The name of this blog comes from our mission at INFLUENCE: “To empower people with clarity and confidence.”
Our objective is to provide brief but meaningful topics (under 500 words) that inspire, educate and empower leaders through resources both inside and outside of INFLUENCE. This week’s edition is provided by David Salmons.
Empathy as a workplace topic has caught on over the last few years, and for good reason. As a case in point, the military term “VUCA”, which means “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity,” is increasingly being taught in business and leadership programs because it describes real employee experiences in the 2020’s.
That said, the intentional development of empathy in business cultures would seem a no-brainer, both because it helps engage and retain the best employees AND because – we’re all in this together.
Still, recent business reports show that nearly half of employees believe their leaders don’t get it. One study showed that roughly half of the employee’s surveyed viewed their leaders as empathetically dishonest. Many seemed to view leaders as talking from scripts without genuine connection or commitment.
Whether these employee perceptions are accurate or not, we’d like to offer the following brief brush-up on empathy in the workplace, beginning with a few explanations of what it is and what it’s not.
First, empathy is the ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions and to some extent, to share their perspective, which leads to the following helpful contrast: While sympathy involves feeling pity or sorrow for someone based on our own perspective, empathy indicates that we’ve placed ourselves in their shoes.
That means, where sympathy might produce a hug, empathy produces more. As one of the five dimensions of emotional intelligence, empathy has proven to build trust, strengthen relationships, and drive engagement – all outputs associated with healthy organizational culture.
How does it work? Experts describe the following three types of empathy:
- Cognitive empathy – becoming aware of the emotional states of others, as well as why they might feel as they do.
- Emotional empathy – acknowledging and sharing others’ emotions.
- Compassionate empathy – taking actions that realistically support others in time of need.
If we look even closer, we’ll see that empathy requires curiosity and connection. This means giving someone our full attention as we watch for verbal and nonverbal clues instead of assuming we already know what they’re feeling and why.
Where a leader’s compassion is appropriate, it will amount to helpful measures that fit the situation within realistic business parameters, such as: Do they need a few moments to emotionally reset? Do they need a quiet presence? Do they need to talk? Do they need to work from home to help an ailing parent?
And while compassion is good as a general rule, many experts advise not to confuse being soft-hearted with being soft-headed. That is, some individuals create their own chaos, and differentiating this is important. For example, when an employee’s drama is non-stop, a leader may need to ask questions that clarify the following: Are the employee’s own choices – including personal passivity – at the center of their difficulties? Or are they taking realistic steps to manage their difficulties?
When employees consistently create chaos, an empathetic response might be to show them the limits of organizational accommodation because empathy, as opposed to sympathy, seeks to acknowledge realistic cause; and ownership is still required for healthy personal and professional behavior.
In conclusion, empathy isn’t only for crisis. Engaging, being curious and listening amounts to practicing empathy anytime. And since empathy-rich cultures are known to engage and retain better employees, practicing genuine empathy in both good times and bad times makes a great deal of sense.