EMPATHY

Last week, I debriefed one of my Australian leadership online mentees on his results from the CliftonStrengths by Gallup assessment. I had asked Kev* to take this as part of our work together.

For those of you who are not familiar with this web-based assessment tool, your responses to 177 questions generates a ranking of 34 predetermined strengths from one to 34. Similar to strengths-based social work practice, rather than exclusively focusing on how to marginally improve the various deficits that we all have, the premise of this tool is that professionals and leaders are significantly more effective if they understand what their strengths and preferences are, and focus more on building on these, and their top five in particular. Taken to date by over 23 million people around the world, it is by far my favourite professional and leadership development tool. 

Kev and I discussed his top five strengths (Gallup call these signature strengths), and their applicability to him and his situation. We then started strategising on how he could quickly and easily better leverage these in his organisational leadership role (and his personal life). The likelihood of anyone else having Kev’s top five strengths is apparently on average one in 275,000. Mind-bendingly, the chances of anyone having the same top five strengths in the same order, has been calculated as one in 33.4 million!

However those at the bottom of the list are not to necessarily be ignored altogether, and so we took a look at these too. One in particular stood out for both Kev and me. Despite his social work training and background, his ‘empathy’ ranking came in at 33 i.e. second bottom out of all 34 strengths. I’ve also come across this with some others who’ve gone into social work management or specialist non-practitioner roles.  

They do have empathy. However, it’s often just not been valued as a strength, let alone something to be nurtured, by either the managerial culture within their organisation or they themselves. Indeed in some organisations demonstrating high levels of empathy may in the past have even been seen as a managerial weakness i.e. over-identifying with individual practitioners, colleagues, families or children and their anecdotal stories, and not grasping the bigger picture!  

The irony of course is that with our growing understanding of brain development, empathy as a concept has recently been embraced by several international thought leaders and top private sector Corporates as one of the latest leadership ‘superpowers’ (be it framed in different ways by different people). Simon Sinek, better known for his book Start with Why argues that empathy, as the ability to recognise and share other people’s feelings, is the first criteria for being a good leader. Brene Brown takes this further and states that there are three things that truly empathic leaders do every day - they are honest, take risks and embrace imperfection. Roman Krznaric in his book Empathy: Why it matters and how to get it argues that empathy is an essential transforming quality that we must develop for the 21st century.

For many of us, including me, one of the few positives of 2020 was that it was very much a year of connection, with many more in-depth conversations with more people, both new and old. In doing so, many of us came to also better understand the myriad of different impacts that COVID-19 has had on us, our friends and families, colleagues, and children in OOHC. Or was it vice versa? Empathy is at the heart of connection and who we are. How well are you using empathy? 

*Not his real name.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz

Kia kaha (Stay Strong).

Iain