Empathy & Compassion
“Empathy gives birth to kindness”
Empathy and Compassion are two of the key attributes of Emotional Intelligence. And what is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence is all about being aware of our own and others’ emotions. But being aware is not enough, ability to manage them for the benefit of our own and others is also important. Humans are considered to be very emotional and not being aware/manage them can often lead to wrong decisions.
Understanding Empathy
Empathy is all about being aware, understand and feel another person’s perspective or emotions. It is also about being able to sense the needs of the other person based on their situation.
Empathy can be of multiple types depending how empathic a person is as defined by Daniel Goleman:
- Cognitive empathy : the ability to understand or being aware of another person’s perspective. This is first step of being empathic. An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy.
- Emotional empathy : the ability to feel what someone else feels. “I literally feel your pain”.
- Empathic concern : the ability to sense what another person needs from you. Once you become aware of other person’s state, knowing their needs from you is what makes empathy actionable.
What is Compassion and how it is different from Empathy?
As Goleman puts it, compassion takes empathy a step further. When you feel compassion, you feel distress when you witness someone else in distress — and because of that you want to help that person.
Simply put, compassion makes the difference between understanding and caring. But compassion also includes yourself. If we protect ourselves and make sure we are okay— and also make sure the other person is okay — that creates a different framework for working with and cooperating with other people.
How empathic leader looks like?
Empathic leaders & managers operate with compassion and curiosity. When they face a troubled or under performing employee, instead of taking a more common route of punishment, they try to understand the circumstances of employee and act as coach. They builds trust and loyalty.
Practice Empathy with caution.
Unless you become really good at it and it comes naturally to you, empathy is a heavy duty cognitive task. It can be very exhausting. So, its important you empathize with yourself too as you do with others. Your well being is most important before you can efficiently empathize with others.
It’s harder to Empathize with people if you’ve been in their shoes.
While this may sound super counter intuitive, lot of research and experiments have found this to be true. The key reason behind lack of empathy in such scenarios is that leader has most likely successfully came out of the same situation and feels more confident about it. Hence, expects the person who is going through the same situation now to be more bold and confident.
In such situation leaders are still expected to be empathic and use their own experience to help the other person.
