Empathy is not a soft skill – it’s a leadership imperative for the modern public service.
ANZSOG’s upcoming Leadership Through Different Lenses masterclass series will give participants the chance to explore leadership through AI, systemic and personal lenses covered in a series of five online masterclasses.
Dr Claire Yorke will present the final session in the series, Leading with Empathy: Building Trust and Human-Centred Institutions, which will explore why empathy matters for public sector leadership and how it can transform trust, decision-making, and institutional integrity.
Dr Yorke is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University in Canberra, specialising in the role and limitations of empathy and emotions in security, international affairs, politics, leadership, and society. She is the author of the recent book Empathy in Politics and Leadership: The Key to Transforming Our World.
She sat down and spoke with ANZSOG about how public servants can build empathy into their daily practice, why it saves time in the long-term, and the importance of combining empathy with courage.
Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Claire. To start with, how do you define empathy, and why is it becoming more important in modern public sector leadership?
Empathy is a process of understanding how different people see and experience the world - their perspectives, their experiences, and their context. It's getting a greater sense of their interests and what they're looking for, but also their feelings about what's going on. The value of that is that it centres the human experience, and gives useful data and insights for people who are in positions of power to make more informed decisions.
What’s integral to my definition of the concept, is that empathy should include self-reflection. So, it's not just about gathering what different people see and think, it’s about leaders asking how are the policies or the initiatives that I'm designing and implementing having an impact on people, and if there may be unintended consequences.
There's also a very important relational dimension of connecting with people, showing that you are listening, that they matter, that they're seen and heard, but also being attuned to what is needed and being able to respond and adapt and accordingly. We shouldn’t underestimate that personal touch.
In the short-term empathy takes time, but in the longer term, you are saving time and effort by actually understanding what the real problem is that you are addressing and cultivating relationships with those on the frontline and those most affected in the process. Because you know if you have the buy in from the people you are serving, and you have more of the information that will make your policy better and more sustainable in the longer-term.
How can empathetic styles of leadership be used to build, or rebuild, public trust?
What we are seeing across the world is growing disconnect between the public sector and the public. There's a greater sense of distrust in public institutions. Empathy is about those institutions saying: ‘let's repair this, let's address and bridge these divides and understand what people are looking for from us. Let's try and co-create more of those solutions’.
Empathy helps us take a step back and say: ‘okay, we understand that you're not trusting us right now. What is going wrong? What's the problem? How can we address this? What is it you need from the public sector?’
One example is the growing trend of participatory democracy initiatives - where public services take complex ideas out for debate, bringing together diverse demographics and different people to talk through a policy initiative. Finland does regular participatory processes with the public to understand what their thinking is on some of the big challenges that they're facing in that country. Participatory budgeting, where you start to go out to the public and you say, this is how much we've got, how do you want that spent? That's been quite effective in places like Brazil and Portugal.
Just getting people invested in the process and understanding what is involved is valuable. Part of the challenge of the disconnect is that the public doesn't always know what's involved in policy processes and politics, or the complexity and compromises involved, and that can be exploited by people who propose very simple, easy solutions.
How do we turn the principle of empathy into practical action, given the public service can often be very process-driven and impersonal towards the public?
This is definitely a challenge, because you can have very empathetic people in key positions, but that’s not enough if your systems and structures don't allow that empathy to be used to connect with the public or to generate more collaborative approaches.
In an organisational sense, the capacity to incorporate empathy as a vital element of policy-making comes down to which metrics and reward systems are prioritised. If you're prioritising and rewarding people for cost efficiencies, or for making things happen quickly irrespective of what the impact is, then that's going to hinder that more patient, nuanced approach of empathy.
Part of including empathy in your work is doing that honest reflection on whether the hierarchies and internal systems and structures work for the desired outcomes.
What do you want participants to take away about empathy from your Masterclass?
I want to challenge the idea that empathy is a weakness and communicate to them that empathy is an imperative if you want to create policy that connects with the public, and that has longevity and sustainability.
Rather than being a soft skill, it actually takes a huge amount of hard work to sit with the complexity and the discomfort that empathy reveals. It takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of courage, and it takes time. Time is something that maybe people in the public sector don't feel they have a lot of when they have so many competing demands.
I want to get into those tensions. I want to look at what it looks like on the day-to-day for individual public sector workers, but also talk about what it means for the broader structure of how we think about what public sector can be in the future, and how it can connect more effectively with the people it's serving.
Senior leaders need to be open to going out and listening to people, and going beyond the normal communities that maybe they feel comfortable in, and hearing different perspectives. I think it's also leveraging the expertise in their teams, the junior staff and different demographics, and creating an environment where people feel able to share challenging perspectives on what's going on, in a healthy manner, and use them as an opportunity to learn and improve.
What about for more junior public servants, who may not be in a position to make those broader organisational changes?
For them, it's about building the habit and the practice, because empathy is a skill, a practice and a mindset. If you're now in a junior or a middle level role, you can get really good at understanding what it means to be an empathetic leader and putting that into practice. It means being curious, getting outside of your comfort zone, becoming more comfortable with discomfort, holding space for people with different perspectives and views from you, and getting better at productive dialogue with people from different backgrounds, and building those relationships across departments and sectors.
A lot of practising empathy is about refining internal leadership traits. It involves emotional literacy and agility, and knowing your own perspectives, biases and assumptions. You need to know how you respond to things and how you manage that response. So when you're confronted with something that triggers you, or provokes a strong visceral or emotional reaction, you can maintain composure and have the right kind of conversations that will get you the insights and the information you need, that maybe will change your perspective, or enrich it, or offer alternative avenues for better outcomes.
What are some of the other qualities that public servants need, to make their empathy work effectively?
Empathy is only really effective when it's matched by integrity, which means that you act and operate according to how you say you will. It also requires courage, because you have to be willing to do things differently, to stand up for what you believe in, and be able to say: ‘I know this isn't popular, and this is a bit uncomfortable, but I'm going to do it, or at least I'm going to try’. Related to this, you need humility, to acknowledge that you do not have all of the answers, and be willing to adapt and amend and repair when things don’t go as planned.
You do need strength. You do need to be able to deliver because people will too easily dismiss empathy as a weakness if you don’t, and if it just looks like platitudes and rhetoric. You need to be able to make decisions, rather than staying in an endless space of deliberation and considering diverse perspectives. You have to be decisive and be a pragmatic idealist about what you can achieve. You also, critically, have to put people first and treat people with care and dignity as a matter of course.
Leadership Through Different Lenses consists of five two-hour online masterclasses each led by a different presenter who will cover one aspect of modern public sector leadership. The series begins on 18 March and runs until 15 April.
Sessions are:
Leading in the Age of AI: Power, Trust and Human Strengths with Alex Hagan
Seeing the Whole: Leading Through a Systems Lens with Nick Fleming
Leadership Grounded in Place: Context, Community and Connection with Luke Craven
The Microdynamics of Leadership: Teams, Habits and Everyday Practice with Jessica Schubert
Leading with Empathy: Building Trust and Human-Centred Institutions with Dr Claire Yorke
Registration are now open, including an Earlybird special and group discounts. More information on the series is available here.