ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD

An “empath” is defined as a person who is highly attuned to the feelings of others, often to the point of experiencing those emotions themselves. This may sound like a quality that’s more helpful in someone’s personal life than in their work life, where emotions should presumably be kept at bay. Yet it turns out that the opposite may be true: displaying empathy in appropriate ways can be a powerful component of effective leadership. And when it’s combined with other factors such as technology and innovation, it can lead to exceptional business performance, such as breakthroughs in customer service. This week, we explore some strategies for leaders to enhance their empathy quotient.

AN IDEA

Empathy can be a superpower

“When I train leaders in empathy, one of the first hurdles I need to get over is this stereotype that empathy is too soft and squishy for the work environment,” says Stanford University research psychologist Jamil Zaki in an episode of our McKinsey Talks Talent podcast. Speaking with McKinsey partners Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, Zaki suggests that, contrary to the stereotype, empathy can be a workplace superpower, helping to alleviate employee burnout and spurring greater productivity and creativity. Boosting managers’ empathetic skills is more important now than ever: “There’s evidence that during the time that social media has taken over so much of our lives, people’s empathy has also dropped,” says Zaki. Ways to improve leaders’ empathy in the workplace include infusing more empathy into regular conversations, rewarding empathic behavior, and automating some non-human-centric responsibilities so that managers can focus on mentorship.

A BIG NUMBER

2

There are two kinds of empathy that may be helpful in business situations, according to professional speaker and author Minter Dial in a conversation with McKinsey. “One is affective empathy, where you feel what the other person is feeling,” he says. “So if you start crying, I’m going to cry. In a business case, the more interesting area is cognitive empathy, where I understand why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.” Where it gets tricky is when trying to teach AI to exhibit empathy. The data sets required to train it may not be effective yet, but an old-fashioned technique—active listening—might. “If you just are able to show that you’re listening and allow the other person to continue on speaking, to provide all the content, that kind of a machine really could work,” says Dial.

A QUOTE

“As we get more power and status, we have difficulties naturally empathizing with others.”

That’s business strategist and author John Horn on why it’s important for leaders to try to understand the mindset of their competitors. “When people become more senior in business, they’ll need to think about competitors directly,” he says in a conversation with McKinsey on cognitive empathy. While it may not be possible to ask competitors about their strategies, technology such as AI, machine learning, and big data may be able to provide competitive-insight tools based on a predictive factor. “You could possibly use that data to look across various industries and learn [for example] what has been the response when prices were raised? That’s thinking about the likely behavior your competitors will have,” says Horn.

A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

The qualities that make a leader empathetic can be found within oneself and in the situations of daily life. “Try to unlock the energy and the aspiration that lies within us,” suggests McKinsey senior partner and chief legal officer Pierre Gentin in a McKinsey Legal Podcast interview. What Gentin calls “arrows of inspiration”—whether they come from art, music, literature, or people—may be available to leaders every day. He believes that “a lot of this is just opening our eyes and really recognizing what’s in front of us and transitioning from the small gauge and the negative to the big gauge and the transformative.” For example, in an organizational context, people may need to look beyond short-term concerns and consider “what they can do outside of the four corners of the definition of their role,” he says. “How can we collaborate together to do creative things and to do exciting things and to do worthwhile things?”

– Edited by Rama Ramaswami, senior editor, New York

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