Empathy in Leadership: Striking the Balance Between Hard and Soft

When you think of a good leader, who comes to mind? Someone who’s vocal and decisive, who holds their team to a high level of accountability and delivers on targets? Or someone who’s compassionate and flexible, who focuses on building relationships and creating a positive work environment? The truth is that the best managers and leaders do both. Empathy in leadership is key to striking the balance between hard and soft, and navigating the competing demands of our complex modern workplaces.

Empathy is often cited as one of the most important leadership skills. Teams with leaders who have high levels of empathy experience increased engagement and innovation, and decreased burnout and turnover. This means empathy is not just a nice-to-have but a business imperative.

However, many organisations still undervalue empathy, both as a business need and as a leadership skill. In fact, 83% of employees say that empathy is undervalued in their organisation and while 55% of CEOs believe they are empathetic leaders, only 28% of employees agree.

There’s a clear gap between our understanding of the importance of empathy in leadership and how that plays out in reality. So, what can you do to fix this in your organisation?

In this blog, we’ll explore:

• Striking the Balance Between Hard and Soft
• Understanding Empathy in Leadership
• Driving Empathy in Leadership in Your Organisation
• Next Steps

Striking the Balance Between Hard and Soft

Imagine a team member comes to you and says they’re feeling overwhelmed and are struggling to hit an important deadline. What do you do? Do you reiterate the importance of meeting targets, double down on this as a priority, and tell them they need to deliver the work by the agreed date? Or do you ask what’s getting in the way, try to understand where the overwhelm is coming from, and see if there’s any way you can support them?

Would your response be the same if it were a deadline for your most important client? Or if not delivering on time could lose you a contract and have serious implications for the business?

How about if your team member was struggling to deliver because of an unexpected and upsetting family emergency? Would giving them time off to deal with that take priority over meeting the deadline?

What if this were the third time this team member had failed to deliver on an agreed deadline? Would it make a difference if they had an ongoing personal issue that you knew was impacting their ability to fulfil their usual responsibilities?

Managers and leaders often face these kinds of situations, where business needs come up against human needs. There isn’t always a clear solution and so we can’t give blanket guidelines or policies on how to approach them. However, what we can do is equip managers and leaders with the skills to strike the right balance. We call this ‘hard soft management’.

The Evolution of Hard Soft Management

In recent years, the expectations we have of managers and leaders have evolved. Pressure from organisational leadership to deliver in an increasingly complex world, coupled with increased expectations from employees around wellbeing and inclusion, have created an environment in which leaders are expected to balance profit with people; challenge with care; hard with soft.

Modern day leaders need to be able to manage not only the ‘hard elements’ of leading a team like monitoring performance, delivering results, and driving accountability but also the ‘soft’ elements like monitoring engagement and satisfaction, coaching and supporting their team members, and safeguarding wellbeing and inclusion.

Business needs and human needs don’t always perfectly align. However, organisations that equip leaders with the skills they need to strike the balance and do the tough things in a human way see increased engagement, satisfaction, and performance as well as lower rates of burnout and turnover. This means hard soft management is not just a personal leadership approach, but something that should be a business priority.

Flexing Your Approach

Understanding the need to strike the balance between hard and soft is a good first step. However, the true skill lies in being able to flex your approach. We all have a default tendency to lean either hard or soft. So, we need insight from elsewhere to judge the best course of action in each individual set of circumstances. This is where empathy comes in.

By prioritising empathy in leadership, we can equip managers and leaders with the skills and mindset to gain insight into perspectives other than their own, helping them to understand what’s needed for each person in each situation. Success doesn’t lie in being hard or soft, but in using empathy to judge how to strike the balance.

Understanding Empathy in Leadership

So, what exactly is empathy?

Have you ever listened to a friend tell you about something challenging they’re going through and felt as though you were going through it yourself? Felt angry, or upset, or outraged – not for them, but with them? That’s empathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share in other people’s emotions and perspectives. It’s not about just feeling concern for them or expressing sympathy, but putting ourselves in their shoes and really understanding their point of view. Empathy helps us to establish rapport, build relationships, make moral decisions, and cooperate with others even if we don’t view things exactly the same way they do – all important skills for a leader.

The 3 Aspects of Empathy

There are three different aspects of empathy, all of which impact leadership performance:

1. Cognitive empathy

This is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand their perspective from a logical point of view.

For example: Imagine you’ve communicated a workplace change to your team that will improve efficiency and cut costs in the long-term but will require some initial work to implement. When someone expresses concerns about the impact on their workload, cognitive empathy allows you to imagine what it would be like to be in their position, appreciate the impact this may have on them, and understand why they are concerned.

Cognitive empathy in leadership supports cooperation and collaboration, helps ensure employees feel their point of view is acknowledged, and enables leaders to consider needs and perspectives outside of their own.

2. Emotional/affective empathy

This is about feeling another person’s emotions with them, experiencing them as if they were your own.

For example: When the same person expresses concerns about the change you are implementing, emotional empathy allows you to feel that worry alongside them. This very different to feeling worried for them, which can come across as pity… not something people often enjoy being on the receiving end of.

Emotional empathy in leadership helps to build trust and strengthen relationships, ensuring employees feel they are understood and valued as people not just as resources.

3. Compassionate/behavioural empathy

This is about understanding what another person is going through and responding with compassion by doing something about it.

For example: Your team member may feel validated to know you understand and share in their concerns around the change. However, that doesn’t have any practical impact on the situation. Compassionate empathy is what compels you to action. For example, you might book a meeting to discuss their questions, de-prioritise less urgent tasks, or even push-back on timelines.

Compassionate empathy in leadership drives action, building a culture of support and demonstrating to employees that their manager (and by association their employer) can be trusted to protect their interests alongside business interests.

Why Does Empathy in Leadership Matter?

When leaders tap into all three aspects of empathy, they become better equipped to understand the competing thoughts, feelings, and needs of different people within the workplace.

For example: Being able to put yourself in the shoes of both business leadership who need to push through the change you’re tasked with implementing, and your team members who may have concerns about the short-term impact, gives you the insight you need to make decisions that balance business needs with human needs and achieve the best possible outcomes for everyone.

This shows up in all sorts of ways for managers and leaders. For example, when giving feedback, having performance conversations, communicating change, managing upwards, assigning workload, or taking action to safeguard wellbeing. Leading with empathy isn’t just about being nice to everyone. It’s a practical leadership skill that enables managers and leaders to understand competing needs and strike the right balance of doing the tough things in a human way – leading to better results for everyone.

Cultivating Empathy in Leadership in Your Organisation

We often think of being empathetic as something you either are or are not. And there is a small element of truth to that, as empathy seems to have a genetic component. However, this only accounts for 10% of individual differences in empathy, meaning that 90% is on us.

Empathy is something we initially learn through socialisation in childhood and further develop through practice. This means that you can take steps to cultivate empathy in leadership in your organisation, boosting engagement, performance, and retention.

1. Encourage managers and leaders to reflect on their default leadership approach

We all have a default approach when it comes to hard soft management. However, we may not be aware of it. Share our free Hard Soft Manager Self-Assessment with your managers and leaders to help them think about where their approach currently sits, what the benefits and challenges are for their team, and how they could lean into empathy as a leadership tool to better strike the balance.

2. Create opportunities for perspective-taking

Encourage leaders to actively seek out and understand diverse perspectives and experiences – and create opportunities for that to happen. This could include job shadowing, reverse mentoring, or simply inviting diverse opinions into workplace meetings. Help managers and leaders to understand how their communication, decisions, and priorities land from other people’s points of view, so they can better flex their approach depending on each person and situation.

3. Support managers and leaders with 1:1 conversations

Workplace 1:1s are one of the most important meetings in the calendar, and managers who have 1:1s are 1.5x more likely to retain their entire team. However, they’re often underutilised. Good 1:1s are an opportunity to check-in on a professional and personal level, and for managers and leaders to make sure they understand what their team members need to succeed. Invest in your leaders by training them to run great 1:1 meetings, so they make the most of this valuable opportunity to build mutual empathy and understanding, and strike the right balance for each team member.

4. Develop emotional intelligence

Empathy and emotional intelligence (EQ) are interconnected but distinct concepts. Where empathy is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, emotional intelligence is about being able to recognise and manage emotions in yourself and others. These feed into one another, so you’ll likely find that developing your empathy increases your emotional intelligence and vice versa. Support your managers and leaders to develop their emotional intelligence by sharing our free EQ Self-Assessment for Leaders. Or, get in touch about our Advanced Management Programme which focuses on developing emotional intelligence.

5. Recognise and reward empathetic leadership

Managers and leaders are busier than ever, juggling conflicting demands and expectations. So, if you want them to make empathy a priority, make it a business priority they can’t ignore. Include empathetic leadership in your competency frameworks and make it a part of performance conversations, highlight examples of leaders who’ve balanced hard results with a human approach and the positive impact this has had on the organisation, and encourage senior leadership to model empathetic leadership behaviours. When empathy is seen as a performance driver, rather than a nice-to-have, managers and leaders start to take it seriously.

Next Steps

Striking the balance between hard and soft isn’t easy, but it’s a necessity in today’s modern workplace. By encouraging empathy in leadership, you can support people at all levels of your organisation to do the tough things in a human way and deliver results that benefit everyone.

To learn more, check out our workshop on The Hard Soft Manager or get in touch! We are here to help.