There are multiple global events impacting the workforce’s intellectual and emotional ability to perform successfully. A recent Gallup poll showed 44 percent of employees experienced emotional exhaustion from navigating post-pandemic trauma and being isolated from colleagues in hybrid and remote work environments.
In addition, employees are craving employer-supported mental health and lifestyle balance. When left unsupported, employee mental health challenges contribute to disengagement and 60 percent of employees quitting quietly. When these intellectual and psychological challenges are unsupported by leaders, 41 percent of Gallup poll respondents identified wanting to change organizational culture which included “better managers.”
Trauma, isolation, mental health and disengagement create a need for empathetic support. Learning and development teams that prioritize development in empathy for leaders have curtailed the strains that employees experience and, in many cases, improved their organizational culture. This article highlights how empathy improves organizational culture, that peer coaching is the preferred method for empathic skills development and five steps to implement peer coaching in your organization.
Empathic leadership improves organizational culture
While leadership focuses on the behaviors required to guide others, empathy is the ability to understand others in a way that guides your leadership behavior. Empathy is defined as a key element of emotional intelligence. It includes the ability to recognize, understand and react to the concerns and needs of others. Empathy can also be learned and coupled with leadership development. Given employees’ intellectual and emotional exhaustion, empathy should not be viewed as a “soft skill,” but rather as a job-related competency.
Empathetic leadership is a business necessity that enables leaders to mitigate employee emotional exhaustion. Equally important, leadership empathy helps improve morale and organizational culture. Businesses have shifted formal L&D programs from understanding logistics to becoming emotionally intelligent. Now, the majority of leadership development focuses on building employee trust, psychological safety, effective communication and nurturing team collaboration. Mid-level leaders are centrally positioned within the organizational culture linking executive vision, workforce function and management peers’ needs.
Earlier this year, 70 percent of employees reported feeling their managers should emphasize the importance of mental health. Leveraging leader empathy skills can be developed without these individuals taking time off from their responsibilities. The consequence of not investing in empathetic leadership skills development contributes to short-term organizational cultural dysfunction and exponential long-term costs. Without leaders’ ability to communicate with empathy, employees will continue to have limited capacity to work, quietly quit and job hop. The long-term consequences include poor production/service, continued employee turnover and fiscal waste.
Peer coaching is an effective method for skills development
Peer coaching is different from executive coaching or leadership coaching. Rather than bringing in an outside expert, peer coaching is a strategic skills development method that fosters relationships between colleagues of equal status within an organization. It is a two-way coaching relationship that helps both participants grow through goal-directed, mutual learning, with empathy at its core.
Corporate training was originally designed to replicate the didactic methods of schools and universities. Today, seminars and instructor-led training remain the primary methods for skills development. Large group learning sessions are useful to impart a one-size-fits-all approach to skills development. However, empathy is a uniquely human skill and based on each person’s individual psychology and experiences. So, developing or deepening it requires a different kind of learning approach.
To learn empathy, you must experience first-hand what it’s like to have empathy for another person and know what it feels like for another person to empathize with you. Therefore, empathy can only be developed through relational learning, where you’re actively put into situations where you have to use it and receive it.
An instructor can still hold a small role in the development of empathy. For example, they can share research on the benefits of empathy or debrief the peer coaches’ learning experience. However, this skill is only fully learned during unprompted, human interactions. For this reason, peer coaching is the ideal, relational learning method.
5 steps to implement peer learning to develop empathy in your organization
Communicate that empathy is good business. Some leaders consider empathy a superfluous “soft skill” that doesn’t deserve focused development. The first step in changing their minds is connecting the strategy of your peer coaching program and its intended outcomes to your business’s goals. Whether you are implementing a standalone peer coaching initiative or using peer coaching as part of a larger leadership development program, show that it’s a necessary skill for your organization to grow.
Answer these questions as a guide to help you make your business case:
- Which of my company’s core values are tied to fostering a supportive, compassionate workplace?
- What strategic initiatives necessitate our ability to understand, experience and act on the feelings of others?
- What data, such as employee engagement surveys, customer experience ratings or other key measurements indicate that a culture of empathy is necessary for the health and success of our organization?
Set a program structure and strategically match peer coaches
Effective peer coaching programs have parameters that enable the dyads to have both meaningful and productive relationships. Create guidelines that define peer coach roles and responsibilities, the frequency and duration of coaching sessions and the duration of the program and confidentiality.
Next, consider how you will pair leaders. You can combine people by geographic region or by time zone if you have remote teams. You may also consider pairing people cross-functionally, so they learn about different areas of your organization. Some programs also require peer coaches to work a minimum of six months in their role before they can participate. This requirement enables them to have knowledge of company norms, cultural nuances and business processes so they can effectively coach their partner. Finally, give your pairs some agency in choosing their partners. A peer that is available to work remotely or in-person, functional area and previous work experience are factors to consider.
Set your pairs up for success
Positive coaching relationships are initially established in a structured way so they lead to unprompted learning moments. It’s essential for each dyad to have a written working agreement consisting of formal guidelines that govern their work together. Explicit expectations minimize misunderstandings and create more successful outcomes. Working agreements should specify mutual expectations about behaviors that are acceptable and not, coaching goals, styles of working, ways of monitoring the relationship, how each pair prefers to receive feedback and address any other element that impacts the success of the relationship.
Consider creating a standard written template agreement that includes your program structure with additional open space, so each pair can customize it to their needs. The following are questions that you might pose to your pairs to help them customize theirs:
- What are your primary goals for this relationship?
- What do you need to function effectively in your peer coaching relationship?
- What is your preferred communication approach? Consider both style (for example, direct, supportive, challenging, etc.) and method (email, virtual meetings, face-to-face, etc.)
- How do you prefer to receive feedback from your peer coach?
- How do you prefer to address potential misunderstandings or disagreements with your peer coach?
A lightly held structure is necessary for your program’s success. However, once guidelines are established pairs should focus on mutual goals, not methods.
Prepare and support your peer coaches
Hold a group orientation to introduce the purpose and intended outcomes at the beginning of the program. Peer coaches should know that the intended outcome is to create an empathic organizational culture. Use a flipped classroom where the coaches acquire useful methods and skills for goal setting, giving and receiving feedback and creating psychological safety as prework. Use the in-person portion to begin building empathy through hands-on peer-coaching activities. Have your dyads hold their first peer coaching session and practice the knowledge that they’ve acquired from each other.
After the orientation, ensure the success of the program by periodically checking in with peer coaches to evaluate the effectiveness of the program and the pairs. Also, share conversational prompts that the pairs could use together, assignments and resources to reinforce empathic skills development and reinforce peer learning best practices.
Set the stage for skill transfer
At the end of the program, gather participants to facilitate a discussion about what they learned about themselves, what they achieved and how the program enabled them to deepen their empathy. Have them reflect on how they will transfer this learning to how they lead their teams and interact with their peers and other internal and external stakeholders.
Peer coaching as a proven learning method effectively nurtures empathy skills development. As a cost-effective and practical approach, peer coaches are provided with timely feedback to their specific leader-employee needs. Furthermore, peer coaching directly supports leadership skills development impacting employee retention and organizational culture.
Written by Carrie Graham & Loren Margolis. Published by Chief Learning Officer Magazine. Original publication here
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