What do you remember most about the best leader you have ever worked with? This is one of my favourite questions to pose to an audience attending an emotional intelligence workshop because the answers enviably get at the heart of “resonate” leadership.
CEO’s and their senior leadership teams have a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure every employee has a leader who cultivates psychological safety. Building your leaders “empathy” and “emotional intelligence” is essential.
How Organizations Can Encourage Empathy in the Workplace by the Center for Creative Leadership:
1️⃣Talk about empathy.
Let managers know that empathy matters. Research shows that understanding, caring, and developing others is just as important, if not more important, particularly in today’s workforce
2️⃣Teach listening skills
When a manager is a good listener, people feel respected, and trust can grow. Managers should focus on listening to hear the meaning behind what others are saying by paying attention to not only the words being said, but also the feelings and values being shown, through nonverbal cues such as tone, pace of speech, facial expressions, and gestures.
3️⃣Encourage genuine perspective-taking.
Managers should consistently put themselves in the other person’s place. For managers, this includes taking into account the personal experience or perspective of their employees. It also can be applied to solving problems, managing conflicting, or driving innovation
4️⃣Cultivate compassion.
Support managers who care about how someone else feels or consider the effects that business decisions have on employees, customers, and communities
5️⃣Support global managers
Working across cultures requires managers to understand people who have very different perspectives and experiences.
Acknowledgment – infographic source: The Bosses We Remember” – Nine features of leaders that direct reports value highly. Based on a tweet by Vala Afshar. Sketchbooks by Anuj Magazine and article from Center for Creative Leadership