Empathy

Understanding empathy as a leader is a lot different than the empathy experienced on a day to day basis. As a leader you do not need to try to take on other people’s emotions and try to please them. It instead refers to you understanding other people’s feelings, and other factors when it comes to making a decision that will affect them. 

A leader can not think about themselves when making decisions that concerns others, it is important to empathize with the employees because what affects them also affects the leader. The reasons for why empathy in a leader is so important is because of the increasing use of teams, the rapid pace of globalization, and the growing need to retain talent.

A team relies on a leader to make the important decisions, however this can’t be done without input from all group members. In order to reach a consensus a leader needs to be able to understand the viewpoints of all the people involved in the group. The rapid pace of globalization identifies another reason why empathy is so important, globalization creates room for misunderstandings. These misunderstandings can be due to differences in languages and cultures, a leader needs to be able to empathize and understand that everyone is different and that there can be more than one way to do something. Finally the need to retain talent is another reason why empathy is important for a leader to have. Leaders want to keep the good people around, but instead of trying hard to keep them around it is more logical to teach everyone to be a certain way. Some ways to go about this is through mentors and coaches, they would provide a push that people need to keep their work performance up or help them improve it.