According to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman, empathy can be defined as (1) understanding the emotional makeup of people and (2) treating people according to their emotional reactions.

People tuned into their sense of empathy are better at building relationships, trust, and collaborating more effectively.

Henry Ford once said that if there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put oneself in another person’s place and to see things from his or her point of view –as well as from one’s own.

An empathetic leader has the ability to acknowledge that everyone sees the world through different perspectives without judgement. They are able to relate to openly communicate with their team and understand when they are struggling. In short, an empathetic leader is able to listen to their team, not fix ,solve or dictate; therefore, building up their team for success.

It is a common misconception that an empathetic female leader is just someone who is really nice. But being empathetic doesn’t mean being nice all of the time. It is more defined by understanding everyone’s feelings. We’re all human. We have fears and weaknesses, as well as opinions that deserve to be shared. And of course people have problems and worries, and those should be addressed, acknowledged, and treated with understanding. However, successful woman show their leadership qualities by understanding, without allowing sentimentality to disrupt production.

Forbes put together a panel of experts on this very topic. According to them, empathy leads to happy employees, and happy employees are PRODUCTIVE employees. Clearly having diversity in the workplace, especially strong female leaders who are empathetic, makes sense for businesses.

I believe we all experienced at work or maybe whilst watching a movie, mainly Male business executives say things like: “Let’s take the emotion out of this”; or “there is no place for emotion in business”; or “We need to make a rational decision”. The implication in the last example being that rationality operates in the absence of emotion.

These comments show an almost complete lack of understanding of what emotions are, their purpose, how they work and specifically the role they play in decision-making. Any neuroscientists may confirm that rationality actually requires emotion. You can’t have rationality unless emotions are involved. They are not two completely separate systems they are intimately intertwined. Thus it is impossible to remove emotion from decision making even if you wanted to. Business is neither rational nor emotional; it is both rational and emotional.

Emotions are just energy-in-motion. They are composite physiological signals made up of all the physiological data coming from all the different bodily systems – your heart, your lungs, your gut, your muscles, joints, liver kidney etc. Emotions are just data. If we can detect the data (i.e. feel the energy-in-motion), correctly label the data and most importantly change the data, then we have developed emotional intelligence, emotional literacy and emotional self-regulation all in one go. The development of such capabilities confers a massive competitive advantage simply because most people (and by people I’m afraid I mean mainly men) are unable to change how they feel on demand. Most leaders lack control of their emotions, rather their emotions control them. If you develop the ability to change how you feel then you get the control back – you have the emotion rather than the emotion having you!