The Importance of Empathic Leadership
Empathy is the medicine the world needs.
And at this crucial turning point, we need empathic leaders with innovative management styles to motivate teams and provide regular moments of connection and caring, as well as global leaders who can help create a more loving, unified, and cooperative world.
When an empathic leader sees a team member faltering, they don’t crank up the pressure to perform or use criticism to motivate. Nor do they lead with impatience, which only makes people freeze or panic. Instead, they begin with appreciation for the person’s contributions to the team. Then, in a caring tone, they address any difficulties they are encountering and explore strategies together to reach their goal.
Approaching a team member or co-worker with empathy rather than criticism doesn’t make you a pushover, weak, or unable to set boundaries. Rather, it shows you can incorporate strength and compassion to lead.
My empathy training helps individuals, businesses such as Google, and organizations develop empathy. Based on my book, The Genius of Empathy I provide practical empathy programs to help businesses and organizations improve customer interfacing, enhance the health and well-being of their staff, develop their team’s emotional intelligence, and create an empathic foundation in their organization.
In the empathy training participants learn what empathy is and discover tools to cultivate it. They receive a demonstration of ways to handle challenging customer calls with empathic listening, harnessing their tone of voice, and specific empathic statements to utilize to make the customer feel valued and heard.
Participants learn common causes of burnout, which can occur when you have “too much empathy” and how to reverse this to achieve more balance. They also discover how over-giving or “feeling too much” can cause a sense of being overwhelmed that isn’t healthy. How to identify draining people and learn how to ask themselves, “Is my energy getting drained by a customer or coworker?” and use specific techniques to effectively deal with the person in a solution-oriented way. As a result, their relationships are more empowered and stress-free in the workplace. Click HERE to learn more about empathy training.