Empathy in the Workplace

Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work. -Daniel Goleman

7 ways to create an empathy advantage:

You might not have natural inclinations towards empathy, but you can practice empathy as long as you sincerely serve the best interest of others.

1. Listen with interest.
2. Remember people’s names.
3. Learn about people and their families.
4. Ask, “How can I help?”
5. Say, “That sounds like a real challenge,” when people explain difficulties and obstacles.
6. Affirm emotions. “I can see how you might feel that way.”
7. Ask yourself, “What’s it like to be this person?”

Surprise—the people you lead expect you to care about them. If you don’t show empathy in the workplace, you are not demonstrating good leadership, and you may be hurting your company’s success, says leadership expert and executive coach Loren Margolis.

“Generational shifts have brought more empathy to the fore,” she says. Different expectations from Millennials, multicultural workforces, and mergers bringing workplaces together have pushed empathy to the forefront of what’s desired in a leader

In these challenging times, many of my coaching clients are feeling deeply concerned about how to motivate and inspire their people. “How can I motivate someone who is immersed in fear and uncertainty?” they ask. In my coaching sessions, I’m working to help them effectively guide their people when they need a strong leader most.

During times of crisis, showing empathy for your staff and the broader world will help you pull together as a team and feel capable of moving through this challenging time together. Empathy helps you relate to one another on a personal level, showing you care deeply about each other as human beings. Thus, successfully navigating a crisis together can dramatically enhance trust and unity.

Today, with people more anxious and stressed than ever, empathy in customer service has arguably never been more important. To shed some light on this, MyCustomer and Genesys commissioned a consumer study examining how successfully today’s organisations are catering to their customers’ emotional requirements, and how it impacts business reputation and customer relationships.

Soft skills are vital for leaders, regardless of your industry. Here's why being empathetic plays a major role in successfully growing your company.

Why empathy matters

There are three main reasons why empathy is crucial for professionals. 

1. You sell to a person, not to an organization..

2. Feeling heard builds true connection..

Renowned author and a specialist in #leadership training, Simon Sinek talks about how empathy can make you a leader.

Why Empathy in the Workplace Matters
It’s critical for companies to hire and develop more effective managers and leaders capable of moving their organization forward during both good and challenging times. That requires looking beyond traditional strategies for management development, and cultivating the skills most important for success. One of those skills, perhaps unexpectedly, is empathy.

Empathy has long been a soft skill that’s overlooked as a performance indicator. Research from CCL, however, has shown that today’s successful leaders must be more “person-focused” and able to work well with people from varying teams, departments, countries, cultures, and backgrounds.

Author and leadership strategist Dan Pontefract points out that there are three types of empathy. He not only defines the three types but provides examples from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry how each type of empathy is demonstrated. (Dan's 4th book, LEAD. CARE. WIN. How to Become a Leader Who Matters can be ordered from your favourite bookstore.)

Empathy gives you insight into what others are feeling and thinking. Empathy allows you to create and maintain trust with your employees, even when they aren’t in the office. Everyone is worried and stressed right now, but we aren’t all worried and stressed about the same things. I may be worried about the health of my business. An employee married to a healthcare work might be worried about their spouse’s health.

An employee with small children might be frustrated by their inability to work normal hours. The frustrations and stress these employees are feeling doesn’t mean they are suddenly less valuable employees. Instead, it means that I, as a boss, need to be empathetic and understanding. By sharpening your understanding of others, you will make better decisions for your business.

It is not often that business leaders are heard talking about empathy, but then it is not often that the entire world shuts down, so we are in grey areas everywhere anyway.

While some brands have simply shut down and ceased communication, some others have continued their usual marketing campaigns with an aim to meet their 2020 projections. Neither approach is the best way to present your brand in these uncertain times and to ensure that after this wave has passed you will emerge in the best light possible.

Related: 4 Reasons Why Empathy Is Good for Business

So, what does empathy look like in the workplace? It’s admittedly tough to define what is essentially a human trait or quality. From a psychological perspective, empathy centers on the ability to recognize and understand other people's thoughts and feelings — you know, walking a mile in each other’s shoes. Empathy helps us connect with others.

Many leaders and managers vaguely understand the impact empathy has on leadership effectiveness. One of the reasons, we have found, is that very few of them have been trained or taught how to cultivate empathy in their lives and work as a daily practice.

Empathetic leaders put themselves in their followers’ shoes and attempt to see things from their perspective. Empathy doesn’t mean agreeing with someone. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy doesn’t mean telling them that they are right, or even addressing their concern.

"Demonstrating empathy shows that you care enough to give someone else’s issue at the same level of respect and attention they do. Empathy can also be seen as demonstrating active concern for people and their needs by forming close and supportive relationships with others. Leaders who lack empathy may be perceived by others as cold, uncaring, and having little interest in them as people". (Bawany, 2020)

As Samsung Solve for Tomorrow embarks upon a new decade, equity and empathy are top-of-mind. This has sparked a heightened focus on “STEMpathy” – embedding human compassion and empathy into STEM education to further evolve both emotional intelligence and cognitive development.

Empathetic understanding leads to human-centered ways of solving problems and that conscious view also frames critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, decision making, leadership, entrepreneurship, and more.

Why Empathy is a Strength 

 When people think of the key qualities that make a great leader, words like decisiveness, self-confidence and integrity usually come to mind. Often missing from this list is what I consider to be one of the most important leadership traits: empathy. And today, with the pandemic impacting the way we all do business, I believe empathy in a leader is more critical than ever.  

 There are plenty of studies to back this up. A report by global consulting firm Korn Ferry, "The Power of EI," highlights empathy as an emotional-intelligence competence that makes leaders more effective. The research reveals a positive link between empathy and a company’s performance, team climate and employee retention. 

When we give someone a safe space to share what they're going through personally or professionally, we make them feel seen, heard, and valued. Empathy is essential to good leadership.

The good news is that empathy is a skill, not a trait. Although some people have traits that make it easier to empathize, the skill can be improved by almost anyone, with any set of traits. It’s not about feeling what other people are feeling; it’s about a cognitive capacity to take their perspective. This may seem counterintuitive, but consider: if you’re confronted with an employee who’s deeply depressed, actually feeling that depression yourself might paralyze you to the point of being unable to help. 

Professions as diverse as psychotherapy and theater thrive on teaching people empathic skills. Anthropologists must also learn empathy in order to conduct ethnographic research. The key to improving empathic skills, as with all skills, is through practice and good coaching. Though time in short supply right now as you fight so many simultaneous battles, there are few things more valuable right now than becoming more empathic. Here are three quick ways to improve:

Our ability to empathize with other people is key to our success as working professionals and human beings. Empathy helps us forge bonds, find collaborative solutions, and improve the world around us. 

But in the age of the coronavirus, when most of us are locked up in quarantine and hidden behind face masks, empathizing with each other has become more difficult. It's especially true in the workplace, where Zoom calls have become the norm, and meeting face-to-face and gathering for social meals and after-hour get-togethers has become a rarity.

It is a time for leaders who can understand their teams beyond the output that they create, and really empathise with them. These will be the leaders that manage to lead their troops to recovery at a pace.

For a number of leaders today, many of whom were trained in a previous era of leadership thinking, this move to more emotionally intelligent, empathetically influenced and regeneratively-led business is infinitely difficult to grasp. When you have the same conversation with a millennial leader, however, they understand intrinsically that this move isn’t an option.

It is what 21st century business, and certainly business post the COVID-19 crisis, is already poised to be founded on.

Place it at the core
It will be in this driving of awareness surrounding the role of regenerative leadership, which systematically puts empathy at the core of organisations that we can build - and rebuild. Business and human resilience will provoke impactful organisational results.

Questions I ask Minter Dial:
What are the overarching ideas of empathy and artificial intelligence being blended?
How does empathy relate to business?
How do we ultimately connect this idea to AI?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:
Where empathy needs to start in a business
How empathy affects employees and customers.
The two items that will gage our ability to connect AI to empathy

Empathy is quickly becoming yet another hollow buzzword in business circles around the world. Several businesses treat it as a goal they can achieve so that they can humble-brag about it in their marketing. Many others train their employees on empathy statements they can memorize to show that they care.

Empathy is not a business metric that businesses can measure. But oh, well, that’s how the cookie crumbles in the business world.

Just to be clear, it is worth every bit of your time to practice empathy with your customers and train your employees to be more empathetic. It’s especially invaluable to coach your customer service teams on the value of being empathetic because they are the ones who experience the whole spectrum of customers’ feelings on a day to day basis