Empathy
Empathy is the ability to share and experience feelings with another person vicariously. Empathy is essential to understanding the needs of the people you work with and live with. If someone’s cat dies and they are distraught, rather than discounting it because you hate cats, you can put yourself in their shoes and understand what they are going through. Organizations are full of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and emotions. In order to be able to relate to everyone, you need to have empathy and try to understand how they feel about things.
Empathy Leadership
Empathy is essential for a leader to have since that is how they can connect with their subordinates. Leaders will come up against all sorts of challenging situations, and having emotional intelligence will help them more effectively deal with those situations. Your subordinates will also respond better to you if you are empathetic to their needs. Integrating empathy will help you to build trust with those around making it easier to connect with them.
Empathy Artifact
The below artifact is from the class OGL220 Behavioral Dynamics. The paper is all about empathy, stress, and emotional intelligence. I discuss a conversation I had with my wife about emotions and how I control mine to the point that she would rather I get angry and argue with her. I also discuss the video “Radical Experiment in Empathy” again. This video is about the Iraq invasion and how they are angry at the Americans. It gets you to understand that there are two sides to every story and sometimes you need be empathetic to a person’s story.
Empathy is the ability to share and experience feelings with another person vicariously. Empathy is essential to understanding the needs of the people you work with and live with. If someone’s cat dies and they are distraught, rather than discounting it because you hate cats, you can put yourself in their shoes and understand what they are going through. Organizations are full of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and emotions. In order to be able to relate to everyone, you need to have empathy and try to understand how they feel about things.
Empathy Leadership
Empathy is essential for a leader to have since that is how they can connect with their subordinates. Leaders will come up against all sorts of challenging situations, and having emotional intelligence will help them more effectively deal with those situations. Your subordinates will also respond better to you if you are empathetic to their needs. Integrating empathy will help you to build trust with those around making it easier to connect with them.
Empathy Artifact
The below artifact is from the class OGL220 Behavioral Dynamics. The paper is all about empathy, stress, and emotional intelligence. I discuss a conversation I had with my wife about emotions and how I control mine to the point that she would rather I get angry and argue with her. I also discuss the video “Radical Experiment in Empathy” again. This video is about the Iraq invasion and how they are angry at the Americans. It gets you to understand that there are two sides to every story and sometimes you need be empathetic to a person’s story.
Reflection
Because of the importance of empathy in leadership, it is important that it is taught in the Organizational Leadership program. Leaders deal with people every day, and if they can’t learn to use empathy with their subordinates, then it’s likely that those subordinates will never truly trust them. We need also to learn how to manage our emotions so they don’t get the better of us. Dealing with stress can cause us to lash out at those around us but being aware of your emotions and how they will affect others is important. Empathy is a must for leaders.
I am one of those people that has always kept their emotions in check. However, placing myself in someone else’s shoes hasn’t always been so easy for me. There are times when I have felt that something was stupid, rather than keeping my mouth shut and trying to see it from their point of view, I just blurted out my distaste. Learning about empathy in class has helped me to understand the importance of being more empathetic to people. I have noticed a difference at both work and home.