Leading with Empathy

If you’ve been following along, you know that at Soul Trained we believe in the immense power of hard humankindness. Hard humankindness is an upgrade to what some folks call ‘tough love’ and it has a deliberate intention of moving the leader more towards their optimal outcomes. One of the key components underpinning the delivery of this is the ability to lead with empathy, a behavior that is non-negotiable if you want to be a leader who is worth following.

In recent months the topic of empathy seems to have been talked about more than ever and in a 2018 Forbes article Javier Pladevall, the CEO of VW Audi Retail in Spain is quoted as saying, “Leadership today is about unlearning management and relearning being human.” We couldn’t agree more. It feels like the tide is at last turning on previous cynical attitudes towards ‘soft skills’ as being associated with weak leaders who are too nice and just want to make you feel good.

In fact at Soul Trained we reject the use of the word ‘soft’ in relation to empathetic leadership, instead we prefer to talk about ‘relational skills’, or better yet Daniel Goleman’s concept of Emotional Intelligence. We believe that the behavioral side of being in a people management role actually takes enormous strength and without serious amounts of empathy you will not encourage followership.

Let’s take a closer look at what we really mean when we talk about empathy and why we believe it’s so important.

First, a definition. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings and the ability to communicate [through words and behaviors] your understanding. It’s important to note that there is a distinction between sympathy [feeling for someone] and empathy [feeling with someone]. Brene Brown does a beautiful job of explaining the difference in this short vid.

Empathy is the listener’s effort to hear the other person deeply, accurately, and non-judgmentally. Empathy involves skillful reflective listening that clarifies and amplifies the person’s own experiencing and meaning, without imposing the listener’s own material’. Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy and author of On Being a Person [1951].

Reflect for a moment on these two scenarios taken from a workplace you may, or may not, recognize:

SCENARIO #1: The alarm goes off on Monday morning at 5am. You have had a restless night’s sleep after a helluva weekend in which the family troubles that have been bubbling finally boiled over and the weather was a pile of poop which meant no one could get outside and were under each other’s feet all weekend. To cap it all off you and your partner had a big ole falling out on Sunday night which meant you weren’t able to get to the report you had promised yourself you would finish over the weekend in favor of an on-time finish on Friday evening.

You open up your calendar and log into Zoom for the first meeting of the day which is, as always, the weekly team meeting in which each team member walks through the report that describes last week’s business performance.

You just can’t bring yourself to smile and act as if everything is okay so you decide to go camera-off this week. As everyone logs on and chats cheerily about their weekend, your boss opens the meeting with a quick go-round-the-room, checking-in with everyone before getting stuck into the report review. The creeping-death-of-check-ins finally reaches you and you muster all the strength and courage to say, “The weekend was fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Thanks.” By the tone of your voice everyone in the room can tell you’re not fine [as if the camera-off wasn’t already a telltale sign].

Your boss quickly moves on, silently worrying that if they dwell too long on you, the mood will be brought down and everyone else will start to feel not-okay. For the rest of the meeting you’re distracted, still with one foot in the weekend chewing over the argument you had last night. When it comes to the part of the meeting when you present your performance report you go as quickly as you can, offering as little as you can to get by, and you stay off-camera.

The next time you hear from your boss is towards the end of the week, in a teamwide email reminding everyone that the reports are due and that they will be reviewed in the weekly team meeting on Monday.

SCENARIO #2: The alarm goes off on Monday morning at 5am. You have had a restless night’s sleep after a helluva weekend in which the family troubles that have been bubbling finally boiled over and the weather was a pile of poop which meant no one could get outside and were under each other’s feet all weekend. To cap it all off you and your partner had a big ole falling out on Sunday night which meant you weren’t able to get to the report you had promised yourself you would finish over the weekend in favor of an on-time finish on Friday evening.

You open up your calendar and log into Zoom for the first meeting of the day which is, as always, the weekly team meeting in which each team member walks through the report that describes last week’s business performance.

You just can’t bring yourself to smile and act as if everything is okay so you decide to go camera-off this week. As everyone logs on and chats cheerily about their weekend, your boss opens the meeting with a quick go-round-the-room, checking-in with everyone before getting stuck into the report review. The creeping-death-of-check-ins finally reaches you and you muster all the strength and courage to say, “The weekend was fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Thanks.” By the tone of your voice everyone in the room can tell you’re not fine [as if the camera-off wasn’t already a telltale sign].

Your boss pauses, takes a breath, and says, “Thanks for sharing, everyone. I know sometimes it is hard to kick into gear for these Monday morning meetings. I appreciate you all being here.” With your boss’ words, you notice your nervous system settling slightly and you feel more able to be present with the rest of the team. While you stay off camera for the rest of the meeting, you confidently present your report and are even open and receptive to some questions from the rest of the team about one line item which didn’t perform as well as the others.

Soon after the meeting you receive a ping from your boss who thanks you for showing up today and offers-up some time to check-in 1:1 if you would like to. They are careful to let you know it is not for anything in particular, it’s just that they noticed you weren’t your usual self earlier that day, that they don’t wish to pry, but that they are here for you and willing to listen if there is anything you want to share. While you don’t respond immediately to your boss’ message, you notice that you feel fortunate for being part of this team and increasingly more able to engage with work after such a shitty weekend.

Receiving an empathetic response will result in team members being more effective; it’s an important part of proactively managing discretionary effort which we wrote about here. The knock on effect on the rest of the team is also worth noting, the responses from the boss in each scenario will communicate to the broader team certain messages about what is, and what is not, okay around here.

Like kindness, empathy doesn’t cost a penny, but the ROI is incredible. Brene Brown says that empathy is a skill, which means it is something we can all learn to do. Here are some quick tips on how to bring about greater empathy in your leadership:

1. Assume positive intent: This is not the same as letting people walk all over you, nor is it the same as letting people off the hook, and it certainly isn’t about not holding others to account for their behavior. The act of assuming positive intent is a conscious process of recognizing and remembering that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us at the time; that none of us get up in the morning to come to work to do a deliberately bad job. Notice what happens to the way you approach problem situations or conflict in team relationships when you start from a place of assuming positive intent. It will change your life.
2. Give the benefit of the doubt: when we give people the benefit of our doubt by suppressing our suspicions [until proven otherwise], we demonstrate that we respect their model of the world and we show-up as someone who is interested, curious, and open. Giving the benefit of the doubt is a posture of softening and solving problems from this place is infinitely easier and more enjoyable, for all concerned.
3. Meet people where they are at: or, as we like to say at Soul Trained, meet people at their bus stop. What do we mean by that? Simply, instead of trying to convince your people that your way is the right way, take a moment or two to explore, unpack, and respect where they are coming from and the many ways in which they interpret the world. See how quickly your people grow and improve their performance when you meet them where they are at, instead of having them meet you where you are at.
4. Listen with the intent to understand: The late great Stephen Covey [author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People] is known to have said that most people don’t listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply. We’ll say this loud for the people at the back — THIS IS NOT REALLY LISTENING! You see, when we are listening with the intent to reply, we are doing what is known as ‘queueing’ or, in other words, we are waiting to talk. We’re up in our heads perhaps formulating a clap back, a clever question, or a rebuttal in order to react to a portion of what someone else has just said. No bueno. You cannot truly listen while waiting to talk. It’s as simple as that.

In a recent Soul Trained poll, 62% of respondents expressed that the demonstration of empathy was the behavior they most valued in their leader. How do you measure-up in terms of the 4 skills outlined above?