How empathic leadership drives workplace diversity and inclusion
Sympathy and empathy are often confused, but empathy fuels connection and sympathy drives disconnection (1).
The difference between feeling sorry for someone, and truly understanding their perspective is key to driving inclusion.
For this article?AbilityNet?asked five accessibility leaders about the benefits of stepping into someone else’s shoes, and how a culture of empathy helps deliver inclusive solutions.
1. What is empathic leadership?
Becoming a more understanding leader relies on being open to someone else’s viewpoint, recognising how this may make someone feel or act, and learning from this.
“Listening is one of the most important skills,” says?Kush Kanodia ?(pictured left), social entrepreneur, disability rights campaigner and AbilityNet trustee. “The humbleness is to have that growth mindset. Otherwise you have leaders who think they know it all.”?
Leaders who listen, learn and understand what others are experiencing will build inclusive, diverse and accessible workplace, agrees?Laurie Henneborn , a Managing Director at Accenture Research.
Employees must be seen as individuals, not cogs in an organisational wheel. Henneborn quotes her colleague, Shannon Adkins, who advises (2): “Make sure that the people you work with and who work for you know that you value them for who they are, not for just what they produce.”?
Listening must be followed by practical action, adds Henneborn: “An empathetic approach leads to actions which can help to adapt or improve the workplace culture and remove physical, digital, social barriers”. For Henneborn, this means going beyond standard diversity targets on quotas and instead “understanding, leveraging and valuing what diverse people bring to the table”.?
Ted Drake ?is Global Accessibility Leader at financial software company Intuit, and he agrees about being results-focused:
“There’s a mantra at Intuit to fall in love with a customer’s problem, and not a solution. This pushes us to explore barriers and opportunities to find solutions.”
When considering leadership styles, it’s important to recognise how empathy fits with other attributes. Rama Gheerawo (3), inclusive design expert and Director of the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design,?champions a leadership approach ?based on a mix of empathy, clarity, and creativity.?
2. How Covid-19 has driven an appetite for empathy
A focus on empathy is timely because the pandemic has encouraged awareness of the greater good, giving more people a sense of the social exclusion faced by disabled people.
An international study4?of 2,000 employees?from the US and UK, showed that almost 42% of people surveyed said their mental health worsened during Covid-19.
Evidence of disproportionate impact on disabled people has raised awareness of the?adjustments ?some people need to work from home and of the challenges facing excluded groups. For example?74.6% of people with a learning disability believe their wellbeing has been affected by the impact of coronavirus .
“If ever there was a time for leaders to exhibit empathetic leadership, it’s through this pandemic,"?says Accenture’s Henneborn (pictured)?“and we have seen evidence of empathetic leadership in action through advancements in accessible tools and technologies which enable remote working and connections.”
For Accenture, this meant avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach to remote working and instead looking into specific barriers for employees with disabilities (5). Solutions included polarised glasses or standing desks.
2.1. The empathic approach sparked by Covid is here to stay?
The pandemic triggered the mainstreaming of adjustments previously considered optional.
As?Intuit’s Drake says , this will have benefits post-Covid “as people should not have to struggle and justify their need for flexible hours, remote work, captioning, mental health care, personal time off, readable documentation, and personal working styles”.
More specifically, Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of accessible digital services.
Alistair Duggin (6), Principal Accessibility Consultant at user experience design agency Nomensa and former Head of Accessibility at the Government Digital Service (GDS), says: “It’s much easier now to explain to people that if the digital service you're making isn’t accessible, that's going to prevent some people from doing what they need to do.”
领英推荐
3. How empathic leadership benefits employees
There are clear advantages for employees whose bosses not only acknowledge their challenges, but find solutions.
“It’s about understanding the challenges that people face and removing the barriers so people can do things a lot more easily,” says Duggin.
Research (7)?from accountancy firm Ernst & Young, shows this more sensitive mindset creates trust between employees and bosses, with 90% of US workers reporting how empathic behaviours from bosses brings higher job satisfaction and 79% agreeing it decreases employee turnover.?
3.1. How empathy benefits accessible digital design
There is an inextricable link between good design and having deeper insights into the barriers facing different users of your products.
In practice, this means “doing the hard work to make things simple”, as Duggin recalls of the key design principle at Government Digital Service (8).
No designer aims to develop inaccessible products, but this can happen “through ignorance”, adds Duggin: “There are lots of people who will interact with your product which is different to how you’re doing it, and if you’re not considering their needs, you’re going to accidentally put barriers in their way.” For example, deaf users will be excluded from an otherwise accessible online service if one element of the transaction requires a phone call.
Empathy labs, like the one Duggin created for the UK government (9), can show how users with different support needs interact with websites. While labs help designers develop websites, they are often criticised as an artificial way to experience disability. For Duggin, labs are one element of accessibility work. At GDS, for example, he also set up a cross-government accessibility leaders network10.
Intuit’s Drake, who previously co-founded Yahoo’s Accessibility Lab, agrees that "accessibility or empathy labs can be a great addition to a company’s accessibility program, but there needs to be a reasonable expectation when they are established.”
Yahoo’s lab was more than an opportunity to experience blindness by, for example, wearing an eye mask, says Drake: “It’s a place for people to test their products with different technologies, do code and design reviews, and understand the complexity of accessibility and inclusive design”.?
Yet to achieve genuinely accessible, inclusive design, people with lived experience must be involved in the process. Kanodia says: “If you’re an empathic leader, you understand that’s the missing piece of the jigsaw”.
3.2. How empathy benefits leaders
Kanodia describes Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella (11)?as a leader whose empathy fuels innovation. Nadella himself has frequently described how his experience as the parent of a disabled person (12)?influences his thinking. Not only, says Kanodia, did Microsoft design its Xbox adaptive controller for gamers with limited mobility, it also made the packaging accessible (13).
This approach reaps rewards. An Accenture report (14)?underlines how Microsoft’s share price has tripled since Nadella - who describes empathy “as an existential priority to our business” - began as CEO in 2014.
3.3 How empathy benefits organisations
The business advantage is compelling, as?the Click-Away Pound Survey ?shows. The cost of people abandoning a retail website because of barriers is now ￡17.1 billion, according to the survey. Companies that are more inclusive gain a competitive advantage, being four times more likely to have total shareholder returns that outperform their peers, according to Accenture (15).
This article was written by Saba Salman .
Connect with AbilityNet
Welcome to our very first LinkedIn newsletter! We hope this first edition on empathic leadership is useful and inspiring. Have you experienced empathic leadership? What examples of empathic leadership can you share? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Be sure to reach out if you have questions about empathic leadership or inclusion in the workplace and check out the range of Workplace accessibility training options AbilityNet offer.
Or visit the AbilityNet website and discover the range of free resources we offer.
Thank you again for reading and subscribing! We will be back soon with more updates and news on accessibility and inclusion...
References
Inclusive Design Consultant at Lloyds Banking Group.
2 年Great read! I like to use the term compassion instead of empathy. I found compassion through story telling to be very effective when delivering training in workplace. It’s hard to train empathy when someone doesn’t relate to another’s lived experience.