Infographic: The Importance of Empathy in Your Career

A large part of how your career progresses will be determined by the relationships you build along the way.

Of course, work ethic and competency will play a major role, but you still need to be able to work efficiently and effectively with others and within teams. If you can’t get along with your colleagues you’re never going to go very far in your career.

Building positive relationships with your coworkers will benefit your productivity, open new opportunities and make work more enjoyable overall. But how do you foster these strong relationships at work?

It’s simple – by showing empathy.

Being empathetic towards your colleagues will help you better understand them, help them better understand you and help cultivate a connection.

Empathy can be especially important if you work in a managerial role. According to a study conducted by Businessolver, 56% of employees wouldn’t leave a company with empathetic management and 40% of workers would willingly work longer hours for an empathic manager.

However, it’s not always easy to be empathic in the workplace. There are numerous factors that can block our ability to show empathy, such as:

• Being overly busy or distracted
• Feeling frustrated or annoyed by a struggling project
• Perceived “social distance” from our coworkers because they come from different backgrounds

The good news is there are techniques for boosting empathy and ways to overcome these blockers and show empathy in the workplace.

These techniques include: having deeper conversations, reading more often, learning new skills and traveling. GetCRM has put together a visual that shows how you can use these empathy boosters to be more empathic in the following ways:

• Listening more
• Acknowledging other people’s’ perspectives
• Showing patience and remaining calm in stressful situations
• Encouraging others and being supportive
• Being more open to changes in plans
• Using your colleagues names more frequently
• Being aware of your non-verbal communication and how it affects others

Empathy is just as important to your career as education and technical skills. You need to build strong relationships at work to advance in your career and achieve your goals, and showing empathy is the best way to foster these relationships.

Check out the infographic below to learn more about how you can increase your empathy in the workplace.