Empathy (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)
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In business, empathy is considered an important factor in product development and in building relationships. Though an excellent idea in theory, in truth the ability to understand the motivations and mental states of others often proves elusive. This book explores the meaning of empathy, why it’s important, and how to overcome the obstacles that could make you less empathetic.
The Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series features fundamental reading on the human side of professional life. Each book in the series is uplifting and practical as it evaluates how our emotions impact our work lives, highlighting critical social skills.
This collection on empathy includes:
- “What Is Empathy?” by Daniel Goleman
- “Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic Than Toughness” by Emma Seppala
- “What Great Listeners Actually Do” by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman
- “Empathy Is Key to a Great Meeting” by Annie McKee
- “It’s Harder to Empathize with People If You’ve Been in Their Shoes” by Rachel Rutton, Mary-Hunter McDonnell, and Loran Nordgren
- “Being Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic” by Lou Solomon
- “A Process for Empathetic Product Design” by Jon Kolko
- “How Facebook Uses Empathy to Keep User Data Safe” by Melissa Luu-Van
- “The Limits of Empathy” by Adam Waytz
- “What the Dalai Lama Taught Daniel Goleman About Emotional Intelligence” an interview with Daniel Goleman by Andrea Ovans
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.
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Empathy (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) - Harvard Business Review
SERIES
1
What Is Empathy
By Daniel Goleman
The word attention
comes from the Latin attendere, meaning to reach toward.
This is a perfect definition of focus on others, which is the foundation of empathy and of an ability to build social relationships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence (the first is self-awareness).
Executives who can effectively focus on others are easy to recognize. They are the ones who find common ground, whose opinions carry the most weight, and with whom other people want to work. They emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank.
The Empathy Triad
We talk about empathy most commonly as a single attribute. But a close look at where leaders are focusing when they exhibit it reveals three distinct kinds of empathy, each important for leadership effectiveness:
Cognitive empathy: the ability to understand another person’s perspective
Emotional empathy: the ability to feel what someone else feels
Empathic concern: the ability to sense what another person needs from you
Cognitive empathy enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways—a skill essential to getting the best performance from their direct reports. Contrary to what you might expect, exercising cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly.
An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy. As one successful executive with this trait puts it, I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them and what didn’t work.
But cognitive empathy is also an outgrowth of self-awareness. The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people’s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way.
Emotional empathy is important for effective mentoring, managing clients, and reading group dynamics. It springs from ancient parts of the brain beneath the cortex—the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the orbitofrontal cortex—that allow us to feel fast without thinking deeply. They tune us in by arousing in our bodies the emotional states of others: I literally feel your pain. My brain patterns match up with yours when I listen to you tell a gripping story. As Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany, says, You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.
Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own echoes of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice, and other external signs of emotion. (See the sidebar "When Empathy Needs to Be