Why empathy is the key to your competitive advantage

Hard-arse leadership is out. Getting in touch with your feelings is in. In a world that is becoming increasingly digitised and automated, the power of feelings and empathy are viewed as top commodities, writes leadership expert Vanessa Vershaw, author of Unreasonable Ambition: Renegade thinking for leaders to create impossible change.

Empathy is what differentiates us from machines and gives us the ability to engage the hearts and minds of people during times of constant change. And yet, you rarely see the word empathy used in the same sentence as business.

With over one-third of skills (35 per cent) once considered ‘important’ in today’s workforce changing within the next five years, leaders need to be able to read the thoughts and motivations of their teams and customers to be better equipped to guide them through the rapid pace of change. Empathic leaders also tend to respond more quickly and at scale to stakeholder needs, collaborate more successfully, and achieve far greater results than one person or one team could achieve on their own.

The bottom line – there is nothing soft about leading people.

So much so that global research demonstrates how progressive and future-fit organisations are increasingly prioritising the development of these so called ‘fluffy’ qualities by reskilling their workers to cultivate empathy. They know it’s a critical leadership skill for competitive advantage and we are seeing that it’s the organisations that make empathy a priority who surpass their competitors with elevated productivity, profitability and customer engagement.

So why is building empathy as a leadership power tool so hard to do?

There is a lot of confusion around what empathy really is, which is making it harder to get a place on the critical skills list.

The simple way to define empathy is as the ability to see the world through the emotional lens of another. It’s about being able to make sense of the unmet and unarticulated needs of both your internal and external stakeholders and the market. Not to be confused with sympathy, which is more about being nice.

Understanding what empathy is, is the first step to mastering it. Empathy is not about being nice; it’s about being human. It’s what differentiates us from the robots.

Can we all develop empathy?

Empathy is an innate human trait, yet people vary in their ability to tap into it and apply it. The good news is that with the right training, just about anyone can develop their ability to show it even if doesn’t come naturally at first.

Knowing how to show empathy is an ongoing commitment. Much like going to the gym for your physical health, empathy is a mental muscle you need to build daily. Without an ongoing commitment to ‘working it out’ and the discipline to apply empathy consistently, it can atrophy like any other muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

It’s not a one-size fits all approach – the masterful empathic leader utilises different tactical empathy tools and skills depending on the person and the situation that has to be navigated. Just like baking a cake – if you want chocolate, you’re not going to use strawberry in the batter. Some of the more powerful skills include learning the techniques of radical listening, mirroring, unconditional positive regard, labelling feelings and building trust. These tools are so powerful it’s how FBI negotiators get some of the biggest bad guys to give up their hostages. It’s also how psychologists train to work with their clients to create breakthroughs.

We are in the era of a revolution of human relationships at work and in life. Never have we lived in a world so divided, pushing us all further apart from each other.

Empathy is a skill to begin bringing us all closer together to solve for the future and create the world we want to live in.

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