“I Feel Your Pain…” -– the role of Empathy in Leadership

After Joe Biden’s Presidential win, a pair of billboards in Dover Delaware proclaimed, ”The People have chosen Empathy.” In every election I remember since 1992 when Bill Clinton became President, as a people we have looked for leaders who seek to understand “us,” to feel our pain.

There has been much research about the important role empathy plays in effective leadership. A study by the Center for Creative Leadership of over 6,000 leaders asserted that a leader’s level of empathy was positively related to job performance. Managers who were viewed as more empathetic to their employees, were more likely to be perceived as high performers by their bosses.

In a Google study of what makes an effective leader, technical expertise came in last but qualities relating to empathy ranked high.

In my own unscientific polling of over 100 managers in a series of classes I taught on leading effective change, empathy was consistently ranked as one of the most important traits to exhibit if you want to create long lasting change in an organization.

With so many organizations working virtually due to the pandemic—and many businesses predicting that they will remain fully or partially that way—empathy becomes an even more critical skill for effective leadership. Empathy is the glue to build trust among people who don’t have a tight physical bond of working together. Trust is the precursor for connection, engagement, and motivation.

The emphasis on empathy makes sense.  As a leader, success is no longer a solo activity. You must leverage—and inspire–the productivity and effectiveness of a whole team of people, all with different strengths and challenges, personal and professional. If you as a leader don’t know—or don’t seem to care—what makes each individual on your team ”tick,” why should they trust you to have their backs? I can recall leaders I’ve worked with who didn’t seem to care about me as a person and, even now many years later, I feel my own motivation to excel deflating.

In our mission-focused world, empathy may seem like slowing down, accepting excuses, weakness. It is anything but. It is a powerful and effective way to connect with people to honor the importance of their stories, and to find mutual solutions to empower the work that needs to get done, considering the issue at hand. Empathy is not being soft; it is actually being strong enough to honor another’s pain while also finding a mutually supporting way ahead.

The neurological basis for empathy seems to be the “mirror neurons” in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex. Mirror neurons are the reason we wince when we see someone stub their toe on a chair, as if we were feeling their physical pain. It seems that these mirror neurons extend to ‘feeling others’ in ways beyond physical pain. These mirror neurons, if exercised, can help us emotionally communicate with others going through circumstances beyond our own experience.

Think of the woman at the grocery navigating shopping with three kids under 5, seemingly doing nothing to control their rambunctious behavior. So easy for us to judge—Bad Parent! Yet, an empathetic view might yield overwhelm, overtired, trying to hold it together the best she can. Even as I write that, my emotions and interest towards understanding her shifts.

Or think of the elderly man shuffling along with his cane, taking up so much time at the check out counting change instead of just swiping his credit card. The emotionally bereft view: “Get going old man!” Or the empathetic view: “Here he is doing his best to navigate life with a failing body and now alone after his wife, who used to do all the shopping, has just passed.” For me, I shift from impatience and intolerance to compassion and expansiveness.

Empathy is not saying nice things or being nice. Empathy is the ability to be aware of, understand, and appreciate the feelings and thoughts of others. To Non-Judgmentally put into words your understanding of another person’s perspective…even if it is opposite of yours. An adversarial stance of two different opinions shifts to a collaborative stance of “let’s try to find out how we can both resolve this.” 

It is not sympathy. Sympathy has us feeling sorry for what has happened to others. Empathy, on the other hand, has us try to understand what they are going through, disconnecting ourselves from the outcome, but wanting to connect with them to find a way to acknowledge, honor, and support.