Introduction
Even though empathy has been considered as a basic human trait, many leaders fail to display it in their behaviour. Empathy has been described as one of the most important traits among leaders as it enables leaders to understand the problems of their employees and understand the diverse perspectives. When leaders display empathy towards their employees, it goes a long way towards encouraging employees to perform better. Many employees are inspired by leaders who display empathetic leadership traits. This happens as leaders displaying compassion and flexibility towards their employees are easy to work with and desired by most employees. Basically, it makes leaders look human and employees consider them understanding and accommodating (Barisco, 2014). Therefore, every leader who desires better relationship with their employees and wants better team performance needs to be empathetic. But, despite its obvious importance, many leaders fail to display empathy trait and fail to understand its importance in the business and ethical context.
Reasons for Overlooking Empathy
There are many reasons for leaders overlooking empathy at the workplace. It is obvious that leaders prefer to focus on business goals, monetary gains and empathy does not rate very high on their leadership trait scale. Leadership is a lot of work for many leaders as they need to understand the employees and their problems better. To demonstrate empathy, leaders need to spend time with their employees and need to display understanding and awareness. The question of spending time can only be answered when leaders are willing to listen to their employees, but many leaders are just focused on reaching their business goals and provide instructions to their subordinates. This leads to the creation of limited chances for leaders to display empathetic behaviour towards their subordinates and leaders fail to show empathy towards their employees (Pressley, 2012).
It is challenging for many leaders to relate to the importance of understanding how an employee feels and thinks about a situation. Due to globalized business teams in several organizations, it is a challenge for a leader to understand employees who come from different cultures. Since, employees can come from different cultures and have different perception of the same objects and situations, leaders overlook the need to understand their perspective and expect that employees to adapt. Leaders simply overlook the needs of their employees as the challenge of understanding the needs of many is too large and it is easier to expect employees to simply adapt (Pressley, 2012).
Empathy requires placing employees ahead of yourself that is a challenge in itself under today’s competitive business environment. Therefore, leaders need to perform and ensure their team or organization delivers results that are better than their competition. Practicing empathy would mean that some of the employees would be allowed to deliver under expectations, due to their problems. This would mean the performance of the team or organization might fall, which is against the objectives of several leaders. Therefore, many leaders overlook the need to show empathy towards their employees as they believe that would provide employees with an opportunity to perform at lower standards (Pressley, 2012).
In today’s competitive working environment, leaders are focused on achieving their business goals and the cost paid by employees in none of their concern. Showing empathy can be seen as a mistake as leaders have targets of their own and employees are expected to help in achieving them. Showing empathy would work as a roadblock in the achievement of leader’s objectives; therefore it needs to be removed as a leadership trait. Many leaders believe that employees might find it easier to get around an empathetic boss and it is better develop and maintain results based relationship over human relationships (Pressley, 2012).
Importance of Empathy in Good Leadership
Even though empathy in leadership contradicts with the conventional workplace culture that is cutthroat and competitive, it is still a crucial ingredient for many leaders to experience accomplishment. Leaders not only need to hear or see people who work around them, but it highly important that leaders should relate with them. It is obvious that successful leaders have a large employee base; therefore they need to support their employees to achieve targeted objectives and ensure employees give their best in the achievement of business objectives. In a business context, empathy is a combination of leaders understanding the logical and emotional rationale while taking every decision (Boyers, 2013).
Empathetic leaders and better understanding of employee needs is becoming indispensable in today’s increasingly diverse business markets. Operating in markets such as Germany and the U.S. and in other several cultures, leaders have to be empathetic to employees coming from other cultures. Neither business acumen nor technical knowledge of leaders suffices. Leaders need to show sincere interest in understanding other’s cultural and personal needs and psychological behaviour. The modern work culture is made of several millennial employees, who are confounding the cohort of empathy. Millennial can be noble or narcissistic and leading them requires better understanding of their individuality and better understanding is achieved through empathetic behaviour (Wilson III, 2015).
Empathy as a leadership trait is not given its true importance, but many successful leaders such as Jeff Bezos keep it top on their leadership traits. Instilling sense of empathetic behaviour provides several advantages. Empathy allows employees to feel safer, despite their failures as they feel that empathetic bosses would at least listen to the reasons before blaming them. Empathy also encourages leaders to place importance on understanding the cause of an employee’s poor performance and find solutions. Empathy also encourages improved performance as employees feel that the leader has been fair to them and they need to deliver their best work as a form of respect. Overall, empathy improves relations and performance of employees and helps leaders to achieve success in the long term (Wilson III, 2015).
Conclusion
Empathy is an essential trait for leaders in the conventional business environment as workforces are made of employees from different cultures and perceptions of the world. Many leaders avoid displaying empathy for their employees as it is a challenge for them to understand their employees, business goals are more important, competition forces them to overlook, or displaying empathy is harder in a real business environment. The importance of empathy can be seen through the life of many leaders who have identified empathy as one of the central causes of their success. In addition, empathetic leaders are able to improve their relations and deliver better results in the long term.
References
Barisco., J. (2014, 29 October). Empathy: The Basic Quality Many Leaders Keep Getting Wrong. Retrieved 12 April 2016 from, http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/empathy-the-basic-quality-many-leaders-keep-getting-wrong.html
Boyers., J. (2013, 30 May). Why Empathy Is The Force That Moves Business Forward. Retrieved 12 April 2016 from, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/05/30/why-empathy-is-the-force-that-moves-business-forward/#4c79043b8fb8
Pressley., D. (2012, 16 November 2012). The importance of empathy in the workplace. Retrieved 12 April 2016 from, http://www.sbnonline.com/article/the-importance-of-empathy-in-the-workplace/
Wilson III., E.J. (2015, 21 September). Empathy Is Still Lacking in the Leaders Who Need It Most. Retrieved 12 April 2016 from, https://hbr.org/2015/09/empathy-is-still-lacking-in-the-leaders-who-need-it-most
