Cultivating empathy in the team

We are emotional creatures. Even if some people insist that we aren't, our emotions play a major role in the way we carry out our tasks, in our relationships with ourselves and others, and so on. The professional world is no exception to this reality, and yet there's a persistent tendency to ignore them as much as possible.

This podcast on soft skills focuses on this topic, particularly in the context of teamwork. Many conflicts would be avoided if everyone were able to maintain empathy.

Empathy is more than simply listening to others. It's being able to put yourself mentally in the other person's shoes in order to understand how they feel and see things. This insight enables each of us to better grasp our team-mates in order to find compromises, solutions that take different visions into account, and so on.

This is cultivated through an empathic approach, i.e. active listening in which the other person not only hears, but also reflects what he or she has grasped. Sensitivity to non-verbal attitudes is also important, in order to detect subtleties in other people's moods.

Finally, you yourself must learn to express your feelings in order to trigger a desire to do so in others. This doesn't mean revealing everything, but it does mean not hiding the stresses, joys, worries, frustrations and so on that surround not only work, but life in general.

Running time: 8min43

Image: omar sahel from Pixabay