While working with senior management over the past years, one quality of leadership emerges as an absolute necessity for successful communication and organizational well-being: empathy. I define empathy as: a capacity to experience the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of other people while simultaneously differentiating one’s own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This quality or capacity is something that many people naturally possess. However, under the stress of running an organization, over long periods of time, necessity often trumps propriety. What is responsible for successful development of the organization – cooperative effort – is moved to the background and “efficiency” and controls in response to the “bottom line” push mutual regard into the shadows.
As this occurs, there is a decrease in human connection and communication resulting in the diminishment of empathy. Eventually, this allows a split to emerge and the fractured parts silo and begin to function independently of the whole. Individuals, departments and teams tend toward functioning in service of their independent objectives often antithetical to the well-being of other departments and the organization as a whole.
The devolution of an organization can be successfully corrected through cultivating empathy as a conscious antidote to organizational dysfunction.
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