Leading with Empathy in Today’s Workplace
By Heidi Sadecky, MA,PCC – Executive Coach & Director, Townsend Leadership Program
Have you ever heard a colleague explaining how overwhelmed they are, and another team member jumps in to pridefully remark about how hard they’ve been working, how many extra hours they’ve put in, or how they go the extra mile? This kind of conversation is not inherently bad, but it squashes empathy throughout the team. The first person opened up about how he or she felt about their work, and the second overrode those feelings with their own prideful view. After several conversations like this, how likely do you think someone would be to share their feelings of stress and burnout openly?
As a business executive or team leader, it’s important to foster an environment where team members feel comfortable and are able to work together in a safe, trusting, and empathic environment. Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another person’s feelings and experiences. It is an essential element for building trust among colleagues. Encouraging empathy in the workplace can help create a more productive, positive environment where everyone feels valued and respected.
I would like to share two strategies for successfully fostering empathy in the workplace that can, hopefully, save some of your coworkers from feeling siloed and shut out.
Create Open Avenues for Listening — One of the most important ways that business leaders can promote empathy among their team members is by encouraging open communication. As a leader, the responsibility rests partially on you to create spaces for this communication. This means creating safe spaces for people to share their feelings, concerns, and ideas without fear of judgment or criticism. Asking questions like “How are you feeling? What do you think about this situation? How can we help?” can make your employees feel heard. If you really want to go the extra mile, then set aside time and patience to listen without providing your own opinion.
Implement Collaborative Group Work — Another way that business leaders can encourage empathy among their team members is by getting them involved in group activities that focus on collaboration and working together. Working together on tasks outside of the office allows employees to get to know each other better and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This helps to build mutual respect between team members as well as trust within the team as a whole. When everyone on your team shares the load of work, they begin to understand just how hard each of their colleagues are working to improve the organization as a whole.
Business leaders should also model empathic behavior themselves by actively listening to their employees, showing patience when facing difficult conversations, being understanding when dealing with conflicts, being open-minded when making decisions, giving honest feedback, providing words of encouragement or recognition for good work, showing appreciation for differences among team members, and communicating openly about expectations for all parties involved in order to promote mutual understanding within the workplace.
One final tip: Executive leaders should be coached on how the best practices in workplace communication and empathy, so that they can lead and coach their employees as well. Throughout the workplace, the best executives I’ve met will ensure that they are providing regular training on empathy-related topics such as active listening skills, self-awareness techniques, conflict resolution strategies, etc. so that employees have the tools they need to handle difficult conversations more effectively while still maintaining respect for one another.
Office culture is always a top-down initiative. Building a great path for communication begins at the very top, and it can save you headaches and time to receive coaching and executive leadership counseling before trying to radically change the way work is done at your corporate environment.
By proactively nurturing an environment of openness and understanding within your organization through effective communication strategies focused on empathy-building activities, business leaders can ensure strong relationships between all stakeholders while promoting a healthy culture of collaboration within their teams. These strategies will ultimately result in higher levels of job satisfaction among employees while also contributing positively towards overall productivity levels. If you would like to receive coaching on how you, as a leader in your business, can improve your potential and empathy, then please reach out today. Schedule a quick call with me to see what results we can achieve together for your business.
Heidi Sadecky is a highly-trained executive coach with over 30 years of combined corporate and coaching experience. She helps her clients operate at a higher level, overcome workplace challenges and achieve measurable results.
She is an in-demand facilitator of the only Townsend Leadership Program, a unique and highly effective group coaching program located in the North East United States.
In-person, virtual and hybrid leadership groups are now forming.