Who is a good leader? What is it that makes a good leader stand out in the crowd and mesmerize you with his/her finesse in everything he/she does? Experts say that along with numerous other qualities, it is the quality of feeling empathy towards your employee and colleagues that actually makes one a successful leader and eventually leads to the success of any organization.

You can find people in leadership roles almost everywhere you look. However, simply shouldering responsibilities of a leader doesn’t necessarily makea a person an effective leader. Leadership itself is a privilege and a skill. There are many leadership skils and competencies that when combined and applied, go towards making you an effective leader.

So what is empathy? Empathy is the ability to have an intuitive understanding of other people and their needs. Within a business setting, it is critical for empathy to be as widespread as possible, permeating all departments from sales to accounting to manufacturing. In today’s world, as evidenced by the terrible financial crisis of last year, there is a possibility that we could get too caught up in data. When we do that, we often fail to see truths that are right in front of us. Employees at ll levels of an organization need to understand the people beyond the office walls – their customers, their clients etc. This enables everyone to make better real-world decisions. Over time, even the smallest decisions influenced by empathy add together to produce a more informed and nimble organization.

Empathy is a necessary attribute of a great leader but i is not sufficient. A lot more is required. In fact, some highly aggressive corporate environments see empathy as a sign of weakness. A good example of such cold-bloodedness was the hot-shot chief executive Albert John Dunlap, who appeared to relish the title of ‘Chainsaw A1′, bestowed upon him for the way he could and would fire any number of employees without hesitation. Well, he was considered to be golder CEO for a while, but he ended up being denounced for an accounting fraud! And that’s the core of the matter – people who are not empathetic often end up being selfish and short sighted instead.

Effective leaders, make tough decisions when situations warrant, but hey also communicate with employees and understand what they are going through. Empathy distinguishes a good leader from the great ones, in a crises situations.

It has been understood that empathy is one quality that a leader must possess in order to be successful and it also plays a role in making an organization achieve its vision. So,, what are the behaviors that go into making any person empathetic towards others and how can this quality be developed?

Empathy can be built from three major behavior
- Recognizing your own shortcomings – past and present.
- Listening to others and learning more about their lives and their private challenges
- Explicitly aspiring to a noble deal of leadership.

If you want your business to adopt widespread empathy, there are really three steps to follow.
1 – Leave the office and get outside. Go to places where people are most likely to act like themselves.
2 – Be genuinely interested in other people. Forget about what is that you do and start caring about the needs of others. Find the real needs first and your solutions will dramatically improve too.
3 – Bring evidence of the real world back to your offices.

Empathetic leaders position people first. True empathy stems from the leader’s ability to display genuine concern towards the needs of others. High level of empathy is denoted by:
1 – Listening to people:
Pay attention to their tone of voice, to the hidden emotions behind what they are saying to you and to the context. Don’t interrupt people. Don’t dismiss their concerns offhand.

2 – Focusing on the non-verbal communication:
the body language of people often communicates what they think or feel, even when their verbal communication says something quite different.

3 – Being fully present:
when you are conversing with people, don’t check your email, look at your watch or take phone calls. Allow people to have their comment.

4 – A Smile:
it makes people comfortable and you more.

Hence, it can rightly be said that, even if you have all the qualities of becoming a successful leader, but if you miss the basic quality of feeling empathy towards your teammates, your journey towards success will be very short lived. Put yourself in their shoes and see how success touches your feet.

Top management techniques that most of us would love to see!!!

1: Pro Wrestling Project Management

Much like the world of professional wrestling, the world of project management can be filled with empty threats, posturing, feuds, rivalries, and unusual alliances. But what if the similarities were made an official part of project management? Let’s face it, I think we have all (at least once) dreamed of putting stubborn clients into a headlock until their faces turned purple, or maybe seeing the project manager spend 20 minutes in a steel cage with the operations manager. To really make it an authentic experience, managers would be required to enter conference rooms to music and perform a variety of poses designed to intimidate any other managers.

2: The Rolling Stones Development Model

During their extensive career, The Rolling Stones have produced a song for every occasion — and nearly everyone is familiar with their most popular tunes. So it seems like a perfectly logical jump that instead of “standard communications,” one could run an entire development project using sound clips from various Stones songs. Is the client demanding an impossible timeline? “You Can’t Always get what You Want.” Is their favorite feature impossible to code up in a way that makes them happy? “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction).” Is the project in deep trouble? “19th Nervous Breakdown.”

#3: Bug Bounties/Penalties

Ever feel like half your day is spent cleaning up someone else’s mistakes? It’s even worse when you find out that the person who is making you feel like your job has been reduced to “clean up on aisle two” is earning as much (or more) money than you are. Imagine for a moment that any problem that could be definitively pinned on a co-worker’s poor quality of work would have a financial penalty attached to it, and that the person who fixed it would get that same amount of money. Would that co-worker’s mistakes be such a headache then? Probably not. I suspect many of us would look forward to them!

#4: Jargon-free Communications

Sometimes, listening to a manager (or worse, a salesperson) feels like you’re reading a Tom Clancy novel, with all of the acronyms, industry-specific slang, and other incomprehensible jargon. It seems like every other sentence requires more time to decipher than it took to say it. I think we can all agree that if management started using real, standard English (or your local language of choice) instead of these marketer-speak filled, incomprehensible messes, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, we are probably more likely to see a wrestling ring put into the lunchroom (see #1) before that happens.

#5: Geek Games for Performance Reviews

Most of management’s existing techniques for measuring performance simply look at the wrong factors. Ever notice that they count the times you were late to arrive but ignore all the times you were in the office at 11 PM patching servers or writing critical pieces of code? What is really needed is a metric for overall geekiness. A much more effective review would be a pentathlon challenge, testing each employee in the following critical areas:

• Knowledge of sci-fi and fantasy movies and books
• Ability to stay in-character over a five-hour role playing session
• Modern video game skills (FPS death match)
• Classic video game skills (Super Mario Brothers speed completion)
• Ability to identify ancient computer hardware and make it work

I think with this kind of review, it would be easy to ensure that raises and promotions went only to those who have what it takes to be top-flight technologists.

#6: Charging for Dumb Questions

Remember when you were in school, and the teacher told you, “The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask?” Well, from what I can tell, that rule goes out the window the moment you become an IT worker. Your day is now filled with giving answers to dumb questions from people who won’t understand the answers anyway. Management loves to bandy about the saying, “Time is money.” Let’s put these two ideas together. If management wants us to spend our time answering questions, that’s fine; we’ll simply charge them for it. Under this new policy, all IT employees will be given a mobile device that allows them to time any useless interactions with management and record the manager’s name. At the end of the month, their department will be charged at “standard consulting fees” (say, $250/hour), which is then put into the IT department’s budget, earmarked for perks like new PCs, raises, and other niceties.

#7: No Degree? No Problem!

Most of those who are in the know in the IT industry realize that college degrees and even many industry certifications don’t directly translate into real world IT experience, let alone the ability to do the job. Try telling that to the HR department, though. Sure, many roles within IT can benefit from formal, academic-style training (people writing compilers and device drivers come to mind), but those positions are fairly uncommon. However, for the typical IT worker, dropping the college degree or certifications from the “mandatory” list would be a wonderful thing. Not likely to happen in our lifetimes, but one can dream.

#8: Siskel & Ebert 360 Reviews

The 360 review is a model in which everyone on the team reviews everyone else. Of course, this promises that the workers get to review management. Wouldn’t it be sweet if this was done in a “thumbs up/thumbs down” format, complete with bickering over things like the manager’s handling of weekly meetings, the quality of his or her memos, and the tone in which the team is addressed? I can picture it now: “Well Bob, to be honest, Sally is really lacking in the leadership department. When she tries to give constructive criticism it sounds like she is really phoning in the performance. A thumbs down from me!”

#9: Relevant Manager Dashboards

At one job I had, I created a number of “manager dashboard” reports. I think we are all familiar with these. They’re supposed to show the manager’s world at a glance. The more it tries to look like the instrument panel of a car or airplane, the less likely it is to show any information that actually relates to the project at hand. To make matters worse, IT projects are pretty difficult to quantify, so you end up with dashboards that don’t really mean much of anything at all.

I propose that we put together some dashboards for our bosses that show what we think the bosses need to know at a glance. We could have a thermometer indicating the team’s frustration level and a tachometer for hours worked per week… with anything over 40 being the “red zone.” We could also put in some idiots lights. But instead of saying “check engine” or “change oil,” they will indicate “team nearing mutiny” and “Jim needs a vacation.”

#10: Better Project and Team Names

Okay, we’re going to violate #4 here. We recognize that management is going to insist on keeping codenames and acronyms for projects and teams. So why not have codenames that make us feel like we are part of something interesting, at the very least? In other words, if the project is about to be named “Project Happy Kitty Cats” it needs to be named something better. Like “Operation Cthulhu” or possibly “Project Thor’s Wrath.” Likewise, instead of boring team names, such as “QA” or “Network Operations,” we should have much more colorful names. I’m not suggesting that the development team be renamed “Cobra” (and the supervisor be known as “Cobra Commander”), but how about renaming Tech Support to “Really Trying to Fix Mistakes”, aka “RTFM?”