Empathy is Essential in Leading

Empathy is the ability to understand what others are feeling. It's essential to leaders: It lets you feel out a room before you give a presentation, gauge a team member's receptiveness to a course-correct and identify potential performance issues before they get out of hand.

If you don't think of yourself as a naturally empathetic person, you probably just haven't put in much time actively practicing this skill. Empathy is a skill you can work on and improve.

Using All The Clubs in Your Bag

Empathy is just one of the many skills available to you as a leader. You would probably use a combination of techniques when overcoming any challenge. I like to compare it to golf, with each leadership skill being a different club in your bag.

It's always best to have as many clubs in your bag as possible and to understand how to use each one. No matter what hole you're playing, you're going to need at least a few different tools to make it to the end. However, in golf, you're limited to 14.

Over the course of your leadership career, you can throw as many clubs in your bag as you want — nobody is going to make you take a penalty for being too skilled. In golf and in leadership, having more choices is a huge advantage. Knowing when and how to make the most of each is also important. Choosing the right club for your first swing could lead to that elusive perfect shot — a hole-in-one.

Developing Your Empathy Skills

Going back to empathy, it is usually easier to view it as a combination of different, simpler skills. Nobody has the magical ability to simply understand others. Empathetic leaders use a variety of concrete techniques to gather information and formulate their conclusions. Here are a few of the foundational skills.

· Listening: It’s the first step to developing empathy — and it's also a skill you can practice on a daily basis.

· Tracking changes: Noticing small changes in performance, personal presentation or other attributes could help you identify emotional changes in your team members.

· Engagement: Especially in a one-on-one conversation, developing an active rapport with team members can help them feel comfortable enough to reveal their emotional status.

· Patience: Developing patience, especially when listening or conversing with team members, helps them finish their thoughts and communicate their emotions.

All of these together add up to more accurate, faster recognition of your team members' emotional states. It doesn't happen overnight, but focusing on the right basic skills usually provides a clear path to developing your empathy.

Once you start honing this skill and incorporating it into your practice, you should see results in many forms, such as better professional relationships, more trust from your team and higher levels of performance.