Actionable ways to be a more connected leader
In our last post, we looked at empathy's benefits for leadership and its positive power to influence your organization's culture, morale, and bottom line.
Simply put, when you care about people, they’ll also care about you and your shared goals. This is the reciprocal power of empathetic leadership.
The research backs this. But to maximize engagement, more than merely transactions between managers and employees is needed. A 2015 Gallup study, Employees Want a Lot More from their Managers, found that employees who feel their manager is invested in them as people, not just workers, are more likely to be engaged.
Remember: empathy in leadership isn’t soft; it’s smart. But for many leaders, it can feel hazy or slippery. How do you show empathy to make it tangible to your colleagues and teammates?
We’ve already explored the Empathy Spectrum and Empathy Map, two tools for building empathetic leadership practice.
In this post, I share five practical ways to level up your empathy to foster stronger relationships and create a culture where everyone feels seen, valued, and supported.
Empathy in Leadership: Creating a safe space
A productive workplace is one where people feel safe—safe enough to experiment, challenge ideas and each other, share information, and support one another. Team members are prepared to give their manager and organization the benefit of the doubt. However, none of this happens if employees do not feel cared about.
Stereotypical small talk—“Hey, how about those Dodgers?” “How are the kids?”—isn’t going to cut it. Again, this is not a mere “check the box” effort. The best leaders make a concerted effort to get to know their employees and help them feel comfortable talking about any subject, whether it is work-related or not.
This is no small feat. It requires some real engagement on your part, allowing yourself to care about each person. That means listening deeply and empathetically, getting to know their individual passions, interests, and challenges, and actively supporting their success and growth to help them be their best.
The best leaders understand that each person they lead is different, with their strengths, skills, and challenges at work and away from it. Knowing their employees as people first, leaders accommodate their team members’ uniqueness while managing toward high performance. To build deeper relationships with people, you must work through five levels of connecting. (And bonus points if they have kids AND you know their names!).
1) Establish trust
This means developing a mutual understanding of your respective drivers, preferences,
motivators, and demotivators for high performance at work, and coming to understand what makes each other tick.
2) Align on expectations
You both need to understand what you are trying to achieve at work and why, then align the expectations you have for each other to achieve those outcomes.
3) Show genuine appreciation
This includes helping team members focus on where they are being successful, jointly
understanding what drives that success, sharing how much you appreciate their
contribution and exploring ways in which they can use their skills and talents to benefit
both themselves and the organization.
4) Challenge unacceptable behavior or inadequate performance
There will be times when you need to hold more difficult conversations, to agree on a more effective set of behaviors or results when the team member’s performance or actions are getting in the way of the team’s overall performance and results.
5) Grow for the future
Understanding your team members’ career aspirations gives you the best
chance of creating the conditions for them to build that career within your
organization rather than elsewhere. And, occasionally, it means helping them achieve those aspirations in other organizations, if that’s what’s best for them.
As these five simple levels show, it really comes down to connecting better with people. Remember, workplaces where people feel connected deliver better results. And, ultimately, isn’t that our job as leaders?
Want to learn more about empathy or get some professional support making it part of your leadership development strategy? Our program, Lead with Empathy, which is based on many years of fieldwork with hundreds of leaders, is designed to help close this gap.
Meanwhile, we’d love to hear from you. What’s helped you build closer relationships with your team? What’s your biggest empathy challenge?
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