Applying Compassionate Leadership

Types of Empathy

When cognitive and emotional empathy merge, emotional warmth and respect can be extended with a realistic understanding of what can be changed, and when. You can create a sense of connectedness and closeness while maintaining your own, separate perspective. This can also prevent you getting overwhelmed, and help to preserve personal and professional distance.

Compassionate empathy is combining the positive elements of each type of empathy-somatic, affective or emotional, and cognitive. This is the ideal, as it facilitates the most effective and realistic understanding of another’s position while leaving space for us to retain an independent perspective. You can recognise and acknowledge the emotion and respond to it appropriately without yourself becoming overwhelmed. Compassionate empathy then creates actions with the people you have been listening to, to create a next step that is grounded in understanding. The good news is that, like deep listening, compassionate empathy is a skill that can be learned.

More thinking or more feeling? Most of us will skew to one side or the other, and it is important to have some awareness of where you sit on this spectrum, and to recognise how this may impact your ability to connect and support another.

Being able to identify emotions and express what you are seeing in an empathetic way improves how you communicate, adapting to meet the needs of the other person. Through clearer and more considered communication relationships can be improved.

Building trust and an ability to have open conversations improves workplace effectiveness as people are able to identify strengths and better communicate their needs. We need to be aware of our assumptions, our biases, our conditioning. We need to be aware that our brains will fill in the blanks from our past experiences, beliefs or values unless we consciously choose to check them.

Engaging with empathy and compassion is an ethos. It is essential in our professional and personal lives to understand the perspectives and diverse experiences of other people. When we actively practise genuine empathy, our relationships and workplaces benefit with improved communication, and everyone feels more supported and understood.

Implementation Ideas:

• Consider how it feels for you when others show you sympathy or empathy
• Consider whether you are more likely to feel sympathy or empathy for others
• Consider whether you feel different types of empathy for people you are connected to in some way (for example, family, versus a colleague)
• Reflect on whether there any changes you’d like to make to the way you experience empathy and compassion
• When you feel yourself ‘othering’ a person, pause and list 5 things you have in common with them, rather than focusing only on your differences

If you would like to learn more about this topic, check out our Engaging with Empathy & compassion eLearning course.