Empathic leadership has gained increasing attention in studies examining successful and healthy organizations over the last two decades. The shift away from commanding and controlling leadership styles to more trusting and caring leadership styles is becoming increasingly critical for leaders hoping to attract and retain highly qualified employees in a thriving organization.
There is a growing awareness that leaders who demonstrate empathy are not soft or nice; rather, they possess a highly refined skill that can, and data suggests should be cultivated. In this article, I review research on the impact organizations with empathic leaders have experienced and strategies leaders can implement to develop and practice sustainable empathy.
What is empathic leadership?
As leaders, we’ve all probably heard an employee tell us they don’t want our sympathy. However, recent studies are indicating that our employees are expressing their desire for our empathy. Empathy is the ability to connect with the feelings of others; it is sharing the emotions caused by an experience, but it does not require someone to share a particular experience with another person.
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Empathic leaders have the ability to combine strategic thinking and feeling. Meinecke and Kauffeld (2018, p. 487) describe an empathic leader as someone with the “…ability to accurately recognize and understand the emotional reactions and feelings of their followers,” which reflects a leader’s emotional intelligence and other prosocial skills such as compassion, authenticity and vulnerability that will be described in more detail later.
Why empathic leadership is a necessity
Prior to the early 2000s, many leaders exerted their authority and power over their employees to keep staff in line or meet quotas and objectives either consciously or unconsciously. For many, it was a default style of leadership that was accepted—albeit reluctantly by employees.
Today, those same behaviors are driving people from organizations to seek out empathic leaders who are yielding much greater returns than the former leadership approach (Sinek, 2014; Coyle, 2018, Younger, 2021). Recent large-scale surveys have found that people with caring employers were far less likely than others to actively search for a new job and the central cause of 58% of the resignations that were seen during the Great Resignation of 2021 were cited as a lack of empathy from their employer.
The benefits of empathetic leadership extend beyond employee satisfaction and retention. Research is being positively linked with empathetic leadership because it inspires positive change, fosters trust, and enhances productivity.
Moreover, there are tangible business benefits associated with prioritizing empathy, including increased efficiency, creativity, innovation, and company revenue. These results underscore the importance of empathy not only for employee fulfillment but also for driving organizational success and competitiveness.
Developing and sustaining empathy
Regardless of your current leadership style, empathy is a skill that can be developed. Whether you are looking to develop it for your own leadership, or you are intentionally working on this area with one of the leaders on your team, the practices below will assist you in that effort. Below are brief summaries of one practice for developing empathy.
Developing empathy
- Self Leadership: Just as Timothy Quinn states, “You’ll never see or believe in their full potential unless you are consciously striving to meet your own full potential,” so too must we first need to recognize our own emotions before we can identify and detect them in others. By understanding our own emotional states, we can start to draw connections with others. There are many self-leadership inventories available online either free or at a low cost. Look for self-assessments that focus on emotional intelligence because they will usually target self-regulation, self-awareness, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
For those leaders who have a deep well of empathy and feel the emotional taxation of having deep empathy, some strategies can be practiced to keep you in a healthy state of mind as well. If you have done a great deal of work understanding your own personal leadership, you are likely also highly aware of others.
You likely already know that leaders must take interpersonal risks to lower interpersonal risks for others, and as already noted, this can be incredibly powerful. It can also come at a high cost to your own mental well-being, so it is important to make self-care (physical activity, deep breathing, walks, exercise, solitude, etc…) a priority because you could experience compassion fatigue.
Even if you are still on the journey to developing a more empathic leadership style, you have probably encountered times of burnout and self-doubt. Or you have interacted with energy vampires- people who tend to be cynical or negative about every initiative or idea presented or people who are always sucking up your time to solve their problems. It is important to practice self-care after those interactions too.
Sustaining empathy
- Self Care: Consider your sympathetic nervous system. It drives your fight-or-flight response in stressful situations. These fight or flight responses can be triggered and elevated by engaging in highly emotional or taxing experiences for people with deep empathy. The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is to help regulate the body. Engaging in exercises that promote mindfulness, reflection, and deep breathing allows the parasympathetic nervous system to activate. Deep breathing or reflection activities are also known by many athletes and coaches for top-level executives to promote non-sleep deep rest (NSDR).
Take some time to figure out what activity you are most comfortable with implementing to allow your parasympathetic nervous system to regulate you, and then make practicing and implementing it your priority. If you find yourself always putting your self-care last, ask a trusted friend or family member to serve as your accountability partner and ally to ensure you are taking time to practice self-care. Simply possessing empathy as a skill does not mean we will always lead empathetically if we are emotionally empty, and our organizations deserve our empathy.
Modeling empathy
If we want our staff to be empathetic and compassionate when working with their students, we must be models of the same behavior. The studies are also pointing to new demands from employers. Whereas previous generations of employees merely hoped to have a caring and understanding employer, Gen Z-ers (people born approximately between 1997-2012) are demanding leaders who model vulnerability and broader forms of perspective-taking.
This is an important moment for educational leaders who are already struggling with teacher pipeline issues. Fortunately, empathy is a skill that can be developed in leaders and we can leverage it to create more successful, innovative, and safe organizations for the students and staff we serve.
