Compassionate Leadership

Concluding our series on Leadership, we will delve into compassionate leadership.

Leading a Diverse Workforce

Any leader needs to be able to lead a workforce that is diverse culturally, in languages spoken, in disability, neurodiversity, sexuality, gender identity and religion. A leader needs the capacity to feel empathy for employees with life experiences significantly different to their own if they have any hope of representing us fairly and adequately. For too long, this has not been considered an important characteristic of leaders.

Listening, reflecting, understanding, and connecting across different perspectives is critical to transformational leadership. A key skill is what 2021 Senior Australian of the Year Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, a Ngangikurungkurr woman, calls dadirri–or deep listening.

While your own experience can create a point of reference for you, it will not ever be universal. Listening to someone else’s experience can be distressing, especially if the person has experienced trauma, discrimination or marginalisation, and especially if they are speaking truths and revealing issues which have been shrouded in silence.

Understanding empathy and recognising its importance to your organisation will deliver benefits not only to diverse individuals in your workplace, but to the business as a whole.

SYMPATHY OR EMPATHY?

Sympathy and empathy are concepts that are at times conflated.

When we have sympathy, we are focused on our own experience—our own feelings in a situation. Often, sympathy makes us think about trying to fix, solve, say the right thing, or put a silver lining on a situation without acknowledging how it feels for the other person.

When we have empathy, on the other hand, we are feeling with another person. We are not thinking about how the situation affects us, but instead reining in our own emotions so that we can hear a story or see a situation from the other person’s perspective, feeling how it affects them.

When we have compassion, we take those feelings of empathy for someone and take appropriate actions to support them.

With empathy, we can understand another’s needs and demonstrate care and concern for their experience, even if we have a different perspective on the situation. Our goal with empathy and compassion is to connect with a person and support them in their experience, without judgement or dismissal of the intensity of their experience compared to our own, or others.

It will be helpful to think about empathy as the ability to be with a person and hold the space for them to feel whatever it is that they are feeling, without trying to change it.

Empathy is all about connection, listening and seeking to understand. It involves:

• Recognising what we have in common
• Being able to perceive another’s feelings and appreciate why they might be feeling the way they are
• Being curious, especially when how they’re feeling seems different from how you would feel in the same situation
• Not judging the other person for that difference, but rather listening and developing an emotional connection

If you would like to learn more, check out our Engaging with Empathy & Compassion eLearning course.