Friday Fifteen #2: Reroute to empathy

I started out wanting to write about listening today. I wanted to write about Shaw’s comment that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Listening as a leadership skill has come up in several conversations this week. In reflecting on this, I wanted to write about listening to understand vs listening to respond, and about how listening well can help us find connective tissue in communities, teams, and organisations.

Instead, what I kept coming back to was empathy. Perhaps because in order to listen, we need to hold a certain degree of empathy. Or perhaps because when we listen well, we bring empathy to round out our understanding. When we’re leading ourselves, empathy is also self-compassion, a necessary element of innovative, constructive learning, and often destructively lacking in ambitious leaders. When we’re leading others, empathy builds the connection required to retain, motivate, and promote excellence. It doesn’t have to be complicated. By deliberately understanding teams as fundamentally human, we can measurably improve people experience and business outcomes.  

I began to get frustrated when I couldn’t arrange my thoughts about listening on the page the way I wanted to. What I needed to do was listen, empathetically, to where my reflection was settling.