Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts

Tuesday 11 August 2020

Misconception about empathy and performance

 Misconception about empathy and performance

(Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)



One of the responses for last week's discussion on "empathy or looking at the things from other's views" is that if we start looking at things from other's views, that leads into lenience and, in turn, mediocrity in the performance, particularly in a professional environment.

We need to understand the slight difference between empathy and being lenient.

Empathy means we listen to other's views and recognize the cause in it. That does not mean that we are accepting the consequences as such.

For example, let us imagine a typical scenario in the workplace,

One of your junior colleagues on a particular day left the office early due to personal issues. He/she may be the authorized person for a financial transaction, and he/ she had not delegated the task to anyone on that day. Due to his/ her absence, the important financial transaction did not happen, which affected your organizational performance.

In this scenario, as a manager/leader, what choices you had the next day when the junior colleague reported the duty?

Choice 1:

You might have displayed your dissatisfaction with the performance without listening to his/ her situation. In this process, both of you experienced negative emotions or hurt personally.No learning from low performance.
 
Choice 2 :

You might have listened to personal issues, and both of you felt sorry about the performance. In this process, you are lenient and accept mediocre performance.
 
Choice 3:

You might have listened to personal issues, acknowledged it and you might have assertively conveyed your dissatisfaction and his/ her lack of delegation to the work. You made him/ her responsible for not completing the task.He/she might have learned from the mistakes.
 
Choice 3 is the appropriate method of understanding others and ensuring the right management process in place.

Most of the time, we are witnessing either choice 1 or 2 in which mediocre performance is encouraged.

 i recall an incident that happened to me some years back. I drove my car first time in a new city and violated the signal as I was not familiar with the signal points and free left etc. A traffic policeman stopped me and got my license. I briefed him about my first-time driving and lack of awareness about the signal points. He listened to me and advised me to be careful in city driving. But he was firm to charge me fine as punishment and I also paid. In my view, the policemen were very empathic about my ignorance but, at the same time, firm on his duty. That is what required for the people who are at the commanding level as a manager or leader. Just imagine if the policeman displayed choice 1 or choice 2  behavior, then we both were not doing justice to ourselves as humanity consideration or duty consciousness.!
 

The point is being empathetic does not lead to lenience; you need to be firm on your role as a leader in a professional environment for ensuring performance!

Friday 4 January 2019

Leading Others (Connecting with care)


The second factor in strengthening the quality of relationship in the workplace is to connect with care.

Connecting with care means your kindness or how you are showing concern to others when you are dealing with them. The others could be your colleagues, or the people work for you.

For example, when one of your colleagues is undergoing some personal problem, how you are showing your concern or intention to help him is caring or compassion. Most of us display care when others are in trouble. However, what requires in the workplace is during regular time, how we are connecting with our co-employees?

In reality, under normal circumstances, it is not spontaneous for most of us, to connect with others with genuine care. Most of the time, the demonstration of care looks like ritual or artificial. As I read sometime back in LinkedIn survey, 70 % of the people responded that they are not being valued or appreciated by the colleagues.

Why is it sometimes difficult to connect with care?
We may argue that busy or work pressure and so on. From my observation, the reason could be either due to a lack of detailing or not being in the present or more of self-focused.

In my opinion, a simple way to show your care and concern to the fellow human being in the workplace in a day to day interactions is as follows.
  • Give respect to others by showing your kindness in your approach and words / Tone.  
  • Encourage others to express their opinions & feelings
  • Listen without interrupting or tempting to give your advice
  • Motivate them to go through the workplace experiences, as you had gone through
  • Appreciate when they do good 
  • Teach them when they do poor

It just requires awareness, effort, interest on others and also it will strengthen your quality of relationship with others, in turn, it will enhance your leadership capability!

Thursday 28 September 2017

Empathy –explained easily

Most of the communication and interpersonal relationship issues in the organization or in family arise when we are not understanding others from their perspective, from their thinking and feeling. This result in arguments, blaming, abusing and finally results in straining the quality of the relationship.

Everyone has their own stories and hardships. If we understand others, their thinking, their feeling, then our way of looking at them would be different as everyone is undergoing different emotions at any point in time and to deal with them, empathy is required.

I came across a below video which explains the empathy in a beautiful way and I understand that this is being used for educating medical professionals to treat others in an empathetic way …
Pl watch it when you have time …thanks to Cleveland clinics on education series

https://goo.gl/YqsP2H