Empathy is a leadership superpower
When I started out I was not great at hiring staff. I was horribly impatient and expected our newly hired employees to work as hard and be as adaptable as me. Without anyone to coach my leadership style, I was ruthless and decisive but lacking in relationship skills and sometimes basic compassion. My mindset was typically that I could do most people’s jobs better than they could – a classic entrepreneur failure for which my only excuse was that I was young and naïve.
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings in any situation from their point of view, rather than your own. It is not the same as sympathy, where we may be moved by someone’s thoughts and feelings while nonetheless maintaining emotional distance.
This is important with work colleagues, as it builds trust. My teams looked to me for leadership and reassurance, but most of all understanding and empathy. I sought to offer that most of the time and know of no better way to build a team that people want to be part of.
The same applies across all stakeholders. The success of my most successful enterprise was down to our empathy for prospects, customers, employees, suppliers, colleagues and even departing customers. We extended that to our relationship with the environment by setting ourselves standards.
When we were meeting a prospective new customer, we didn’t pitch what we could do. Rather, we actively listened to what their challenges were, what problems they needed to solve, entering into a co-creative dialogue to find solutions. This was exactly what most of our customers were looking for.
Empathy was a core behaviour of the enterprise culture and what we looked for when recruiting. Customers, suppliers and even departing customers commented on the empathy that they felt from the business as a whole
Empathy is a leadership superpower.
Creating Social Enterprise is a book and newsletter by Patrick Nash, lifelong social entrepreneur.
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