How Choosing Empathy Helps You Stay Agile

Reading time: 2-3 minutes

In order to navigate uncertain times, leaders need to stay agile if they are to help their people and teams 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

As leaders, sometimes it’s so much easier to stick to what we know.

But sometimes the strategies, cultures, and structures that have worked well in the past, are the same ones that are getting in the way of the future.

When 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.

That 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.

Here’s where managing with empathy comes in.

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. Helping you solve problems, and make better decisions.

When it comes to managing others, 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 from others.

When we hold on too tightly to what we know, we shut ourselves off from what can be. It becomes our blind spot. We deprive ourselves of the knowledge of others, that’s when we start to become rigid and obsolete leaders.

So instead of closing ourselves off to possibilities, by ignoring perspectives. Approaching leadership with empathy not only opens our minds to different perspectives, but helps us embrace them and see the value in alternative points of view.

Be Curious. Ask What Other’s Think. Then Listen.

So your challenge for this week, approach your teams with empathy and curiousity.

It's easy to get caught up in your own judgement, advising and telling rather than asking and listening. So although you might know the answer to a question, or you might know a solution to the problem,

I want you to challenge yourself:

Ask others what they think.

Open the floor for someone else to speak their mind or share their thoughts, no matter how inexperienced they are, or how far above their pay grade you might feel it is.

You will be surprised at what you learn, when you start listening to perspectives you don’t typically hear.

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

Explore My Relationship Accelerator program for leaders:

→ If you’re still struggling to unlock the potential of your people and would like to make some meaningful change - our relationship accelerator program helps your leaders learn all they need to know about building effective relationships to drive success - in one day. Check it out here.

Or reach out at [email protected]