Are you an empathetic leader?

At its very heart, a business is the beauty of bringing together people and things to make the community better off—these are the businesses we admire.  Empathy is one tool that makes it all happen.  ~Angel Cabrera, President of George Mason University

Rita McGrath, professor at Columbia Business School recently authored a post on the HBR Blog Network that very succinctly summarized the history of management into three eras, leading up to the current era of empathy.   The following few paragraphs I excerpted from her blog post.

With the rise of the industrial revolution, management changed.  Along with the new means of production, organizations gained scale.  The focus was wholly on execution of mass production, and managerial solutions such as specialization of labor, standardized processes, quality control, workflow planning, and rudimentary accounting were brought to bear. 

The next major era of management emphasized expertise.  The mid-twentieth century was a period of remarkable growth in theories of management.  Statistical and mathematical insights were forming the basis of the field that would become known as operations management.  Peter Drucker, one of the first management specialists to achieve guru status, was representative of this era. 

Today, we are in the midst of another fundamental rethinking of what organizations are and for what purpose they exist.  If organizations existed in the execution era to create scale and in the expertise era to provide advanced services, today many are looking to organizations to create complete and meaningful experiences.  Management has entered a new era of empathy. 

This would mean figuring out what management looks like when work is done through networks rather than through lines of command, when "work" itself is tinged with emotions, and when individual managers are responsible for creating communities for those who work with them.

So what is empathy?  Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experience of others.  Simply put, empathy is the ability to step into someone else's shoes, be aware of their feelings, and understand their needs.

If you're thinking that this view is held by McGrath and few others; I challenge you to do a search on leadership and empathy and you may be surprised at the results.  Here are just a few examples of others who support McGrath's perspective.

"Leadership is about making a positive difference and you cannot do that without empathy."  ~Carly Fiorina (CEO of Carly Fiorina Enterprises and former CEO of HP)

"We are living in a world that, more and more, is driven by rapid change; a world in which every individual needs to be a changemaker.  You cannot afford to have anyone on your team who isn't a changemaker…and one of the qualities you need as a changemaker is empathy." ~Bill Drayton (CEO and founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and former director at McKinsey & Co.)

This week, let's each make a greater effort to "walk in someone else's shoes" and join the movement toward 21^st century leadership.