5 Ways to Improve Your Leadership Using Empathy

Michael MacIsaac, MBA, PMP, CSM, is the Technical Technical Project Manager Consultant and Agile ScrumMaster consultant at MacIsaac Consulting.

  Leadership  

At some point, you have probably worked for someone who lacked empathy. I will never forget a manager I once had. He was like a robot, with no ability to connect on an emotional level. I was baffled that he was in charge of managing people. Yet, people like him get put into “leadership” positions all the time.

So, what is empathy and why is it so important for leadership? Merriam Webster defines empathy as “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions: the ability to share someone else’s feelings.”

The word empathy derives from the Greek word empatheia (“feeling into”). Empathy is the ability to sense the emotions of those around us. People who have strong empathy can feel the feelings of others as if they were their own. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is feeling self-pity or sorry for others. With empathy, we may not even agree with others, but we can understand and sense how they feel.

Empathy is one of the components that make up emotional intelligence (EI). The other components are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation and social skills. Today, leaders need to have both strong IQ and EI. There has been much research done on the value of EI in leadership. The research indicates that the greatest leaders have a high …

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