Leader empathy

Empathy is defined as-

Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.

I think Satya Nadella of Microsoft revitalized thinking about empathy in business with his book and talks. It is easiest to have empathy with people we identify with. It is much harder to have empathy for groups of other people or those against whom we have some bias against.

Leaders are a group of people that I'd argue we all have a natural bias against. Leaders can be in a political setting (local, national or global), business settings (c-level executives) or any other form (maybe parents?). I'll stick to political leaning discussions here since that was a conversation that spurned the thought for this blog. Decisions by these leaders do not always seem to benefit their constituents. Especially when looked at after a long period of time after massive changes in the environment. From an empathy perspective, I'd like you to try to consider the context under which the decisions are being made. The situation at a current time and past experiences have a major bearing on a decision. There are always many active issues that require attention in a large enough organization. It is simple when things are going well or ironically when things are clearly failing. When things are not going well, it's easy to identify the problem and then maybe try and fix it or blame someone else. The harder issues are partial failures which might become massive issues in the future but are currently not catastrophic. It's hard to know how much resources to allocate to fix the issue. Hence the timeline of when decisions are made are very important as part of the known information when the decisions are made.

As an example related to politics, I've noticed that bashing Jawaharlal Nehru for policies during India's independence is in vogue. In most conversations the allegations are vague and critical evidence is often missing. History also gets re-written more often than we’d like to admit.

By empathy I do not mean that leaders should have no consequences for their actions. Illegal actions like corruption, should clearly be condemned and prosecuted. However making decisions that had unintended side-effects or those that did not have the necessary impact are tricky. Having some empathy helps.

PS: I usually start writing on topics with partial ideas and notes. Most ideas remain as drafts for a long time and some lucky topics are actually published. This is one topic that started before the Ukraine war. Getting it to completion I did have to proofread it again to see how well it aged. Though likely a bit controversial given the current environment, the crux of the opinion still stands.