Is Empathy a Skill That Can Be Learned? For some leaders, empathy comes naturally. For others, it takes a bit more of a conscious effort. Not to worry though, empathy, like many other leadership skills, is one that can be learned if you're willing to invest energy and effort into doing so.
Definition of Empathy®
People with the Strength of Empathy® have the unique ability to feel into the feelings of people around them, not only that, they can sometimes take on those feelings of others.
“My greatest strength is empathy. When I'm dealing with customer complaints, I'm able to really put myself in their shoes and understand how this issue is affecting them. As a result, I've been able to maintain my department's highest complaint resolution numbers for the past three quarters.”
In short, empathy has recently gained momentum as one of the top soft skills recruiters want prospective employees to have, as it leads to increased productivity and well-being for all.
Especially in social psychology, empathy can be categorized as an emotional or cognitive response.
Empathic skills are abilities that relate to the identification and use of emotions in the workplace. You can remain informed of your own thoughts and feelings, and you can identify how your colleagues may feel as well. Empathy is often present during conversations in the professional environment.
The three key skills in this realm of increasing empathy and emotional intelligence are building trust, actively listening, and having compassion. These skills are all the more important when it comes to virtual coaching and video coaching. Not always being in-person takes away the cues we often get when face-to-face.
Empathetic employees and employers result in better job performance because it builds respect and inclusiveness among people. By developing your empathy skills you improve your professional relationships which lead to better opportunities for success.
In this infographic, we've highlighted facts and statistics from recent research studies that indicate that empathy in leadership is in fact a strength, not a weakness, and will be an essential skill for leaders to embody moving forward.
If you have empathy as a significant strength, you probably readily identify with other people's situations and can see things clearly from their perspective. You probably find it relatively easy to 'put yourself in another's shoes' and appreciate not only what people are saying, but also why they are saying it.
In general, your strengths should be skills that can be supported through experience. For example, if you list communication as a strength, you may want to recall a situation in which you used communication to reach a goal or resolve a problem.
The seven strengths include: belonging, curiosity, friendship, kindness, confidence, courage, and hope. The idea is once you get these themes ingrained in the child's mind, it will encourage the joy of reading and open dialogue with others to what they are reading.
Is empathy a skill or a trait? The answer is simple: empathy is both a skill and a trait. It has been shown that empathy has a genetic basis. This means that within the empathy spectrum, there are people who are naturally more empathetic than others, because of their biological and genetic predisposition.
Empathy Is The Most Important Leadership Skill According To Research. This article explains the importance of empathy in making leadership decisions and how it impacts workplace environments.
A CV won't tell you how customer orientated a candidate is, what drives them, if they have the right attitude, can work in a team, or if they're open to developing. They don't cover those all-important soft-skills, vital for employers in making sure they are investing in the right candidate.
Empathy is without a doubt one of the most essential soft skills for leaders to possess these days, and it's also one of the most difficult to improve.
Each month we focus on helping you build one of the Umbrella Skills. Our focus for October is Empathy! Empathy is our ability to see the world from someone else's perspective. To understand and share the feelings of another.