Short excerpt from a YouTube talk by Simon Sinek (uploaded Aug 11, 2020) explaining empathy in leadership. Sinek contrasts a typical managerial response to poor performance with an empathetic one: rather than blaming the person, leaders should ask 'Are you okay? What's going on? I'm worried about you.' He concludes that leadership is a human job focused on taking care of people who produce results.
Chapters
Empathy at its foundation includes curiosity. One of the examples I like to share of what empathy looks like in the workplace is here's a fairly normal scenario. A manager walks into somebody's office and says, hey, your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don't know what's going to happen. An organization that embodies empathy, that same circumstance sounds different. It says, somebody walks into the office, says, hey, your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. Are you okay? What's going on? I'm worried about you. There's the assumption that the person is not the problem, but they have a problem. And if we can give them a safe space for them to tell us what they're going through personally or professionally, then we can help them. At least we can be there for them to support them. And so empathy is core to. To what good leadership looks like. It's seeing people as people and recognizing that we all have personal issues and struggles and insecurities and egos and ambitions, and all of we're just messy balls of human beings.
And fundamentally, leadership is not about the results. Leadership is about taking care of the people who are responsible for the results. It's a human job. That's what leadership is.
