Empathy is the ability to understand and connect with the feelings of another person, and it’s a necessary skill to learn when working collaboratively in a leadership position or as an employee. At Techanlink, we use and encourage empathy in various ways within the workplace, and we know the benefit that active empathy brings to your overall professional atmosphere. A few ways you can use active empathy in the workplace today, whether to generally improve the office environment or as part of your soulful leadership, are:
• Set your viewpoint aside – One of the easiest ways to practice conscious empathy, which is what you’ll do most often when first introducing empathy into the workplace through soulful leadership, is to set your viewpoint aside. Consciously take your view or opinion, ignore it, and focus solely on the view or opinion another is expressing to you. Work this other viewpoint through in your mind, and find where it’s coming from and why the person may have it. This can be done naturally throughout the workday, or as an intentional exercise to help to promote active empathy and its benefits.
• Examine your own attitude and belief – Do you want to push your own idea or plan because it’s truly a better way to go, or is there something deeper there? Examining your own attitude and belief, and your own bias, can help you to feel empathy more easily. If you look within and find that you want to win simply to win, and not because you truly feel that your idea is the better path, you will find that you’re lacking empathy to others, and increased empathy will provide more success in current and future collaborative projects.
• Validate different opinions – Sometimes you’ll use empathy and you’ll try to see from a different point of view, but you just won’t quite agree or see where the other person is coming from. This is okay, and it doesn’t mean that you’ve failed to be empathetic, just that your perspective is simply very different from someone else’s. This doesn’t make either party wrong, and validating these different opinions and “agreeing to disagree” shows empathy in these difficult or challenging situations.
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