Empathy Training, Is It A Good Investment?

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There has been plenty of discussion about people completing empathy training.

From the Prime Minister, to senior Federal Government Ministers many of our leaders have publicly announced that they have completed high value empathy training. The question really is how beneficial is empathy training?

Firstly what is Empathy? It is the ability to understand another person's emotions. Many believe that it is broadly understood to be a learned behaviour, something that is developed in our early relationships with our parents or caregivers and then shaped by culture.

A persons degree of empathy really does depend on their personality and often their career path and events in a person life has an impact on their degree of empathy.

Historically many facilities managers, specifically hard services specialists have levels of empathy that could best be described as “in their infancy” as these roles usually are very mechanical and the outcomes have very little direct correlation with people.

The key components of empathy is to be able to be an active listener; understanding what triggers a person's emotional reactions; and genuinely being able to solve problems with a focus on the solution from their perspective.

Among the reasons a person may struggle in showing empathetic traits is that often process often privilege and power or in other words class can interfere in the way people engage.

People in positions of privilege or power often have everything around them arranged or coordinated for them so their access to the average person is often significantly reduced and they become by default less responsiveness to individuals concerns.

We tend to find many workplace change management experts have excellent empathy skills and when coupled with workplace technical expertise on how to be use the workplace facilities it delivers a leading level of support for an organisations employees.

Often empathy training for senior leaders is embarked upon when a senior leader identified that their communication and particularly their listening skills need to be improved for the benefits of the leader, other individuals and the organisation as a whole.

Often a poor workplace culture can be directed attributed to poor empathy across the workplace. A pandemic is a great way to resolve these organisational shortcomings, but it is also more about the type of persons that are navigating the direction of an organisation.