Running Head: EMPATHY 1

Empathy

Name

Professor

Name of the institution

Course
EMPATHY 2

What does it mean to be an empathetic leader?

Empathy is the capacity of understanding another person’s perspective, feelings and

experience. It is the faculty of putting yourself in other people shoes and access how they feel in

their shoes not how you feel in their shoes. An empathetic leader therefore is a leader who is able

to reach his people. Empathetic leaders are able to foretell the outcomes of their decisions and

the implications they will have on the audience and how to strategize them accordingly.

Empathetic leaders are always first in processing information. As an empathetic leader, as stated

by Tom Monahan, you need to start with understanding every single individual in your team,

strengths and weaknesses, their interests and relate them to the purpose of the organization. He is

able to see the goals of the organization and connect these on how individuals can uniquely

contribute toward achieving those goals.

Do you agree that empathy correlates to how leaders understand new contexts or changes

in contexts?

There a lot of changes in the world of work that make empathy to be more relevant than it

would have been some years back and the main one is the persistence of change. Majority of the

current leaders have a lot of changes in their work place and in their job responsibilities because

change is constant. Therefore, empathy has a strong correlation on how readers understand these

new contexts and changes in contexts because organizations have to reorganize too fast with

respect to these changes.

EMPATHY 3

Why is it important for a leader to understand the context and culture in a leadership

situation?

To be a successful leader in an organization depends on your ability of understanding

and responding fruitful to the context of your company and your duties within that company.

Every company has its own eccentric culture that contribute to its formation. As you increase

your knowledge and understanding of your organization culture, you will be able to work more

constructively. For a leader to be effective, he has to respond to the distinctive culture of that

company which creates reasonable norms and expectation on how they should react towards

helping their organizations deriver business goals. Understanding the context help leaders to

calibrate their style to their situation in order to meet their client needs.
EMPATHY 4

References

Kock, N., Mayfield, M., Mayfield, J., Sexton, S., & De La Garza, L. M. (2019). Empathetic Leadership:

How Leader Emotional Support and Understanding Influences Follower Performance. Journal of

Leadership & Organizational Studies, 26(2), 217-236.

Hunter, S. J. (2018). Why Leadership Matters. Maine Policy Review, 27(1), 11-12.

Mayfield, J., & Mayfield, M. (2018). Speaking from the Heart: Empathetic Language. In Motivating

Language Theory (pp. 35-48). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.