Leading with empathy
We have all either heard of — or worked with — the person who looks out for “number one.” The phrase, “Nothing personal, it’s just business,” comes to mind with these people. They are so focused on the “goal” that they lose sight of those around them. While they may reach their destination, they are good at leaving behind devastation and destruction.
In 2012, Svetlana Holt and Joan Marques set out to research empathy in leadership. They wondered if empathy was a requirement for leaders, or if it is just a leadership fad. They asked 87 MBA students to rank their opinion on the necessary qualities for successful leadership and found that empathy placed dead last.
What is empathy?
Empathy is the ability to acknowledge and respect our emotions and the emotions of those around us. It allows us to recognize emotional responses, and helps us to regulate our responses. It helps us to “read between the lines” to hear what somebody is really trying to say. Because of the emotional connection, we can develop deeper and more meaningful relationships.
Business students
Svetlana and Joan looked through existing studies and found that business students are quite peculiar. It turns out: business students have the honor of being less cooperative, more likely to defect in bargaining games, and are 50% more likely to cheat than any other major. And then they graduate and carry that behavior forward into the workplace. Yikes!
But, that still does not tell us if empathy is vital in business for managers and leaders alike. It just tells us that business can be a cruel place — and maybe that is necessary for a company to be successful. Is it?
The two researchers point out that the right doses of narcissism helps leaders such as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, to be innovative. But, when it gets pathological, we see Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom infamy and other grave ethical failures.
Building our companies
Given our theme, it’s a challenge to create a cliff-hanger: “Is empathy important? Stay tuned!” As anticlimactic as it is, empathy in leadership and management is crucial to an organization’s success. In an interesting turn, Svetlana and Joan point out that the organizations devoid of empathetic leadership tend to spiral out of control, and negatively impact the bottom line. Empathetic organizations, on the other hand, may seem soft and not “business-like,” but often wind up creating a positive spiral into profitability.
Empathy is important and, as the two researchers point out, can be developed. By improving our emotional intelligence (EQ), we learn to connect with those around us. Much like leading with kindness, using empathy provides us with a different lens when considering how we interact with our teams and those around us.
To lead with a bleeding heart?
While some may push back because of misconceptions and say that empathy causes a bleeding heart, the research does not support it. Empathy helps us look at a situation and view it from somebody else’s perspective. It helps us recognize our emotions and emotions in others.
Empathy helps us recognize that the person who just joined the organization is likely not a “failure,” but our on-boarding process needs to be overhauled. We aim to fix the process, not the person.
Empathy helps us to see that those on our team are trying their best and may need encouragement or validation. As managers, we are here to help our teammates succeed, not to get in their way. We can highlight their work without taking away from ours. The world is no longer zero-sum.
Empathy allows us to spot the pain-points in our products and services that get in our customers’ way. We realize that a feature may take a little bit longer to develop, but that cost is relative to the burden we lift.
We are here to help our teammates succeed, not get in their way.
Engaging diversity and inclusion
Rebecca Lee wrote in 2011 about empathy from a legal viewpoint. While we continue to struggle with diversity, Rebecca notes that we require empathy to gain the perspective needed to thrive in an environment of diverse people. To create space for different points of view, we must understand how our biases take away from the success of others.
Rebecca also brings up EQ as a crucial aspect of leadership, which helps us to avoid the trap of self-grandeur and entitlement. She also points out that empathy helps us develop our softer sources of power — those that take time to curate and do not derive from our ability to reward and punish.
Providing employee feedback
Stephen Young and team looked at how managers can do a better job of providing feedback to employees. They note that managers don’t like giving feedback, and employees tend to continue their work unchanged — even after receiving feedback.
They found that leaders who show empathic concern for their employees while providing feedback had a strong correlation with an improvement in the quality and promotability of the employee. We know we need to give feedback to our team members to help them grow and be successful. If we do so with empathy, we can supercharge the results.
Starting with ourselves — agency
Because empathy — and EQ, in general — can be developed, let us start with ourselves. What are some of the ways we can take a step back and help those around us? Are we a little too focused on ourselves? Are we enabling the behaviors that annoy us? As we increase empathy, we also increase our agency.
When we have agency, we allow ourselves to rise to a higher level of throughput. We enable others to be successful. And, we realize that somebody else’s success does not come at our expense.
As we increase empathy, we also increase our agency.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Empathy is considered a feminine leadership trait and is not something that most men take pride in building. We see, though, that empathy helps us build stronger teams, helps us take better care of our customers, and — in turn — feeds the bottom line.
In celebration of International Women’s Day, I want to note that almost three-fourths of the authors that helped inform today’s newsletter are women:
- Lola Butcher,
- Nicky Dries,
- Svetlana Holt,
- Joan Marques,
- Rebecca Lee,
- Erin Richard,
- Rana Moukarzel, and
- Lisa Steelman.
While women are under-represented in many aspects of business, they contribute significantly to the world as we know it. Let’s work together to build empathy into our teams and organizations. So much so it is no longer solely a feminine leadership trait — but a leadership trait.
Here’s to leading with kindness, empathy, and compassion!
References
Butcher, L. (2019). Making empathy count. Physician Leadership Journal, 6(1), 22.
Dries, N., & Pepermans, R. (2012). How to identify leadership potential: Development and testing of a consensus model. Human Resource Management, 51(3), 361–385. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21473
Holt, S., & Marques, J. (2012). Empathy in leadership: Appropriate or misplaced? An empirical study on a topic that is asking for attention. Journal of Business Ethics, 105(1), 95.
Lee, R. K. (2011). Implementing Grutter’s diversity rationale: Diversity and empathy in leadership. Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, 19(1), 133.
Young, S. F., Richard, E. M., Moukarzel, R. G., Steelman, L. A., & Gentry, W. A. (2017). How empathic concern helps leaders in providing negative feedback: A two-study examination. Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology, 90(4), 535–558. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12184
