For some engineers who are promoted to manage their teams, there’s a form of empathy that can sometimes come naturally. It’s the desire to tell your team, “I’ve got your back.” Your team members are your friends, and you naturally want to take care of them.
When you advance into a role where you’re managing managers, that form of empathy can actually get in your way. Even worse, it can get in the way of the success of your team.
You may have experienced something like this when you were a first-line manager. You empathized with, and then advocated for, one of your team members in asking for a privilege or an exception, but your request was denied. Why? Those in higher levels of leadership may be able to empathize with you and your team member, but they must also empathize with others in other departments who will also be affected by the privilege or exception.
As you advance, your empathy must grow beyond individual empathy into systemic empathy. Your responsibility for broader unintentional and indirect results of decisions means you can’t be everyone’s champion or defender. This doesn’t mean you become rigid and forbid all exceptions, but it does mean that you’ll end up needing to be more deliberate in how you consider and evaluate the impact of decisions across more people.
If you’d like to look deeper into this evolution of empathy as you grow in your career, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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