Empathetic Leadership – A Choice or Mandate?

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“Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.” – Daniel Lubetzky, Founder and CEO, Kind LLC.

In today’s world, with high levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, empathy and compassion are apparent solutions. While we have always craved empathy in our personal lives, it has now become imperative for work culture or leadership style. Empathy isn’t just a good-to-have ability but has taken center stage in employee performance, retention, and even business profits.

What is Empathetic Leadership?

Simply put, an empathetic leadership style is the ability to place yourself in the shoes of your team, customers, or other stakeholders and understand their pain points. Empathetic leaders take a genuine interest in their team members’ mental health, professional growth, and any challenges that they are facing. The major shift in empathetic leadership comes with moving away from an individual perspective to a more collective solution, by being compassionate to other person’s needs and challenges.

Imbibing empathy is not just restricted to your team but also involves your customers, vendors, and third parties you work with. Bringing in empathy helps you streamline more effective policies, find more innovative products and services, create an inclusive space, and facilitate growth for all.

Examples of Empathetic Leadership

Empathy can be practiced at emotional, behavioral, or analytical levels. Here are some examples of empathetic leadership:

1. You notice your team member is showing an unusual decline in performance. You reach out to understand the challenge faced by the person and work together to find a solution.
2. You had a conflict of opinion with a colleague in a meeting. You are inclined to listen to the contrary opinion rather than being dismissive, defensive, or shutting down the conversation.
3. When someone in the office faces an exponential personal crisis, including the loss of a loved one or health issues, you find ways to support the team member. You go out of your way to support the person financially and emotionally. You also manage and redistribute the work among other team members.
4. You regularly check-in with the team to understand how they are flaring at work, proactively seek feedback, dive into their challenges, and implement solutions accordingly.
5. You connect with people and can alter your communication style based on individual requirements.
6. You think from the perspective of ‘If I was in his position, what solution would I expect’ or ‘If I were her, I would feel extremely insecure about my job safety.’  You can easily understand the reasons behind someone’s actions and correlate them with the emotional upheaval they are going through.
7. You are inclined towards coaching your team to improve performance, and charting their career progression, instead of criticizing them.

Why Empathy Matters?

Empathetic leadership doesn’t just lead to happier employees or satisfied customers, it can help you retain employees, boost productivity, and promote innovation!

According to studies by Catalyst and Businessolver, here are some benefits of practicing empathy at the workplace:

1. Enhance innovation: When senior leaders are more empathetic, 61% of people at work are highly innovative, compared to 13% who worked with leaders with less empathy. In addition, 76% of people felt highly engaged at work with empathetic leaders, compared to a mere 32% who worked with less empathetic leaders.

2. Make them feel valued: Discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, or color can create a huge performance barrier for any employee. A report by Catalyst highlights that 80% of women of color and 93% of white women felt valued and respected by their organizations while working with empathetic leaders, compared to 40% of women of color and 42% of white women otherwise.

3. Increase financial performance: If you are an empathetic leader, chances are that the employees would be happy working for extra hours. Empathy also increases employees’ performance and a whopping 87% of the CEOs believe that their company’s financial performance is linked to empathy in the workplace.

How to Practice Empathetic Leadership

1. Evaluate Yourself

Before you begin practicing empathetic leadership, start by understanding where you stand right now. Evaluate yourself on the following parameters and find some ways to practice empathetic leadership.

• Have you been vulnerable? Many leaders refrain from acknowledging their mistakes in front of their team. However, recognizing what went wrong and taking ownership is one of the strongest traits of a leader. Share your vulnerability and fears with your team. That only makes your team feel more confident about having transparent conversations and opening up to you.

• How much do you know about your team? It is imperative you understand how your team is flaring in terms of workload, what support they need from you, how is their mental health, what is team dynamics, how often your team members collaborate with each other, etc. Start making conscious efforts to seek responses to these questions.

2. Listen and Connect, Authentically

Humans are wired by social connections. We crave empathy, compassion, love, and appreciation; in life or at work. As empathetic leaders, it is vital you connect with your team and look beyond the KPIs and targets. Now while you may think that you make that effort, research shows that employees know when it is not real. In a study conducted by EY, more than 50% of employees surveyed perceive their corporate attempts to empathy as inauthentic.

Here are some handy tips to practice empathy in leadership:

• Keep open discussions on policies and how employees connect with them. Seek input not just from key stakeholders or senior managers, but create a diverse group across functionaries, designations, gender, ethnicity, and roles. Give a platform for people to voice opinions and, more importantly, take action. While many leaders make an effort to gather feedback, little is done to transform that into actionable steps. The best way to demonstrate that you listen is by taking measurable actions. And if you cannot take any actions, or if the feedback isn’t relevant, be transparent and communicate the same with your team.

• Connect with your team members frequently and do a quick check-in with them. Make this a fun thing. Everyone can begin the meetings by sharing how they are doing, any interventions they have that day, and responding to an interesting question, like sharing an unknown fact about them or how they would like to spice up the next team meeting.

• Be genuinely interested in your team members’ challenges and bottlenecks and find your role in helping them out. Check on their personal issues when required and offer your support.

• Remain approachable to all your team members, irrespective of the organizational hierarchy. Communicate that you are there to support them at all times.

3. Empathetic Work Culture

Empathy doesn’t sustain with one empathetic leader. It is an organizational culture, which can be implemented in a top-down approach. While it begins with you, the ripple effects must influence your entire team or organization.

Try these tips to ensure that empathy becomes part of organizational value and culture:

• Be vocal about valuing empathy in the workplace. Share examples and encourage those who value empathy in your team.

• Introduce empathy as part of organization values and make efforts to train your team.

• Empathy begins with leaders but cannot end there. Organize trainings on empathy for managers and everyone within the organization.

• Enable access to psychological counseling on stress and anxiety management, particularly in times of crisis. Ensure that the employees feel safe about having these conversations and that the details remain absolutely confidential between the person and the counselor.

4. Offer Flexibility

Flexibility is one of the common ways to express empathy, yet often overlooked. Go beyond offering the flexibility of working from home or the flexible working hours of 9-5. Be conscious of what your team needs and respond accordingly.  

Every individual and their challenges are different, each requiring varied interventions. Enable flexibility in supporting your team in their unique needs, like giving extra work flexibility to someone who has to care for a sick child at home. Employees now expect personalized treatment, and for a majority of the time, it is non-negotiable.

5. Watch out for Burnout

Burnout isn’t uncommon, in fact, it is a prominent reality. What is burnout? It is the feeling of being trapped in your profile or organization without a vision or plan of action for growth or learning. People with burnout are likely to have lower morale, be less engaged, make more mistakes, miscommunicate, and are likely to leave their jobs.

Here is what you can do to avoid burnout and practice empathetic leadership:

• Recognizing the signs early of burnout within your team is critical. Observe anyone who is procrastinating a lot, is feeling hopeless, or is dreading work. When you can identify these signs early, managing them will be relatively easy.

• Provide temporary time off to employees who are experiencing burnout. Reduce the workload, and redistribute the scope of work.

• Consider mandating yearly time off for everyone. If your employees aren’t taking leaves, it may be a red flag.

• Set boundaries and discourage working over the weekends, or working late hours.

• Ensure that there is absolute clarity on roles and responsibilities, and timelines to complete work. Unclear expectations can lead to burnout.

6. Sympathy vs. Empathy

Sympathy and empathy are completely different but are often jumbled up in our workspace. Sympathy is something that most humans expect; however, empathy is that silver line beyond expectations.

• Sympathy is feeling sad or disappointed for someone and then offering support. When you say, “That must be very difficult”, you are practicing sympathy. However, empathy is more about understanding the other person’s perspective by being in their shoes. It is having those in-depth conversations to understand the root cause and then pitching in support. “I understand how you feel. You can share everything with me” is an example of being empathetic.

• While sympathy is more of acknowledging distress faced by someone, empathy is diving in to take action. It is to identify your role in a colleague’s challenge and act on it.

Both empathy and sympathy are extremely important to practice in the workplace. Pick a conscious choice based on the person you are interacting with and the circumstances.

7. Remain Transparent in Decision-making

To practice empathetic leadership, it is essential to remain open and transparent in all communications.

Here is what you can try:

• Be transparent about layoffs and whenever possible, share the news in advance.  Refrain from holding on to information, and share company issues before laying off a team or individuals. It is also important to remove the fears of other employees with open communication and sharing future plan of action.

• Do not make increments a complex mathematical and behavioral calculation. Set aside clear ways to measure performance and increments, and communicate these with your team.  

• Consider undertaking employee surveys on a regular basis to understand their fears and challenges. Talk to your team based on the key highlights from the survey and look out for effective solutions.

Conclusion

Let empathy not just be a buzzword in your organization. Being empathetic comes with a shift in mindset. It is all-inclusive and involves the entire team and vendors, irrespective of their performance. Practice empathetic leadership by including empathy in your policies, values, and more importantly, in your daily interactions and decision-making.