The Empathy Advantage: The Secret to Fueling Your Success

Empathy. The word conjures up mental images that aren’t often associated with strong leaders, the powerful, or the successful.

Can success-driven people be both strong and empathetic? Should leaders care about empathy in their business?

​Let’s examine why empathy is a top skill for leadership and success.

Leading with empathy helps you connect with the people dedicating their lives to support you and your life’s work and purpose.

However, ‘empathy’ can have a bad rap. When people hear that word, they often think ‘soft’ or ‘weak.’ Sometimes, it gets confused with sympathy, which means feeling pity or sorrow for the misfortune of another.

​Empathy is the ability to understand and connect with another person’s feelings. And there’s no better way to lead a team successfully than with empathy. When you can ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,’ you can better relate to them and motivate them to drive performance and loyalty.

Does empathy impact success? You bet it does! Especially when talking about maintaining long-term success.

Empathetic people understand and recognize the feelings and perspectives of others around them. Successful people are made and maintained based on their ability to encourage and influence others. You must understand people to predict how your actions make them feel and behave. You do this by being empathetic.

Empathy can boost your social skills. Your ability to understand people can help you enjoy and embrace socializing. It also promotes acts of goodwill as you are more likely to help someone in need. These traits promote success in your personal and professional development.

​Empathy helps you understand and form a close prediction of how others might react or feel. You’ll emerge as trustworthy, knowledgeable, and a leader others turn to for advice due to your ability to empathize and handle people and situations appropriately.

While empathy is vital to leadership success, it has limitations. Knowing empathy’s negative impacts can help overcome them.

​Being over-empathetic can:

Empathy can cloud your judgment and lead to biased decision-making. You might unknowingly provide better treatment, jobs, or opportunities to someone who seems similar to you. You might unwittingly base promotions on commonalities or needs instead of merit. As a result, your organization could suffer from a lack of diversity, perspectives, creativity, and problem-solving capabilities.

Empathy can inhibit or negatively affect your energy. It can be very draining and lead to burnout because it’s emotionally taxing and requires vigilantly considering many people’s perspectives. More people will willingly open up to you, but who can you offload to, especially if you carry secret information? It’s physically impossible to have empathy all the time.

​Empathy can be motivational at first. However, following through on an empathetic idea can become too time-consuming or unproductive.

In rare cases, empathy can put a target on your back for people seeking to offload their emotions. Some could use your empathy to manipulate you into giving them what they want.

​Once you know the pitfalls of empathy, you can better avoid its negative impacts–poor judgment based on emotion rather than logic and getting bogged down with others’ burdens.

So, how can you harness the best parts of empathy while avoiding the negative to become successful? You need empathy to understand and relate to others. Too much, however, you risk tipping the scales toward unfair decision-making, poor self-care, and being targeted or manipulated by others who can pick up on your emotional cues.

Awareness of your emotions and feelings can make a huge difference and help you find balance. Start by assessing yourself. What experiences, worries, insecurities, thoughts, and interests color how you see things? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can help you challenge your thoughts and determine the right thing to do.

Take steps to improve your emotional intelligence so others can’t easily take advantage of you. You can work with a coach or therapist to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, get feedback, and learn strategies for dealing with people.

You can also boost your emotional intelligence by reading. Self-development, success, self-confidence, mindset, and entrepreneur literature are full of advice on the secrets of success. And, with today’s online book resources about successful habits, you can easily access hard-to-find self-development materials anywhere you have an internet connection.

​Furthermore, training your brain to become more consciously aware (mindful) can help you lead with empathy while maintaining control over your emotions and minimizing negative impacts. When you can step out of your feelings and judge an entire situation objectively, you can make the best decisions for yourself and the team.

Most people have sufficient degrees of empathy. You can work with a licensed therapist if you’d like to build more. Additionally, you can practice imagining what you would feel like in someone else’s situation. Finally, read various types of literature to understand and learn more about the world and people around you.

Whether you’re a leader in your professional or personal life, leading with empathy helps you optimize your success. You’ll reach higher heights than you could without it.

​Being empathetic doesn’t make you soft or weak. It strengthens you, helping you better understand and connect with people and build meaningful relationships.