Empathy as Leadership Superpower

Ed shares how having strong empathy supports you as a leader, specifically, in the following two areas:

Building Trust

  • Empathy helps you be as authentic and genuine as possible when you lead and supports deepening your relationships with your team. By demonstrating you understand them and work to support their unique needs, you build trust.
  • This further helps when you’re coaching or supporting your team through a difficult time. It enables you to read a room or an individual and create safety for them to operate in real-time. This is critical when building a high-performing team.

Helps you read your leaders

  • On the other hand, empathy helps you in high-pressure situations like a senior stakeholder meeting. It helps you catch subtle cues and emotional sensitivities that can help you effectively navigate a meeting/conversation.
However, you need to be mindful of how deep you empathise with people. There are times when you’ll have to put the needs of the business first. For example, when your company has to go through redundancy to survive then you’ll have to bite the bullet and have difficult conversations with your employees. Ed states that along with empathy you also need to build up a level of resilience and balance.

How can you learn to empathise better?

Although there are people that can empathise naturally, Ed believes it’s a skill that can be learnt. He shares his tips:

Tip 1: Have a genuine desire to care for the people around you

  • You must have a genuine desire to understand the people around you. Of course, this can’t come from a selfish motivation to “become more empathetic” but from a motivation of genuine care for these people.

Tip 2: Emulate the experience

Imagine yourself in the situations your employees are facing and try to understand what the person is going through, and how they are feeling. This will help you react in a way that resonates with their needs and support building a stronger connection. 

Tip 3: Read books on emotional intelligence

There are many great books on emotional intelligence. For example, Daniel Goleman’s - Working with Emotional Intelligence. Read these sorts of books and connect with the stories they share in there to practice the art of connecting with people’s personal stories. 

Balancing empathy for your employees and contradicting business decisions?

  • There will be times in your management career when business requirements run in contradiction with your employee’s desires. Unfortunately, this is always going to be a tough decision for you to make. This could be redundancies, restructures, or even promotions not going to an employee in your team. 
  • Ed believes that it's important to strive to understand the other areas of the business around and above you, their objectives and their needs. This will help you understand their priorities and navigate tricky situations in the best interest of all. 

  • Most importantly, as you step to a senior level you need to become more comfortable with the approach of the business. For example, if it’s a private equity business. You need to be ok with the fact that the owners are focussed on returns and not necessarily the people. That’s just the business model and you can’t criticise anyone for that. Once you start understanding that you become more comfortable with the decisions you have to make. 
See Full Masterclass

The Value of Empathy | Manager Masterclass with Ed Foxwell #22

10X Managers
Ed is currently the Operations Director at Kinly for the UK and Ireland regions. He specialises in business-wide operational strategy and delivery through management of the Project Delivery, Service Help Desk, Field Service and Managed Onsite functions.
A key part of his role is to identify and drive initiatives for change to the operational strategy of the business, ensuring continual end service and efficiency improvements.
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