Leadership Challenge #2 - Practicing Empathy In 5 Steps
Happy Saturday,
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter, dedicated to pioneering the future of leadership.
Each week, I dive into a challenge designed for you to engage with at your own pace. These challenges are designed to enhance your remote leadership skills, offering context, potential wins, and actionable steps.
Last week, we focused on finding your leadership voice. If you’ve missed that, here you can read it to catch up.
This week, we're focusing on the second challenge:
Enhancing Empathy in Leadership for Remote Teams.
Let's explore the significance of empathy in remote leadership and how you can elevate this skill. Because yes, empathy is not a trait but a skill.
Why does empathy matter?
In distributed teams, empathy becomes the lifeline of effective leadership. Without the physical cues and environment of traditional office settings:
There are no "water cooler" moments for casual check-ins.
You can't gauge mood or morale from across a room.
Team members' challenges might remain hidden behind screens.
Empathy allows you to bridge these gaps, creating a supportive and understanding team environment, even from afar.
Empathy, in general, is also a key skill for every leader. Without diving into the HR-voodoo terms, I firmly believe that empathy (or the lack of) directly translates to 5 key metrics in business.
Performance. If you show empathy and support, your team becomes more engaged.
According to the latest Gallup study, engaged teams perform 21% better. Higher engagement translates to better performance, which translates to higher revenue.
Retention. The more engaged your team, the lower your turnover rate.
A turnover costs 1.5-2x of a team member’s annual salary. The better your retention rates, the more money stays in the bank.
Innovation. Google’s Aristotle Project shows that psychological safety is the no1 factor in successful teams.
If your people feel safe, they speak up. If they speak up, they take risks. If they take risks, they express ideas without fear. If they express ideas, they innovate more. Empathy directly impacts psychological safety. The safer your workplace for your team, the more amazing ideas you generate as a business.
Bottlenecks. Empathetic leaders dig up the root causes of problems faster.
Yes, you will still have misunderstandings, especially remotely. But the question is how fast you can solve them. The faster you are, the less time your team is misaligned.
Reputation. Lastly, your reputation is on the line here. I don’t want to dive into this too much, but if you are a jerk boss, people will be happy to tell others.
A leader with a bad reputation will always have difficulty recruiting A-players. And we all know that mediocre people build mediocre companies.
How to practice empathy - the 5 key action points for you.
As with all these challenges, I designed it to fit your schedule. Each action point takes 30-60 minutes daily to complete as a task.
It works like a gym. You do the small reps. The total time investment is around 4 hours. The tasks this time are interchangeable.
Day 1
Practice active listening.
This will be the hardest part to do for most leaders. We tend to annex a meeting and talk it through.
In the worst cases, we all know the scenario: the CEO talks uninterruptedly for 30 minutes, and that was the meeting.
The task is simple. Track your meetings for a whole week.
Pull up your phone. Start a stopwatch.
Any time when you speak, start the stopwatch. Measure the minutes of your speeches.
The goal is to keep it below 10% of the total meeting time.
Day 2
Give up your driving seat.
Almost every leader has a status meeting with their teams. It is when you gather reports on what is going on from multiple people at once.
Hopefully, this doesn’t happen on a daily basis (ditch those daily standups, jeez!), but it almost certainly happens once a week, at least.
Ask a random team member in these meetings to run the meeting instead of you. Give up the control.
Day 3
1:1 with all.
This is especially important in a remote setting. In the office, we tend to recognize if something is off with someone. Online, it’s harder.
We have to be intentionally interested in others.
Having a 1:1 with your team members is the best way to do it. Organize 1:1 sessions (15-30mins) for the entire week with your team members.
Ask them about their personal life, how it affects their work, and how you can help them. Every life is different, and every person is different.
The goal is to learn if someone is struggling and show support (however you can). You don’t need to be intrusive; simply ask if everything is OK with them.
Day 4
Set up an open-door policy.
In the office, it is a practice for most leaders. I’ve seen only a few of them practicing this online.
The task is super simple. Block out at least 1 hour every week from your calendar. Name it however you want (e.g., support hour, feedback hour, etc.).
The meeting should be recurring every week at the same time. A day before, promote it publicly on internal channels so people know.
The goal is to create a space where people can come to you with whatever they want, but not about project-based work issues.
Day 5
Draw the empathy map.
If you did all the tasks above, you probably better understand your team’s dynamics. To make it stick, draw it down.
It can be a simple chart, lines, dots, or a document. Whichever is more convenient for you. The key is to write/draw it down.
Visualize or write down how each team member relates to each other. What are their problems, issues, challenges, and attributes in life?
If you can, update the map from time to time. In months, you will see this dynamic changing. If someone is a weak link for whatever reason, the map can help you attend to the problem—even before it manifests as a problem.
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Empathy is a skill that you can practice. It is not a trait that you are born with. These tasks can help you to nurture this skill.
I’ve left a personal reason why this empathy ‘thing’ is important.
During my 20 years of career, I’ve had a fair amount of a-holes in my life. Almost all the jerk leaders I knew had one key thing missing: empathy.
Some were even close to a classic sociopath.
You can’t run a business just based on numbers.
A company is a company of people. The better people you have, the better business you manage.
The entire leadership challenge series is focused on having a presence as a leader, being a thought leader, and being someone who deserves to be followed.
You can’t just go to the jungle without understanding yourself and others. No one will relate to you.
Last week, we focused on you, on your voice. This week, we focused on others.
Next week, we will finally dive deep into content creation and how to create leadership content, which will be the baseline foundation for your thought leadership program.
If you have any questions so far, do let me know. I’m happy to help you and guide you through this.
Until next week,
Peter
