Empathy and Leadership

Ask anyone to name the most desirable qualities for a leader to possess and we guarantee some form of emotional intelligence will make the list. Defining what makes a leader particularly great is often difficult because every great leader has unique qualities that are different. But despite the unique differences, every great leader in the modern business world possesses the ability to empathize to some degree. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are easy on employees, customers, or competition. It simply means they can step outside of their own shoes and into the shoes of another.

When a leader possesses a high degree of emotional intelligence and empathy, they can unemotionally gauge a situation from another person's perspective and are able to take action that reflects this understanding. They are able to engage in discussion about an employee's problem, perceive a competitor's strategic priorities, and listen to an unhappy customer's perspective all with an open mind. The ability to gain insight from looking at a situation from someone else's vantage point is what sets the great leaders apart from the crowd.

This week, we shared a piece by Microsoft staff that highlights how empathy in business is an incredibly important skill for leaders to adopt in modern times as employees have increasingly greater number of career and work options available. Indeed, Microsoft makes the case that empathy flows from management to employees to customers - and ultimately to the bottom line. Leaders who exhibit greater empathy can improve employee morale which in turn cuts down on employee turnover. In addition, empathetic leaders who interact with customers enrich the customer experience which in turn reduces customer churn.

If empathy is not your strong suit, we wouldn't necessarily recommend softening up. Rather, consider pausing before a difficult encounter to give yourself space to respond instead of react. Here are four questions to consider that can help introduce empathy into any situation:

1. Pause - what is the cause behind the emotion, the problem, or the frustration?
2. Reflect - are there differences in priorities, opinions, or circumstances that may cause tension between you and the other party?
3. Decide - what is the desired outcome?
4. Act - how can you achieve this in a long-term positive sum manner?

The bottom line is that empathetic leaders create happy employees. Happy employees create happy customers. Happy customers tell others and stick around for more.

What other qualities do great leaders have, and what practices have you discovered to help implement these qualities?

2020 Annual Letter (Permanent Equity)
+ "Despite initial uncertainty, some of our businesses prospered as consumers decided to turn attention to their homes and backyards. Other businesses struggled as people stopped flying. Love endures, buildings still use glass, and the military continues to need civilian mariners. March and April looked dicey, but every company made it through the storm and is well positioned for future success. If 2020 was the year of lemons, we pulled out our juicers and became professional mixologists."

The risks you can’t foresee (Harvard Business Review)
+ "Failures to pick up signals are rooted in well-documented biases. Decades of behavioral research show that people pay attention to information that confirms their beliefs but disregard it when it conflicts with them. They often dismiss repeated deviances and near misses as mere blips. This “normalization of deviance” gets reinforced by groupthink, which causes team leaders to suppress or ignore concerns and anomalies reported by lower-level personnel."

The 6 steps of building an audience from nothing (Better Marketing)
+ "Your goal isn’t an arbitrary number of followers. Your goal is to find a targeted audience of engaged individuals. Influencers don’t want more followers, they want more leverage. Bloggers don’t want more followers, they want more readers. Companies don’t want more followers, they want more sales."

The state of mobile 2021 (App Annie)
+ "Biggest Mobile Shopping Year Yet: $115 BILLION spent globally during 11.11 Shopping Festival across Alibaba and several other shopping platforms from Nov 1 - Nov 11, 2020. Mobile drove the lion's share. 30% more time spent YoY globally in shopping apps on Android phones during 2020. Outside of China — an early adopter of mobile shopping — global time spent in Shopping apps grew 45% YoY. $53.2 BILLION spent on mobile in the US from Nov 1 - Dec 9, 2020, up by over 55% YoY."

The state of micro private equity (The Generalist)
+ "The expansion of micro PE is allowing many more to eschew timidity and build their online empires. As tech continues its infiltration of industry, we should expect the proliferation of digital products to accelerate, providing ever more opportunities for the savvy investor and spirited builder."

The founders of Harry's got a $1.37 billion offer to sell. But the FTC wasn't sold. (Inc.com)
+ "The experience was surreal. Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield, the co-founders and co-CEOs of the trendy grooming-products startup Harry's, were wearing suits and ties. They were surrounded by lawyers. And they had just experienced an hours-long grilling by antitrust regulators in a room at the Federal Trade Commission headquarters in Washington, D.C., a hulking limestone edifice on Pennsylvania Avenue. Their apparent sin: competing too well against razor giant Gillette. Isn't antitrust law supposed to work the other way?"

How one of the world’s fastest-growing startups burned through $300m (The Hustle)
+ "Fab had raised $336m since rebranding itself as an ecommerce platform in 2011. At one point, it had been a unicorn, valued at $1B. It had 750 employees on multiple continents, a schmaltzy HQ in New York, and an enormous warehouse stocked with millions of products. Now, the company was selling for less than one-tenth of its original valuation."

9 trends that will shape work in 2021 and beyond (Harvard Business Review)
+ "It’s become clear that supporting employees in their personal lives more effectively enables employees to not only have better lives, but also to perform at a higher level. According to Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey, employers that support employees with their life experience see a 23% increase in the number of employees reporting better mental health and a 17% increase in the number of employees reporting better physical health. There is also a real benefit to employers, who see a 21% increase in the number of high performers compared to organizations that don’t provide the same degree of support to their employees."

Empathy in Business (Microsoft)
+ "The tendency to be egocentric is an evolutionary survival mechanism. But times have changed. We live in an economy where people value experiences and give their time and money to companies and leaders they can respect and that give them additional value. That value is not born through traditional leadership – it is born through leaders who are mentors more than bosses, coaches more than managers."

The internet of animals (New York Times)
+ "By doing so, ICARUS could fundamentally reshape the way we understand the role of mobility on our changing planet. The scale and meaning of animal movements has been underestimated for decades. Although we share the landscape with wild species, their movements are mostly obscure to us, glimpsed episodically if at all. They leave behind only faint physical traces — a few paw prints in the hardening mud of a jungle path, a quickly fading arc of displaced air in the sky, a dissipating ripple under the water’s surface. But unlike, say, the sequence of the human genome, or the nature of black holes, our lack of knowledge about where our fellow creatures go has not historically been regarded as a particularly pressing gap in scientific understanding."

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