Empathy is the New Assertive

It’s a really exciting time to be a feminine leader. And by feminine, I don’t necessarily mean female- for many of the most successful women leaders have been female without choosing to show the slightest inkling of femininity. While there’s much to laud Hetty, Hillary, and Martha for, embodying traditionally female characteristics in their leadership style isn’t one of those reasons.

Although I’m a product of an all-girls secondary school and majored in and have taught women’s studies, I’ve still spent a lot of my educational and professional life establishing myself as a leader in a patriarchal society without abandoning such traditionally female values as compromise, nurturance, and humility. And while I’m by no means suggesting that patriarchy is a thing of the past, everyday I become more aware of how our national definition of “good” leadership is evolving. And I couldn’t be happier.

President Obama’s election was a pivotal moment in this transition into a new era of leadership. One that now privileges grassroots-coalition building to maverick hawkishness. President Obama says, “I’m sorry,” when he feels he’s made a mistake. He’s preternaturally calm. He feels comfortable sitting in the unknown. And he exhibits equal amounts of empathy for those who are with him, against him, and more often than not, for the folks situated in the necessary and often underutilized gray space between these two poles.

In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel H. Pink posits that successful leaders across industries in our current conceptual age will need to hone six senses to cultivate sustainable success: design, story, symphony, play, meaning, and empathy. While all six of these senses privilege more feminine ways of knowing and being, and Pink says one competency is not more important than the others, it’s hard not to walk away from A Whole New Mind seeing empathy as a foundation and catalyst for the other senses. Pink defines empathy as:

the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts…. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality- climbing into another’s mind to experience the world from that person’s perspective.

I’m totally jazzed to think about one day bringing a child into the world who gets to see male and female leaders across sectors with finely developed EQ’s. And I hope that this revolution in leadership values starts a chain reaction of positive movement into how we socialize girls and boys in the first place.

And in the meantime, I feel very grateful to be able to show up to my life each day and finally have my authentic leadership style valued!