Empathy

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

When we talk about empathy, we often refer to the term ‘walking in the other person’s shoes, but it’s much more than that. Empathy and Leadership go hand and hand, the better the Leader understands and embraces empathy the stronger the connection he or she has with their team. Empathy comes in 3 different forms of attention and each one of these holds a very important part within Leadership.

Cognitive Empathy enables the leader to explain themselves in meaningful and sincere ways, a skill essential to getting the best performance from their team. Applying cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly. Being inquisitive and curious about people fuels cognitive empathy.

Emotional Empathy is effective for mentoring, coaching and understanding team dynamics. Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own opinion of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice and other external signs of emotion (AKA body language).

Empathetic Concern, which is closely related to emotional empathy, enables you to sense not just how people feel but what they need from you, it’s what you want in a leader. We intuitively experience the distress of another as our own. However, in deciding whether we will meet that persons needs, we deliberately weigh how much we value his or her well being. Those whose feelings become too strong may themselves suffer. In the helping profession, this can lead to compassion fatigue, it can create distracting feelings of anxiety about people and circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control. But those who deaden their feelings may lose touch with empathy. Empathetic concern requires us to manage our personal distress without numbing ourselves to the pain of others.

We all have some level of each type of empathy. Contact me to learn more about empathy and how Simply Advanced can provide your leaders with tools and methods to help them foster each type to strengthen relationships, personally and professionally.