Why is empathy and authenticity crucial to you as a leader?
It develops Trust and allows you to achieve win-win outcomes more quickly and with less hesitation and resistance from colleagues, teams and clients.
Modern day leadership requires you to be a people leader and develop high-trust relationships with stakeholders. Without this People Leadership skill set, leaders can come across as cold, uncaring or just purely outcome focused.
While outcomes, cost management and timelines are important they do not necessarily produce high level commitment and engagement from staff.
In this video we explore how expanding your emotional vocabulary helps you to connect with others, empathise and develop authentic relationships with your clients and staff.
Video Transcript
We are in the era of the relational, purpose-driven leader. And we have talked about that many times before. A question that I have been asked is, well, Godwin, how do I begin moving from, you know, what I have been trained in, which could be a process driven leader or a task leader. So how do I move into being more Inspirational as a leader and working on my Relationship Intelligence or RQ as we call it.
And my response to a leader that asks that question was – a great starting point is to look at emotional range or emotional mastery. And what I mean by that is, if you were mastering any language and learning a new language, your level of proficiency would be determined by the number of words and phrases you have access to… so similarly for relational leadership, for your RQ, increasing your emotional vocabulary.
Okay, so the range of words you can use to describe how you really feel will both inspire you and then being able to have a greater range of words to validate and empathise with how other people feel will lead to more connected, genuine, authentic relationship with others, whether it’s internal or external to an organisation.
So we’ve got a little chart in the comments that you might want to refer to, or as our leaders do, print it out, refer to it every day. Just ask yourself, how do I feel? And in meetings, how do they feel? And can I validate that to build connections and to get to the win-win.
