A client came into the office (back when it was normal to meet face to face) and was visibly angry about a colleague, who they believed had tried to show them as incompetent in front of their manager. I asked the client to sit and think about why the colleague may have acted in this way, what was happening in their work life and what could have influenced them.
Silence ensued for a few minutes.
“Oh I get it” was the response “their short term contract ends next month and they are trying to secure an extension by showing how good they are”.
All the anger and animosity vanished in an instant. The behaviour was not personal to the client, it was about the colleague’s own situation.
This is the power of empathy.
What is empathy about?
As the example above shows, empathy is about putting yourself in another’s shoes, see where they are coming from, understanding the reason they are behaving the way they are and reflecting on your actions and behaviours and what might work better with that individual.
Being empathetic and seeing things from another’s viewpoint does not mean that you agree with everything they say or do. But is does give you the ability to understand and you can better recognise when someone needs help and support or needs to be left alone. It allows you to take the ‘personal’ out of a situation, as in the example above.
Promoting empathy within a team, can help develop a high performing team where relationships are strong. Developing empathy as a manager can help you to get the best out of every member of the team.
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy is central to overall emotional intelligence, which is becoming more widely embraced as an essential skill within the larger companies when they are recruiting and can be seen from the following article; https://www.fastcompany.com/90471177/4-ways-google-looks-for-emotional-intelligence-in-job-candidates
Empathy and the team
Empathy in particular helps to develop relationships as you take the time to understand your team members and as a consequence, trust within the team is also likely to improve.
It can help to ensure that the team is psychologically safe and the team is inclusive.
It can help to reduce staff turnover, as team members feel listened to, respected and valued.
Important to remember
However, importantly we should not make assumptions about individuals and we should also be aware of our own unconscious biases towards others. That means being empathetic to everyone, not just the team members that we relate to. And it also means that we are not that person we are being empathetic to, so we do not know 100% what their drivers are, we can only try to understand. However, we can then use our coaching skills to carefully question to better understand.
There are lots of ways to develop your empathy and talking through situations with a coach can really help. There are also lots of self-help resources on the internet to get you started; https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-develop-empathy-in-relationships-1717547
