Nobody Believes You: The Importance of Empathy as a Leader S5 EP3

In the third episode of Season 5, Jenni explores the importance of empathy in leadership. She defines genuine empathy beyond just ‘stepping into someone else’s shoes’ and shares personal stories highlighting the chaos that arises from a lack of empathy. 

Jenni also provides three practical tips for leaders to build empathy, including: actively listening, being flexible, and avoiding self-centred storytelling. The episode emphasises that empathy is crucial for forming genuine connections and maintaining credibility as a leader.

Episode Timestamps:

Building empathy is something that we have to practise every day. If we want to lead effectively, it’s not something that just comes naturally to everybody. But it is something that we can build if we’re happy to practise it. As we’ve said, if you don’t have empathy, people just won’t like you. They’ll really struggle to make that connection on any sort of genuine level. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

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Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of redefining comms with me jenny field. Today, I’m going to be talking about empathetic as a practice of credible leadership and in this episode i’ll share with you the definition of empathy the chaos that happens when you don’t have it which i’ll do with a story from some of my own work and then we’ll go into three things that you can do to build empathy in your role 

What is empathy and how do we define empathy?

Well having empathy is not just about being in someone else’s shoes and that’s often what people talk about they talk about treat people how you want to be treated and put yourself in someone else’s shoes now empathy is crucial to developing and maintaining genuine relationships but the problem is that this definition of empathy isn’t exactly right so yes empathy does mean listening and it does to some degree mean stepping into someone else’s shoes, but the core of empathy is a lot more than that. 

Genuine empathy means believing someone else’s lived experience regardless of your own, and an empathetic leader is one that is compassionate, flexible for their team, and caring about their experiences. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent a lot of time reading about the subject of empathy. I was trying to understand it better. It was talked about a lot as a skill that leaders needed to have, and I wanted to understand it more. I wanted to understand really what empathy was, and I read a few different books on the topic. But I felt that it was a skill that was especially linked to communication and leadership because it felt that everyone was demanding it of leaders and wanted to see it from leaders. So how do we actually demonstrate empathy you know what is it how do we practice it is it just something we’re born with, can I build it? 

All of those different things. Well, the short answer is that you can build it, but you have to practice it. And I recorded an episode around empathy in season three of this podcast which goes into a bit more detail about the different types of empathy and the difference between empathy and compassion, which I’ll touch on in a second.

What is the chaos that happens if you’re not empathetic? 

Well, firstly we have to acknowledge that empathetic communication is important for building better interpersonal relationships, better relationships for those that we work with. It’s why empathy is one of the eight practices of credible leadership, and the behaviours that are needed to demonstrate empathy are rooted in humanising the workplace. It brings us back to the fundamental need we have as human beings of having social connections. 

Now, I’ve already mentioned the blend of empathy and compassion, and we often blend the two. When we ask people to lead with empathy, what we want to see is compassion, is the action that is linked to empathy. But the two are not interchangeable. The main difference between them is that compassion is about connection alone, whereas empathy requires us to believe and understand the experiences of the other person involved.

Now, I have popped a link in the show notes to season three, episode where I talked about this in a bit more detail so you can go in and have a listen to that as well. 

As a leader, why does this link to credibility? Why is empathy part of it? 

Well, quite simply… It’s belief. Demonstrating empathy demonstrates belief in someone, and if that’s missing, it means that we just won’t like the person. It’s, it’s fairly black and white. If we don’t believe that someone has empathy, the people that follow them will just dislike them because they won’t feel that they can believe them. They don’t think they’ll listen and they’ll see that their experiences are being judged. So that’s why there’s the likability factor in there.

Now, if I give you an example from some of my work. Before I shared my findings with Jack, who is a director in a rapidly growing organisation, I wanted to make sure that he knew some of what he was going to hear was going to feel uncomfortable. And so we were talking about all of the findings, and after sharing the findings as a group, we took some comments and Jack was quite quick to come in with his opinions. Like he knew that this was going to be uncomfortable, but he found it very uncomfortable to hear some of the feedback based on the research and insight that we’d gathered from different employees. 

And he was very quick to stand up in the conversation and say, “I don’t agree with some of what you shared, but it’s okay.” And I said, “Okay, can you tell me a bit more about what you don’t agree with so we can discuss it?” And he said, a little uneasily, “I think the bit about the CEO and the decision making is just not true. That’s not the experience I’ve had. And I think everyone here would agree that it’s not the reality of what happened.” And I nodded and said, “I’m just simply sharing the trends that came out of the conversations that we had.”

Now I said it gently because we’d sort of been down this road a bit before but I did then say you know it’s not so much that it’s not true but that this hasn’t been your experience is that sort of fair and he was very firm and said no that’s not true this isn’t what’s happened and you’re presenting it as a fact when it isn’t. 

And this always gets quite interesting when we get into facts versus opinions and all of those things and I go into a lot more detail on that into the book but in this conversation with jack I just tried to slow things down and i wanted to try and get us into a position where he might be able to see the other perspective. 

So I actually went in and just said, “Look, let’s just stop here, because I think we need to talk about empathy, because this is the gap that we’ve also seen in the team.”

Now, I’ll be honest, that conversation that day was really heated. It didn’t end very well. Jack never did see the different perspective, and he just sort of folded his arms, sat back in his chair, muttered sort of under his breath, and didn’t interact any further with the conversation. But this sort of interaction is often typical in my work, and it really did sadly prove the fact that they weren’t willing to listen to other perspectives, they couldn’t see other points of view, and they had quite a strong view on what the issue was and they weren’t really willing to hear anything else that.

Might be different to that, and that’s an essential skill. That empathy is that essential skill in this team that was missing for them, and it was impacting their ability to get their vision executed, and it was impacting their ability to lead people just didn’t like some of them because they didn’t feel they were listened to, and all of those things. 

How do we build empathy? 

How do we build it if that’s something that we need to explore for us as a leader? Well, in order for empathy to work, we have to enter into discussions without needing to win.

Now, this can be quite a big challenge and it’s something that’s also come up a lot in recent years with teams going through mergers or acquisitions because we often go into a meeting to put a point of view across or persuade people to do something or you know tell them to do something but if we’re leading with empathy we have to go into that meeting wanting to understand their perspective and that’s a that and that’s a powerful and persuasive shift for leaders because we can then mould our ideas to ensure that we’re solving everyone’s issues and it really requires the ability to be truly empathetic really listening and really believing other people’s.

So for a leader to have empathy you have to be able to demonstrate that compassion that we’ve talked about you have to demonstrate a sense of care and also under empathy we talk a little bit about flexibility it’s come through probably more since the pandemic that the team need to see the flexibility from you because you care about them and because you believe their experience it’s part of all of those things and showing all of those things is really important.

But building empathy is something that we have to practice every day if we want to lead effectively. It’s not something that just comes naturally to everybody but it is something that we can build if we’re happy to practice it.

But as we’ve said if you don’t have empathy people just won’t like you they’ll really struggle to make that connection on any sort of genuine level and if empathy is believing others lived experiences regardless of your own you can sort of start to see why not believing your team will mean that they just won’t like you.

So on its own this doesn’t mean they won’t follow you, they just will follow you but they just won’t like you while they’re doing it and it’s not a relationship that’s going to feel particularly productive or respectful. What we want is for people to follow us and believe us and so these are the three things that I come back to when it comes to building empathy. 

And sometimes it’s a comfortable place for us to go to try and build a connection, but we have to leave those at home. You can share a little bit, but you don’t want to turn the whole conversation into something about yourself, and that’s just something to be a little bit mindful of. 

Being a leader generally is not a natural state for many of us, so we have to explore these practices and develop them so that we can really succeed in a leadership position. Putting them into practice is very difficult to just reading or listening to them, and that’s where the change happens. Jack, who I talked about earlier, he didn’t really want to learn. He was really fixed in what was going on, and after a few months he did part ways with the company. 

But it’s important for us to consider how willing we are to change our point of view. And what’s fixed in our mind and how we might change our mindset. And I’ll talk about mindset a bit more in the final episode of this season. 

Thank you for listening!

Now in the next episode we will look at the practice of integrity, what it means, why it’s an important part of credibility and how to build it. 

So if you want to find out more about our online Credibility Gap Assessment, you want to find out more about the book or you want to dive into the research report, you can find all of that information in the show notes. 

Thank you for listening and if you haven’t already please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. Again, those details are in the show notes as well.