The Relationship Between Leadership and Empathy
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I just recently returned from facilitating at a 3-day leadership conference for Abbvie Pharmaceutical Company. A main focus was discussing the importance for leaders to have genuine empathy for others. Now that’s interesting – in a world where we often see people focused on ME, rather than WE. I call this WAM (What About Me)!

Webster’s dictionary defines empathy as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. Wow! Isn’t this a robust definition?

To better understand how leaders can be effective in their jobs, Center for Creative Leadership conducted a survey to address two things:

1.Successful job performance – Is empathy needed to be successful in a leader’s job?

Results? Empathy is positively related to job performance.

2.Cross cultural issues – Does empathy influence success more in some cultures than others?

Results? There is definitely a relationship in more advanced cultures between empathy and job performance.

Here Are Some Key Points from the survey:

1. Ineffective managers make up half of today’s organizational management pool.

2. Leaders today need to be more person-focused internally, externally, and cross culturally.

3. Empathy is positively related to job performance.

4. Empathy skills can be learned through coaching and training opportunities; empathetic leaders are assets to organizations, in part, because they are able to effectively build and maintain relationships.

Here’s my belief! It’s about PEOPLE SKILLS….the focus of Valerie & Company from the start! And that impacts productivity. And that impacts the bottom line. So what’s not to like? Our slogan for these many years is right on—“Companies improve when people improve.”