How Practicing Empathy Helps Leaders Stay Agile

In order to navigate uncertain times, rapidly changing technologies and business markets, leaders need to stay agile if they are to help their businesses survival and prosper.

To remain intellectually agile, you have to remain emotionally open to all possibilities, observe as much information as possible, and question assumptions.

Rigid Leadership

It's a lot easier for people to stick to what they know. But sometimes the strategies, cultures, and structures that have worked so well in the past are the same ones that are getting in the way of the future.

Rigid leaders are unable (or unwilling) to sense new opportunities to make changes needed to survive or prosper. Or they stick to existing structures, sometimes ignoring their own perceptions in order to conform to their foregone conclusions.

Remaining rigid can often mess up your perception of the world, showing you an unchanging, and often flawed, version of the situation.

Leaders need to question the assumptions that they typically accept, to remain intellectually agile in fluid situations.

Empathy: Discovering The World Through Someone Else's Eyes

Empathy in its essence is the commitment to understanding the world as somebody else sees it.

Staying curious and exploring the experience of others, while withholding judgment and assumptions, allows you to develop an understanding of the world different from your own. Remaining intellectually and emotionally open to all possibilities, regardless of whether you agree with them, allows you to obtain more information from different perspectives, combat biases, and discover new ways of approaching problems.

In the context of leadership, being able to understand problems from the perspectives of employees, counterparts, superiors, and even competitors will help you broaden your perception of ever-changing situations.

Emotions are the Other Half Of Intelligence

When making decisions, I often see people calling for rational, un-emotional thinking. When in fact, when making difficult decisions, emotions should be accounted for more than ever. You can account for the emotions of others, by extending empathy.

While overwhelmed by emotion affects your ability to think clearly, emotions are vital in guiding you through matters too important to be left to our intellect alone.

Emotions play a large role in reasoning. They guide your moment-to-moment decisions, lending some truth to sayings like, "trust your gut", or "follow your heart". Emotions inform us on a deeper level, calling upon the emotional lessons that life's experiences have given us streamlines our decisions by eliminating or drawing attention to certain options.

By acknowledging emotions, you access the emotional wisdom needed to see problems from a different perspective. By extending empathy to those around you, you get access to their wisdom as well.

Be Curious, and Listen

When it comes to practicing empathy, you want to explore and understand others. One of the reasons really smart people often get caught out by their own rigidity is a breakdown in empathy - they're so smart they think they don't have anything to discover.

It's easy to get caught up in your own judgement, advising and telling rather than asking and listening. It is also really easy to listen out for what you want to hear, and in looking out for arguments that support your position, are unable to listen attentively.

Empathy happens when you ask with the purpose of find out more about the experience of others, not to prove yourself wrong or right. And when you listen, not just to the words that you want to hear, but the truth of what's being said, the emotions, and the values behind them.