Member-only story
Empathy Is an Essential Leadership Meta-Skill — How to Cultivate it
Empathy is a superpower that makes us see and feel what others can’t.
Empathy is more than a soft-skill — it’s a meta-skill. It amplifies other skills making us more powerful to understand other people’s needs. Empathy is being in sync with others.
This post is an intro guide to everything empathy. What is it? How to become more empathetic? Why empathy is good for leaders? And more.
What is empathy?
Some experts define empathy as the capacity to a) be affected by and share the emotional state of another, b) assess the reasons for the other’s state, and c) identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective.
The word empathy was inspired by the German aesthetic term Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.”
As Walt Whitman said, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself become the wounded person.”
Empathy is more than putting yourself in another’s shoes. It’s genuinely grasping what others are going through. It’s such an essential human skill that even babies exhibit it, reacting to the facial expressions of adults.
