Empathy!
Simon Sinek writes in ‘Leaders Eat Last‘: “There is a pattern that exists in the organizations that achieve the greatest success, […] the ones with the highest loyalty and lowest churn and the ability to weather nearly every storm or challenge. These exceptional organizations all have cultures in which the leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organization can achieve this is with empathy.”
Only empathy provides the comfort of a safety base for people to take risk and explore new areas, and devote themselves 150% to their tasks. Only empathy provides the linkage between people that allows them to resist successfully to hardships. I have observed too often that when people start being afraid about what could happen to them, their productivity and involvement drops abysmally – and we can’t blame them for that, because their thoughts will be fully occupied by this concern. The only way to keep people involved at their best it to provide moral security in the form of organizational empathy.
How much does your organization deploy empathy today? What can you do to increase organizational empathy?
