beneficial relationships.
Great leaders and managers who demonstrate empathy dramatically improve their teams and organizations. Leaders and managers can act like neural wifi in the workplace – whatever frequency they are on is radiated, absorbed and adopted by their staff like a contagion. In a nutshell, in the workplace, empathy is an advantage.
“Since the leader is sending emotions, self-management in leaders matters greatly because their mental state and moods end up influencing the mood of others. There’s a direct relationship with performance–the better the mood, the better the performance,” wrote A. Primer.
So how do great leaders and masterful managers effectively use and demonstrate empathy in everyday work life? Typically they have built their empathy muscle and begun using it for the benefit of all in four key emotional intelligence areas:
1. Connection – they build long term relationships by showing up with humility, vulnerability and authenticity all the time. Empathy makes them more sensible, practical and strengthens their abilities to connect and create collaborative workplaces. When they empathize with others their sense of identity is connected to them.
2. Contribution – they often help others by getting down in the trenches and working alongside their people building trust and inspiring others to follow their lead during tough times when it counts. They often praise others, focus on the good and inspire people to be the best version of themselves.
3. Community – they create work worth doing and cultures worth belonging to, they keep their commitments and have a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy. tend to understand the needs of people around them and also, how they affect them and therefore bring people together; eradicating feelings of loneliness.
4. Compassion – they take the time to pause and reflect, controlling their own thoughts and often do so through mindfulness or meditation showing up real and becoming a leader worth following 1 – they think, talk and ask about feelings – theirs and other people’
Here are three good reasons to cultivate more empathy in your approach:
1. It’s good for the earth...
A survey 3,500 people about what factors would lead them to reduce their carbon footprint to help slow global warming, found that tapping into people’s tendency toward compassion for others was a more effective motivator than appealing to self-interest.
2. It’s good for people
Research published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes showed how managers with more empathy often translated to healthier employees.
3. It’s good for relationships
The value of empathy comes not from understanding the other person's feelings, but what you do as a result of this. Authors Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry, M.D., stress that not only is the development of empathy important for individual health and wellbeing, but that it also “underlies virtually everything that makes society work — like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity.”
Empathy is quite possibly one of the strongest pillars of humanity. Today we live and work in a permanent state of high anxiety and distraction that managers and their mood have a big impact on the people around them – essentially they are the culture carriers.
AB O U T T H E A U T H O R
As an aspiring minimalist and tiny house dweller she believes in keeping things simple and making 10 degree shifts in all aspects of life and work so you can do less and achieve more.
She is the founder of company culture firm UQ Power, co-founder of Human Power and creator of The 10* Shift and the tiny house experiment The Joy Box.
