How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times

Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 330

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 330 | January 5-11, 2024

Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section | 1

How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times

By Jamil Zaki | Harvard Business Review Magazine | January – February, 2024 Issue

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Many people believed that empathic leadership—which draws on the ability to understand, care about, and vicariously experience the emotions of others—was too “soft” for the hard-charging, competitive world of business.  By now dozens of studies have demonstrated the opposite. Empathy is not a weakness but something of a workplace superpower. 

But for all its virtues, empathic leadership can be emotionally exhausting.  Not surprisingly, given the costs, some managers believe they must make a choice: be empathic and sacrifice their own well-being for the good of others, or back away emotionally and leave their people high and dry. Fortunately, this dilemma is more imagined than real. You can employ three strategies to manage your caring as a leader, which together form a practice the author calls sustainable empathy. 

1. Physician, Heal Thyself.  To avoid feeling selfish, many absorb the stress others are suffering but if they fail to care for themselves, can they be relied on to support the well-being of their reports?  When you let yourself burn out, you deny everyone else the best version of yourself.  The good news is that caring for yourself is the opposite of selfish: It’s a vital path to sustainable empathy. Recent studies of social-service providers and business students have shown that practicing “self-compassion,” in particular, protects people from exhaustion.  It involves three steps: cultivating awareness of what you’re going through; focusing on “common humanity,” which involves recognizing that suffering is universal; and establishing goodwill by extending kindness and grace to yourself.  No matter what industry you’re in, managing others well begins with managing yourself. You can do that in a few ways: Acknowledge the distress that comes from caring about the pain of others, treat yourself with the same grace you offer others, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

2. Learn to Tune Your Caring.  Empathy encompasses multiple ways in which we connect with others. Two in particular matter for understanding burnout: Emotional empathy involves taking on someone else’s feelings. Empathic concern involves wanting to improve someone else’s well-being.   Most people think of empathy as a portal into others’ pain. But it can—and should—also be a portal into their joy. Wise health-care workers remember to ride emotional highs with patients and families, replenishing their own reserves for the inevitable lows. When you can share the joy people are feeling, your empathy helmet doesn’t exhaust you; it energizes you.

3. Remember That Empathy Is a Skill.  Decades’ worth of evidence demonstrates that empathy is more like a skill than a trait. Yes, some people are born more empathic than others, but sustainable empathy is within your grasp. When you understand that empathy can be developed, you also understand that caring well doesn’t always mean caring more.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Many people believed that empathic leadership was too “soft” for the hard-charging, competitive world of business.  By now dozens of studies have demonstrated the opposite. Empathy is not a weakness but something of a workplace superpower. Employees are more satisfied in their jobs, more willing to take creative risks, and more likely to help their colleagues if they work in empathic organizations. 
2. But for all its virtues, empathic leadership can be emotionally exhausting.  Not surprisingly, given the costs, some managers believe they must make a choice: be empathic and sacrifice their own well-being for the good of others, or back away emotionally and leave their people high and dry. Fortunately, this dilemma is more imagined than real. 
3. You can employ three strategies to manage your caring as a leader, which together form a practice the author calls sustainable empathy:  understand that managing others well begins with managing yourself, learn to tune your caring, and remember that empathy is a skill.

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Topics:  Empathy, Leadership