What does it mean to be an empathetic leader?
Empathetic leadership is not simply a matter of gut feeling or a passing fad, but a process that requires time, active listening and emotional intelligence
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In recent years, there has been a proliferation of content referring to the ‘empathetic leader’ – from management development programmes to the many posts by more or less legitimate gurus on social media. We are led to believe that there is a higher plane of leadership where bosses possess a sort of soft power that overcomes every difficulty: a sort of managerial nirvana.
More recently, we have also seen the antithesis of this desirable empathy emerge, with the promotion of workshops aimed at rebuilding managerial assertiveness. Slogans such as: ‘Enough of being a nice boss!’, not unlike those calling for a return to machismo in our social media feeds.
To avoid these tempting shortcuts, we must remember that leadership is not an innate quality but a process that requires time and space. A little etymology goes some way towards helping us understand this: ‘em-pathy’ means to suffer within, whilst ‘sym-pathy’ means to suffer together. Put simply: empathy means that I understand why you are crying or laughing; sympathy means that I cry or laugh alongside you.
Empathy as a leadership tool
Empathy is, in fact, one of the tools – perhaps the most powerful one – needed to exercise leadership, and thus to create an environment in which others (staff, colleagues and even one’s own superiors) can perform at their best.
In leadership roles, we often tend to focus primarily on clarifying the objective: quantifying it, how it fits into the strategy, the resources available, and the obstacles to be overcome. And that is already a great deal. However, just as often we forget to gauge the distance that separates each and every one of us from the objective; this is precisely where empathy comes in: understanding where each person is starting from, with their own capabilities, limitations, history and even their emotional state.
