I’m a big advocate of leading with emotional intelligence (EQ) to create team engagement, motivation and collaboration.

If the work environment is changing or you are launching a new programme/ product/ service, EQ becomes critical to help take people on the journey with you.

One component of EQ is empathy. Empathy is the ability to share and understand the feelings of another.

It’s fairly obvious why empathy is a useful leadership quality - if you understand how your team are feeling you can take action to keep them engaged and motivated.

It helps to build relationships faster when you care about the human behind the employee. And it means you can make good judgements about HOW to communicate, launch new services or change your teams roles & responsibilities.

But empathy, when over leveraged, can become a problem. You don't want to be over-extended.

Every strength has a shadow side to watch out for. With high empathy skills you could be spending too much time in other people’s heads, obsessively mind reading and planning for the wide variety of reactions they could have to an upcoming change.

High empathy could immobilise you or make it even harder to make the really tough people related decisions that leaders often have to make.

So leverage your empathy skills but don’t go over the top. Here’s some strategies to help you stay balanced:

Practice mindfulness regularly to calm your mind from over thinking
Get another perspective from a leader peer who thinks differently to you
Test that your logic works for the long term as well as the short term
Are you in integrity? Ask yourself - would your grandmother be proud of the decision you’re making?

Hope that helps you engage a core leadership skill without disappearing down a rabbit warren. Interested to hear your reflections.

P.S. Empathy is a fantastic leadership skill...until it isn't. Over-extending your empathy skills could leave you exhausted and worried. Use these tips to find a balance