How bringing empathy to work can be the greatest thing you ever do as a boss

Have you ever felt like some people at work weren’t hugged enough as children?

Like the time I called in sick ahead of a Saturday 6 am shift and a total harpy picked up the phone.

I had a fever, I hadn’t slept and I was super nervous about talking on the phone with a stranger.

On the verge of tears and hands shaking, I piped up, “I’m sick and I can’t make it to work today”.

The crone on the other end had the audacity to say: “You don’t sound sick.”

I fought to keep my voice even as my eyes filled with tears and a rage-mixed-panic was rising up in me.

I mean, would it really take that much from you to bring a little empathy to work?!

I was the one who was losing pay for the shifts I was going to miss and her implying that I was just skipping work because I partied too hard the night before – if you call reading a book in a blanket cave partying hard – was just downright offensive.

Ever since then, I’ve wondered what would it look like if we were allowed to have our feelings.

At work. In the world. In life.

I mean, what if no matter where you went, you felt seen and heard? 

Felt like your distress was recognised? 

Felt like what you’ve endured was acknowledged?

It’s that lack of empathy, that “Well, at least you bothered to call in and tell us you’re not coming to work,” way of treating each other that drives disconnection.

We need so much more empathy because that’s our way back to each other, our gateway to healing as a group, a community, a nation and a planet.

But in order to wield your empathy wisely, you need to train yourself to better recognise and manage emotions – yours and other people’s.

Only when you add more tools to your emotional toolkit can you guide others and help them see that pain is temporary.

That they’re not stuck in that difficult situation forever.

That they’re not alone and that they have the power to take action.

After all, how much do a few kind words really cost you?

If I had to do that phone call all over again, I’d dress that bitch down.

But not in a nasty way, just point out that her behaviour isn’t acceptable for a superior at work and that she needs to reconsider her vocabulary.

You can be the hero that brings empathy to work.

Let’s start a kind and compassionate revolution to eradicate all harpies from work.

Cuz we all got shit to deal with and we don’t need to jump through hoops on top of that.

Recognising emotions isn’t always easy – even (or especially) when you’re an empath

Being empathetic doesn’t automatically mean that you’re good at accurately identifying emotions in others or good at helping them deal with those emotions.

Where being empathic is more of a personality trait, emotional intelligence is a set of skills that help you recognise and manage emotions.

Emotional intelligence enables you to help other people manage their emotions.

Having emotional intelligence means that you are capable of putting your own feelings aside so that you can pause, breathe and check-in.

Without developing your emotional intelligence, you end up using your empathy in a misguided way and becoming overwhelmed in the process.

What is the difference between empathy and emotional intelligence?

Being empathetic means that you can share and understand the emotional experience of someone else.

If someone else feels remorse and you’ve felt remorse, you can understand how that feels for someone else even if they’re feeling is in a different context than your own.

Where empathy is strictly about our shared experience, emotional intelligence is about using your emotions and feelings wisely – and supporting others to navigate their emotions.

Without emotional intelligence you may misread emotional cues.

Or end up projecting your own feelings onto a person or a situation.

For instance, when you’re feeling stressed you may look at another person’s facial expression or something they say, and think that they’re feeling stressed when in reality you’re projecting your own emotions onto them.

We also tend to attribute emotions to people rather than find out how they’re truly feeling, further distancing ourselves from the reality of the situation.

Where does emotional intelligence training begin?

Whatever you’re putting out there, is what you’re going to see people reflect back at you.

If you’ve ever had a boss tell you “My door is always open”, but didn’t believe them, you’ll be familiar with a phenomenon called false connection.

If you’re uncomfortable dealing with your own feelings, odds are you’re going to be more closed off, suppressed and get easily agitated.

The people around you will respond by withdrawing and starting to give you the kind of answers they think you want to hear, rather than the truth.

When you’re comfortable with who you are and skilled at regulating your own feelings, you’re going to be more open to dealing with other people’s feelings too.

People will more readily trust you, even with an uncomfortable truth, because they’re confident that you can handle it and give them space to express themselves without being judged.

To have an emotionally healthy workplace we need to break away from disingenuous attempts at connecting, lip service and the overall lack of psychological safety that’s so common at work today.

A true leader is one who listens and stays out of judgement by keeping a learning mindset.

The deeper work that we have to do as a society, is to recognise that how people feel matters.

The culture of unfettered capitalism, that permeates most of modern life, has commoditised everything – including people – and cast us as expendable.

We work ourselves to the point of exhaustion, in order to buy things we don’t need and impress people we don’t like.

That exhaustion and being stressed from overwork are status symbols in contemporary culture speaks to how we have allowed this perpetual hunger for growth at any cost to dictate the quality of our existence.

In reality, we are anything but expendable.

True creativity comes from a place of safety and without it, an organisation can never truly flourish.

Unless the leadership buys into it, it doesn’t have long-term sustainability

When you want to be more open with your emotions and have better, richer discussions at work, but the person you report to doesn’t want to hear any of it, the goin’ gets ugly real quick.

A change in culture really has to come with the full buy-in of the leadership because how things are done at the top always trickles down into the rest of the organisation.

You’ll never succeed at enacting change if every attempt you make is dismissed by those who call the shots.

It is literally a question of leading by example and coaching everyone on every level of the organisation to adopt these new, emotionally intelligent ways of working.

When there isn’t a commitment from the leadership of the organisation, these changes will not be viable in the long run because after the initial hype, they will gradually be dismissed as less important than things that are directly and visibly affecting output and profitability.

Organisations with leaders who have higher emotional intelligence have a workforce that experiences a lot more positive emotions and is more productive.

Our disregard for emotional intelligence goes back to our educational system: how much time in school is dedicated to helping students learn about their inner lives?

When it is taught in school, it can often be just a few minutes here and there, and the teaching isn’t necessarily done very well.

Even in HR, which I studied at uni for a while, the focus was on how to measure and optimise the productivity of the workers, rather than employing emotional intelligence to find the best ways to inspire people to do great work and support them to take responsibility for their own productivity.

The flipside of treating employees like they’re disposable is that they’ll have no loyalty to the companies employing them.

And I know from experience; when you’re constantly on the hunt for a better job, you’re not putting in the effort you could be at your current job.

Since emotional intelligence is such a crucial skill in later life, we need to consider how we can spend more time learning about it continually.

What can you say to a boss that doesn’t think practicing emotional skills or learning emotional intelligence is important?

There is a lot of research showing that how people feel at work impacts their productivity, their creativity and their performance.

An employee who feels disrespected, undervalued, underappreciated, frustrated, dismissed or overwhelmed (or all of the above), at least 50% of the time at work, will be less productive and spend more time off-task.

Research has shown that these feelings correlate strongly to a lack of innovation.

The more you learn about how your employees are feeling, the more you learn about what they’re thinking and you’ll be better equipped to help create a shift in the atmosphere.

How people feel drives their commitment to their own productivity.

An employee who feels less respected than they’d like to aren’t going to put in their best work.

That said, if the leadership isn’t interested in committing to making changes and employing emotional intelligence (or learning about why it’s in their benefit to do so), there isn’t much that can be done.

Some effort can be made at a local level, but then you must always be prepared to have it be overridden by instructions from higher up.

Typically, these kinds of jobs will have high turnover and may see a mass exodus of employees who aren’t okay with being treated that way.

How to get out of your head and really listen

As a leader, if you genuinely want to guide the decision-making, you have to find out where your employees are emotionally.

You have to get out of a fixed mindset where you strive to come off as having all the answers in an attempt to seem competent.

Instead, you need to adopt a learning mindset when you want to learn all you can and make the best decisions possible.

Once you’ve done your emotional groundwork and figured out where everyone is emotionally, you can make your suggestions.

One of the things that I have learned over the course of my career is that the listener is actually the leader; the talker is not the leader.

– Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel

Having a learning mindset means remaining open and curious about how people are feeling.

Being in a learning mode rather than a knowing mode.

Having that perspective is so critical to building relationships, getting the help you need and making the best decisions you possibly can.

Quick pointers for being a better listener:

• Put away phones or computers that might distract you with notifications or make you think about other things.
• Listen to what the other person is saying without trying to think of how to reply to it; just hear them out.
• Help them clarify their own feelings by labelling: “It seems like you feel ________.” or “It seems like this is ________ for you.”
• When in doubt, use mirroring: repeat the last 1-3 words the other person said and take a pause to encourage them to go on.

How do emotions affect our decision-making?

If you’ve ever gone off to work after having had an argument at home, and then found that you’re getting annoyed at your tasks at work, you’ve experienced what it’s like to ruminate in an angry space.

It isn’t the stimulus in front of you that’s changed, it’s that you’re projecting your own negative emotions about the argument onto your task or situation at work.

Without using emotionally intelligent practices, you won’t be able to attribute your feelings to their root causes.

We often fail to understand that emotions subconsciously affect our decisions.

And if we aren’t clear on what emotions we’re feeling and why we’re basically making decisions while riding on an emotional rollercoaster rather than thinking things through calmly.

By recognising and regulating your emotions, you will be able to correctly attribute your feelings to the corresponding experience.

Doing this will stop your emotions about something that happened in the past from bleeding into your future.

To prevent your past from distorting your future, you have to name it to tame it.

Pause, take a breather and check in on your mood.

“I feel ______ because ______.”

Marc Brackett, PhD, is the lead developer of an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning program named RULER.

His goal is for children to learn emotional skills so that they can more accurately recognise emotions and learn what to do with them.

The R, the U, and the L of RULER are all about the experience of emotions: Am I aware of how I’m feeling? And am I aware of how other people are feeling? The E and the R have to do with the strategizing: What are we going to do with these feelings?

– Marc Brackett

The program teaches the skills of emotional intelligence, namely recognizing, understanding, labelling, expressing and regulating emotion.

Why simply listening is more impactful than giving advice

The key to a more empathetic workplace (and life) is to give ourselves and other people permission to feel.

To feel all emotions.

We have to let everyone experience and express their feelings because they are real.

And the only way to get to the other side of an emotion, is to go through it.

We need to learn how to step out of judgement and how to hold space for someone else to sit with their own emotions.

These are critical life skills that need continuous practice and refinement.

Becoming more emotionally intelligent is a continuous process.

And we have to learn how to give ourselves permission to fail because quality output and continuous output are not the same thing.

We need to stop holding ourselves up to an ideal that isn’t sustainable: people make mistakes.

Making mistakes is a crucial part of our learning process, and without a safe environment to fail in we will never achieve the kind of learning that changes lives.

And we need to remember that it isn’t the failure that defines us, but how we recover from it.

When we are truly allowed to be ourselves we can tap into creativity, which makes us so unique, and apply that to come up with new ways of working, increase productivity and feel more fulfilled.

And finally, we need to move away from self-focused models of interacting with each other and create permission to feel everywhere.

This is the only way we can transform the relationships we create at work and in life.