A leader’s ability to harness empathy in their work is a powerful tool for establishing an atmosphere of trust and affiliation, essential for innovation. Leaders must think and act differently to foster innovation by building trust, a learning culture, and a shared vision of the future. Empathy is the first reflective step a leader needs to take to build a dynamic environment that spurs innovation.
“The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes.” — Contemporary Statesman
Leadership Empathy in the Workplace
Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but they’re not the same thing. According to Houston psychologist and researcher, Brene Brown, “empathy is feeling with people.” Feeling for someone else’s situation without feeling obliged to act is sympathy, not empathy. Sympathy is not always a bad thing. In a recent meta study, University of Texas at Austin researchers Natalie Longmire and David Harrison (2018) likened sympathy to perspective-taking. Their research demonstrates that both empathy and perspective-taking are important for leaders to frame their work. The researchers concluded that empathy is a leader’s starting point to establishing trust and cooperation with colleagues and employees.
As with Brown, Longmire and Harrison take the view that empathy fuels connections. An effective leader can stimulate the social action path that leads to organizational trust by adding compassion, defined as empathy with the desire to help. Perspective-taking, also known as cognitive empathy, can accelerate trust building. In situations like addressing the challenges of a subordinate, or engaging in competitive negotiations, perspective-taking helps a leader to keep marginal neutrality instead of becoming emotionally constrained. We call the capacity to lead with empathy and perspective-taking, being compassionate yet emotionally balanced, 3D Empathy.
3D Empathy and Decision Making
3D Empathy is a foundational skill for developing and strengthening effective leadership. Its dimensions – understanding your own feelings, compassion for self and others, and conscious consideration of how others are feeling – help us make better decisions.
The reasons why 3D Empathy helps a leader make better decisions are two-fold. First, it requires careful listening, which helps one gather more facts and dispel personal biases. Second, 3D Empathy affords a leader rational insight into how a decision may affect others’ feelings. The perspective-taking component of 3D Empathy helps consciously frame circumstances and avoid emotionally-laden decisions.
The 3 Reflective Targets of 3D Empathy:
- Yourself – It’s often the most difficult to be empathetic towards one’s self. Leaders are usually tough self-critics and often impose high standards on themselves and those around them. By extending compassion to one’s self and accepting that one will make errors, leaders position themselves to learn from their mistakes, and mentor an experimental mindset. This creates the dynamic required for nurturing organizational innovation.
- Colleagues & Subordinates – Complex conversations with people in the workplace can be difficult with the high number of variables any one decision requires. Leaders need 3D Empathy to understand their stakeholder’s perspectives on functional responsibilities and gauge the collective emotional state of any business situation. As collaboration begins, it’s important to appreciate the different orientations participants bring, and synthesize those perspectives with one’s own feelings before deciding on a course of action.
- Customers – In the heat of organizational work often rife with internal politics, leaders can get caught in internal dynamics and lose sight of customers. Customers don’t want to feel like ‘targets’ that have been ‘landed.’ When a leader considers the customer through the 3D Empathy framework, they can assure their business is organizing best to serve customer needs.
3D Empathy Sets Leaders Free
When leaders genuinely seek to understand their stakeholders’ points of view through empathy and compassion tempered by perspective, they gain freedom. That’s because a leader with 3D Empathy doesn’t have to always watch their back, as they’ve taken the first gesture to establish trust. It’s the equivalent of a handshake that stakeholders perceive as genuinely authentic. Opening this pathway to trust makes a leader free to embrace healthy risk and encourage a customer mindset. Leaders liberated from the restraints of the organization’s collective bad habits clear the space for its people to innovate and thrive, and it all starts with empathy.
Authors Dana DeNault Psy.D, an organizational & leadership psychologist, and Jeannine Vaughan, engagement communications strategist work with organizations that need to jump-start innovation or ignite stalled growth. Should you or someone you know be looking to find out about building high-performing leadership without lengthy training, contact us
