It has been
said, “You can’t truly love another before you learn to love yourself.”
Organizations are no different. If we don’t love and respect and admire the
people we work with every day, we can’t collectively give our customers the
love they deserve. Empathy is an inside-out job.

Empathy is the
ability to put yourself in another’s shoes and walk a mile.  It’s the ability to imagine what it might be
like to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, and experience of the
other person. Empathy is more than simple sympathy, which is being able to
understand and support others with compassion or sensitivity.

Some people
naturally exude empathy and have an advantage over their peers who have
difficulty expressing empathy. Most leaders fall in the middle and are
sometimes or somewhat empathetic. Fortunately, empathy is not a fixed trait. It
can be learned. If given enough time and support, leaders can develop and
enhance their empathy skills through coaching, training, or developmental
opportunities and initiatives.

In the
workplace, showing empathy can help you to understand an employee’s situation
and recognize the outside factors that may or may not be contributing to their
performance. It is essentially the ability to put yourself in someone else’s
shoes, think about how they might feel or react to a given situation, and
adjust your actions and responses to connect with them on their level.

Build a culture of
empathy. Empathy is an essential component of caring about your customers, your
employees, and your company, and its absence signals larger problems in
organizational culture. Empathy can’t be plastered on like a fake smile, but it
can be cultivated from within.