7 tips to build your empathic leadership powers
Empathy is the “attribute-prime” of highly successful leaders. Here’s how you can develop it for yourself.
Empathy is said to be the “attribute-prime” of successful leaders. Luckily, it is an attribute that can be developed and strengthened with practice and time.
As a Founder at global legal design agency Observ, it’s important for fellow Founder Emma Hertzberg and I to continuously build on our empathic capabilities; to make us better leaders and to enable us to create better solutions that meet the needs of our clients.
Here are 7 tips I’ve learnt and use to develop my empathic leadership powers and those of my team.
1. Put aside your views.
An empathic leader is one that can put aside their views and take into full consideration the views of their team. Doing this allows you to tap into the intellect of the people you’ve hired and hear solutions and opportunities that you had not identified. Afterall, in today’s complex climate it is impossible for one person to have all the answers.
Being an empathic leader does not mean always agreeing with other people. It is about giving people the opportunity to be heard and giving yourself the opportunity to listen, understand, balance and weigh up all options. Putting aside your views and having the ability to see from your team’s perspective not only reinforces that you appreciate the intellect and talent of your people, it also enables you to critically assess, validate, build-on or even discard your own ideas as a leader. Ultimately, ensuring that whatever decisions you make for the company, they are well informed and all possible avenues for progress have been assessed.
2. Genuinely validate the other person’s perspective
Other people may have good reason to act or think the way they do. Part of being an empathic leader is empowering others to be empathic leaders. Here’s a great way to build empathy and cohesiveness amongst colleagues when faced with opposing views.
Colleague A and B have opposing views on the business strategy to take. Which is best for the business? As a leader one option is to step in, weigh up the arguments and you select which view is best for the business. Or, you can use this creative approach that we often adopt at Observ, which empowers your team to draw valid conclusion themselves. Have colleague A genuinely attempt to validate colleague B’s view or idea and have colleague B genuinely attempt to validate colleague A’s view or idea. They must each treat their colleague’s opposing idea or view as if it were their own and try to justify it or earnestly bring the idea to life.
The outcomes are many. Team mates will develop an appreciation for each other, they will be able to critically assess the strengths and flaws in both their own and their team mates ideas and more often than not, they will together draw a conclusion on what solution is best for the team and business.
3. Be open-minded and examine your attitude.
Take time to reflect and examine the forces that truly drive you. Are you the type of person who cares more about winning, being right or having the last word? Or, is your priority to find solutions, develop relationships, and include others? Be real and honest with yourself here. And yes, this may be uncomfortable, especially if the reality is one that you would rather not admit, but self-awareness is essential to empathic leadership. Without an open mind and attitude, the ability to cultivate empathy is far lower.
4. Experience new circles.
As we get older, our circle of friends and acquaintances begin to resemble ourselves. Branch out and try to meet people who live a different lifestyle to you, have different interests or hold different beliefs. Make time to get to know these people, defer judgement of them and of yourself. Just aim to appreciate and understand their way of doing and thinking.
5. Ask what your colleague would do if faced with the same challenge as you.
It is interesting how differently people within the same workplace will tackle the same task. Take time to understand why your colleagues would take the same or different approach to you. Sometimes, even if a colleague would take the same approach as you, you may uncover that their rationale for taking the same approach is entirely different. Understanding the diverse range of thinking and justification processes of people can help you build your empathic powers.
6. Listen to the full message.
Here’s the scenario — your colleague is explaining something to you and before they can finish their sentence, you’ve started to curate your ideal response.
So often as professionals, we pre-empt what someone is going to say and interject with our reply before that person can complete their thoughts. The ability to actively and deeply listen to those around us is one of the most under-valued qualities of a brilliant leader. And, it is this ability to actively and deeply listen to the voices of others that is also key to being an empathic leader.
Becoming a good listener may not sound like rocket science, however, much like being empathetic, it takes conscious commitment and practice to develop this skill. As a strategic designer, deeply listening to the voices of those around me is pivotal to creating human-centric solutions and so, we at Observ are always seeking for ways to take our listening skills to the next level. The team recently invested some time learning from deep listening expert Alix Devendra, who taught us how to go from active listeners, to deep listeners. Alix will kindly be sharing some of her tips in a future post.
7. Walk a mile
Having empathy is often described as the ability to stand in the shoes of another person and see, feel and think from their perspective. Challenge yourself and take a literal approach to this — walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
As a strategic designer, this is something we often do to build empathy with our users. A good example is when I was working as an innovation consultant for an airline one of our tasks was to develop airport services for elderly. To develop a real, empathetic understanding of what difficulties arise for elderly people in airports we literally “walked in their shoes”.
Team mates strapped weights to their limbs to mimic joint and limb fatigue, we donned high-magnifying glasses to blur vision, others wore ear plugs to understand what it is like to be hard for hearing, we found ways to restrict hip movement (based on our research a high percentage of travelers over 60 years old had undergone hip surgery) and we spent the day at the airport. In a matter of minutes, we could pinpoint challenges to solve and empathetically understand from our users perspective. This approach to empathy building is more rigorous, but it quite literally will have you walking in the shoes of those you seek to understand.
To learn more about building empathy as a leader in business or law, head to www.observ.agency
