I decided to do an empathy series for several reasons. I truly do not believe you can even entertain the idea of leadership if you do not understand empathy. So, that was definitely the core of the inspiration to dedicate seven episodes of my podcast and blog entries to this one word, one important characteristic of leadership.
However, the true inspiration came when I was in a meeting recently with only women. It was a networking event with women from all different backgrounds. They came from all different backgrounds as far as age, ethnicity, and stature in their career, but the commonality was that we were all in leadership roles or had been. We were either new leaders just starting out or some were nearing retirement. As you can imagine, these types of networking events are my favorite.
The woman moderating the event asked us, “What makes a good leader?” Without hesitation, the women in the event started to unmute themselves or began typing in the chat, “Empathy.” It was unanimous. I was one of them. And I could not agree more. She went on to say that is what makes women such strong and powerful leaders, our gift of empathy. As she stated, we as women are known to lead with empathy and that is proven to be beyond effective in leadership.
I had spoken often about empathy and its importance on my podcast in leadership. But, I was smiling ear to ear watching this response from so many women with such diverse backgrounds. I knew that I had to do a series about it. And, I wanted to examine this topic beyond just “empathy.” I wanted to break down empathy in my opinion.
So, I launched the empathy series on the podcast. The first focus topic for the Empathy Series is Evolve. This struck me as a resonating topic, in my opinion, because I love the idea that you must resolve to evolve. But what does that mean? And why does this apply to empathy?
In my opinion, as a leader, resolving anything within yourself first before acting as a leader is imperative. In general, I believe that as a person we must resolve anything outside conflicts within ourselves to effectively evolve. To me, that is what resolve to evolve means, and I believe to be an empathetic leader and to lead with empathy, you must resolve your own battles in order to evolve so that you can empathize with others.
I often use myself as an example on the podcast and on this blog (just like in previous ones), I will again. I had a serious issue with delegation when I first started out in a leadership role well over a decade ago. I was too young at first to really understand why or pinpoint the reason. So, I couldn’t “Resolve to Evolve” immediately. However, I knew what I was doing wasn’t working. I wanted to have a hand in everything. I was managing a store at the young age of twenty-two. Yet, I was completely burnt out. I quickly realized that I couldn’t be the number one salesperson, have perfect inventory, take manager calls, deal with customer issues, manage the staff, tailor items when the tailor was gone, and you get the picture. I realized that this could not be the way that management, let alone leadership, was supposed to go. Even as young as I was, I was right.
Years later and many mistakes later. I realized that a lot of these issues came from my need to “control” because my life had been so out of control in my youth. That was my issue created from my upbring and a lack of stability in my youth. Yes, that followed me. So, when I realized this, I was able to recognize it and “resolve to evolve.” I knew this is where it came from, and I learned to delegate. I learned to trust my team because why wouldn’t I? They had not given me a reason not to. This was a huge turning point for me and I started to lead large teams all across the country and internationally. You have no choice but to trust.
I do enjoy talking about evolving though because I do not personally feel, in my opinion, that people change. I believe that people can evolve. I had forgotten this until I decided to write and speak about this topic but when I was twenty-two, I told my boss this and his eyes looked like sand dollars. I wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking. But, he finally said to his boss who was sitting with us, “See, I told you she was wise beyond her years.” I just shrugged because that’s how I felt and I was responding to the behavior of a manager who had not changed in years. I still believe this today; twelve years later.
The point is if you want to evolve then you must identify what is holding you back and resolve that issue. Leadership is no exclusion. My lack of ability to delegate was holding me back. Why? Because I wanted to control everything because I grew up in chaos. I needed to resolve to evolve. That was not my life anymore and that had nothing to do with anyone that worked with me or for me. Let it go. I learned to have empathy for myself, as well as my employees for sticking with me during my evolution. We will all still be resolving to evolve as leaders; myself included.
