Leadership with Empathy (Part 2)

In order to empathize, one must truly understand what another is going through. If you have not suffered the same loss, fought through the same struggles, failed at the same struggle, or succeeded at the same achievement, you cannot really empathize with the person you are interacting with. And even if you have, we are quick to forget the details and minutiae of what went into that situation.

Teachers are quick to forget what it is like to be a student sitting through 7 hours of classes. School administrators forget what it was like to have 30 kids staring back at you for 45 minutes 5 times per day, and the ability to only go to the bathroom between passing periods. Superintendents forget what being a building principal was like, and often do to principals the same things they complained about only a year or two before.

This happens in any industry, as we are quick to think of only our goals and lose the ability to understand how our demands are impacting those who are responsible for completing what we are asking of them to do. The only real way to do that is to get back in their shoes. Leaders need to take the time, on a regular basis, of being in the shoes of those they lead.

A teacher should have the ability to follow a student schedule for a day. A restaurant manager should be a server or bus boy for a day. A Starbucks corporate officer should be a barista for a day, or Target executive should go back to the checkout register. Only then can one really understand the true friction between what the day to day is really like, and how the strategies in place towards achieving the priorities towards your goals can be achieved.

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