Why empathy is a crucial leadership skill

With AI we are entering a new era in which technology can tabulate information, recognize patterns, answer questions, and write reports at a phenomenal speed, and do tasks that would require a massive amount of human time and effort. This has huge implications for our future and what kind of skills are still important for humans to acquire. Being the smartest person in the room has little value if artificial intelligence can pull up more accurate information than the entire room has, and assess that information in moments. There is, however, an aspect that we humans possess that AI does not: It cannot authentically care about others and make them feel heard. Doug Noll, author of Empathy Leadership, puts it this way: “Empathy is the learned ability to observe and name the emotional experience of another person from that person’s frame of reference.” Noll has a unique background as a lawyer turned peacemaker. From 2010 to 2020 he and his colleague Laurel Kaufer trained thousands of incarcerated people in California on how to stop prison violence, using empathy as the foundational skill for de-escalation and nervous system regulation. “Empathy suffers from a vague idea about another …