Leading with Empathy

Chapter 7Employee Empathy

People, not technology, are the true value creators within our organization. Technology is only an enabler and can never compensate for an unhappy culture.

Empathy is necessary now more than ever with ever-increasing diversity in the workforce. From an age-diversity perspective alone, some organizations can have up to four generations of team members, and catering to their needs becomes challenging. Empathy in the workplace can help increase respect and trust among co-workers, and elevate behavior from process or policy-driven to performance or relationship-driven. Empathy demonstrates caring and can increase social bonding in an organization. People feel safer when they have an empathetic boss because they won't be blamed when they fail. They take more risks. When they take more risks, they can innovate better or push themselves harder. They can run more ambitious experiments. They can run smaller experiments with quicker feedback loops and learn from them. They can reach out to others when they are blocked. They do not need to feel worried or have mental blocks when they do not possess a particular skill. They can then improve and grow and learn. This drives a better culture within the organization. Poor performance becomes an opportunity for growth rather than reprimands and negative reviews.

The Benefits of Empathy in the Workplace

We have discussed many benefits of empathy in the workplace. To summarize:

• Happy people are productive people. ...