Today, when teamwork, collaboration, and interdependence are so necessary, the importance of having a good leader is clear, but it doesn’t work with any kind of leader: companies demand that the positions of greatest responsibility be filled by people who can implement a specific type of leadership, empathetic leadership.
How exactly is empathetic leadership different from other types of leadership?Can this form of leadership be developed or is it something you were born with?In today’s article, we’ll answer these and other questions.
- Leadership is the ability to manage a group of people or an organization.
- So that a clear vision of the goals to be achieved is established.
- Motivate other team members to work on the common goal.
- And resolve conflicts between different members of the group.
However, if all leaders have these characteristics in common, there are different types of leadership, some of them involve acting by putting personal advantage before what the group needs, using manipulative tactics or acting with arrogance and narcissism.
Instead, a person who exercises empathetic leadership will be able to take on the role of other members of their team and will also try to understand the needs of the market and its consumers, to learn how to give each customer what they need.
On the other hand, a person who exercises empathetic leadership will be able to effectively communicate to the rest of his team what he needs to do, so that he awakens in them the desire to work, by treating the goals he achieves as his own.
According to research on how to lead a team, a person who wants to adopt an empathetic leadership style must primarily develop five skills: empathy, enthusiasm, warmth, serenity, and the ability to set boundaries. Let’s look at each one of them.
Clearly, a person who wants to become an empathetic leader should be able to put himself in the place of others, but empathy is not just about understanding on a rational level what the other is thinking: someone who wants to develop his empathetic leadership skills will. you have to understand how an action will affect each member of your team.
For many people, this ability to put themselves in each other’s place does not come from the factory, however, the latest research shows that it is perfectly possible to develop empathy for most people.
A good empathic leader is capable of transmitting to the rest of the team their desire to create and produce, since their leadership has nothing to do with forcing the rest of the team to do their work, but with their ability to inspire and motivate. they do.
To achieve this, a person with empathetic leadership skills is able to put energy and passion into what he has, proposes and executes, to serve as an example to his peers.
Because it is able to put yourself in the shoes of other members of your team, you can also provide solutions around you, being sensitive and just to individual circumstances.
This is not to say that they will work to make friends, but that they follow the maxim that a cordial relationship helps to maintain a good working relationship and, therefore, as a team; Finally, this proximity also places them in a privileged place to reinforce the individual. attitudes that interest the group the most.
The empathetic leader must be able to stay calm in complicated, emotional or stressful situations, in order to effectively lead his team it is necessary to set an example, so if you let your impulses dominate you soon you will lose the respect of your employees.
The last skill a person who wants to develop this skill must master is to set personal and professional boundaries, although he is able to understand the rest of his team, a good empathetic leader must know how to impose himself and maintain the distance when necessary. .
Otherwise, he will no longer be a leader and become another member of the group, so for someone who wants to develop empathetic leadership, it will be very good to master communicative skills, such as assertiveness.