Is It Time To Rethink Your Leadership Style?

How empathy and emotional intelligence will pave the way to an empowered workforce

Looking back as a leader, the past year and a half feel like a blur of logistical challenges and shifts in perspective. Strangely, the Covid-19 pandemic improved certain processes by forcing us to speed up solutions that were already in the works. But the mental and emotional toll it has taken on employees has also highlighted shortcomings to leadership styles that always seemed effective before.

Remote work and the stress of the pandemic made these issues so much worse, but did not create them. We have an opportunity now, as the workplace attempts a return to normal, to reevaluate our priorities as leaders. Effective leadership has always taken vision, strategy, courage and foresight. It still does. But it also takes empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence traditionally looked at as important everywhere but the workplace.

Emotional intelligence means having an awareness of our emotions and having compassion for ourselves. This lets us be aware of the emotions of others and have compassion for them as well. Traditionally, many workplace cultures have seen emotion as existing outside of work, something you check like a coat on the way to your desk. But that’s just not how people live, and it’s not how they work. Our stresses, our fears, our insecurities come to work with us every day right beside our goals, our metrics, and our deliverables. Emotionally intelligent leadership works because it lets us realize we can better meet those goals, drive those metrics and complete those deliverables by engaging with those emotions instead of ignoring them.

Strategy-first leadership can sometimes focus on the “resources” at the expense of the “human”. It succeeds by highlighting employees’ strengths and correcting employees’ weaknesses. It creates communities of strength, which can effectively drive growth, but sometimes at a mental and emotional cost that becomes apparent in times of stress or crisis. Emotionally intelligent leadership succeeds by building communities of support—where strengths are valued and celebrated, but the leaders’ energy goes to recognizing and fulfilling workers’ needs, which build trust and resiliency.

Empathetic leadership means recognizing that results come when the team is healthy and focusing your energy on that. It means practicing compassion and self-compassion as seriously as time management—when employees can forgive themselves for a mistake, they can learn from it more effectively and suffer less productivity loss.

When employees see leaders working to meet their emotional and mental needs, it motivates them more and builds more resilient teams than traditional leadership can on its own. This doesn’t mean neglecting strategy or ignoring performance. Rather, it means recognizing that no team can achieve its fullest potential without compassionately recognizing its needs and working together to fulfil them.

When trying to understand employees’ needs and stresses, it’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at them through the lens of our own experience—sympathy, not empathy. The first step in emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and examine our own emotions and experiences without judgment. The second is recognizing where our experiences overlap with others’, and vitally, where they do not.

Many leaders’ experiences diverge from their employees’ in significant ways—from experiences of diversity, to simple differences in perspective. By applying their own perspective and experience to that of their employees’, a sympathetic leader might try to meet the wrong needs, or even cause more well-meaning harm than good. An empathetic leader sees those needs from their employees’ perspectives and meets them.

When leaders develop and rely on their emotional intelligence, not only do they create a better work environment, they set an example for their teams. By feeling listened to, employees become better able to listen to others. When everyone feels heard, they become empowered to convey and empathize with emotions and ideas that are often left unspoken in the workplace. By creating an environment of honesty, openness and support, we can foster the kind of growth any leader wants from their team.

This style of leadership leads to a more collaborative, cohesive environment in any circumstance. But in times of crisis, these qualities go from desirable to essential. They keep us from responding to pressures on our teams with a one-size-fits-all solution—by recognizing the differing strengths and needs of our team members, we can make decisions to better support their well-being, and ultimately their performance.

As we begin to move into the post-pandemic workplace and whatever lies beyond, it will be essential to remember the lessons the pandemic taught us. Communities of strength aren’t enough in the face of stress, crisis and an uncertain future. As leaders we can do, and be, so much more. By building supportive communities, we can offer our workforce what they deserve and require—and the best part is, when we do, that’s when they will realize their potential in ways we can only imagine.