Doug NollI'm called in when human dynamics are getting in the way of strategic leadership execution.

3 Types of Empathy Great Leaders Have

19 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief presentation, the speaker argues that the most loyal and beloved leaders possess three distinct, learnable forms of empathy. Cognitive empathy is the skill of accurately perceiving and labeling another person's emotions. Affective empathy involves actually feeling and naming those emotions oneself. Predictive empathy is the ability to anticipate and articulate how someone will feel in the future. The speaker claims that mastering these three empathic capacities separates great leaders from the rest, fostering higher employee loyalty and engagement.

Chapters

The leaders who have the most loyalty, who people love working for, have all three kinds of empathy. The first is cognitive empathy, is the ability to read and name another person's emotions. The second is affective empathy. It is the ability to feel and name another person's emotions. The third kind of empathy is very important too. It is predictive empathy, which is the ability to understand and name how someone will feel in the future. These three empathies are learnable skills that separate great leaders from everyone else.