Empathy proves critical for human survival and helps set us apart from other animals. Empathy entails us holding the ability to understand, feel, and care about the emotions and conditions of others.
As a species, humans' excessive empathy gives us a survival advantage. Even mammals more broadly hold more empathy than other animal types like reptiles, spineless invertebrates, etc, which gives the mammals classification a competitive edge over other animal types. We see this strongly among elephants, whales, and chimpanzees.
In our own lives, we have come to expect the highest levels of empathy towards ourselves from our families. Even in the workplace, our society expects some levels of empathy and displays of empathy from executives and colleagues.
But when an organisational leader lacks any empathy, it can prove shocking. Training and coaching programmes exist across East Africa to help leaders harness the power of empathy so as to improve their company’s performance outcomes.
Benjamin Cuff, Sarah Brown, Laura Taylor, and Douglas Howat's research describes that empathy is an intricate phenomenon with cognitive perspective-taking and affective resonance.
The analysis stresses the profound impact of empathy on human cooperation, conflict management, and meaningful connection. Societies cannot functionally exist without it.
The research also stresses the detrimental impact of empathy deficits on organisational performance, morale, and overall social cohesion.
The article points out that leaders who act without empathy tend to trigger emotional damage and undermine group trust, generating dire consequences for those who are exposed to uncompassionate decisions.
However, we continue in Business Talk our analysis of the live dismal case study happening across the ocean in the US with the restructuring of the government there.
Kenyan business schools and international relations programmes in our universities are following the events every week in classes giving real examples showcasing what not to do as a leader.
Witnesses to the American political climate observe a stunning wave of presidential administration top-down decision-making initiating abrupt firings and programme cuts.
Here in Kenya, we have experienced drastic heartless careless funding cuts from a once trusted ally. Most American federal agencies have undergone disorderly staff reductions without warning, as foreign partners watch grants vanish without a planned transition strategy.
Seasoned public servants scramble to maintain essential services as national leadership appears deaf to pleas for fairness or mere decency.
Those government officials terminated refer to the dismissals they received without written reason, rendering them ineligible for unemployment compensation.
Witnesses feel that there is a deliberate effort to punish loyal public servants for nothing they did wrong, as the national leadership apparently overlooks transitional stability or moral treatment.
Also, relief organisations and NGOs that once enjoyed steady funding now fight for emergency assistance, and many stakeholders worry about the ethical and humanitarian price of such assertive measures. But who could execute such ridiculous measures? Clearly someone with likely empathy deficient disorder.
Author Laura Crawshaw writes about how to coach the most difficult of leaders and providing strategies that promote leaders’ self-awareness.
These are the most authoritarian executives who employ fear and aggression, just like what we are seeing in America. Her model proposes active listening, wise feedback, and trust-building conversations that result in acknowledgment of the harm inflicted by punitive orders.
She provides certain exercises that bring managers to empathetic interaction with subordinates, thus creating respectful teamwork, boosting productivity, and avoiding toxic leadership results.
However, the framework requires that the leader receiving the coaching has a semblance of empathy in them. But in the US, the implementer of their so-called government efficiency initiative appears to lack any empathy.
Even look at that individual’s history of tragic harmful corporate takeovers full of insult, lies, and innuendos that are all repeating at a national level
But how could a person have empathy deficit disorder? Alice Jones and other development psychologists explain the multifaceted nature of empathy deficits in adolescent groups and arrive at the conclusion that compromised affective resonance has a tendency to drive aggressive behaviour.
We see that aggressive behaviour manifesting in the approach to government restructuring and poor treatment of federal workers and grant beneficiaries who are themselves humans, not robots or emotionless animals.
Danuta Brzezicka and Krzysztof Kucia’s study shows whether empathy deficits are a result of antisocial characteristics or autism spectrum disorders and point to the need for targeted interventions, especially while someone is still young. They stress that specially designed help is required for individuals who find it difficult to have mutual understanding.
Marc Schipper and Franz Petermann’s research recognises a vicious cycle wherein deficits in empathy aggravate dysregulation of emotions, inducing conflict and disintegration of society.
Whereas they caution that problems with emotional understanding can hide clandestine vulnerabilities. We seem to be seeing these exact warning signs amongst those restructuring a whole nation!
So, to allow the individual full unfettered access to the US Government and all its systems and staff with no oversight despite knowledge of his condition is shocking and will prove negligence of the highest order as the world writes its history texts in the coming decades and centuries.
Empathy-driven strategies might have prompted the new American presidential administration to institute systematic changes in the workforce with open communications and fair severance packages.
Managers might have been allowed to engage employees in participative forums, being sensitive to individual circumstances and articulating organisational objectives. Diplomatic efforts to extend a hand to grant recipients would have minimised humanitarian fallout and preserved goodwill, enabling any restructuring to occur without catastrophic interruptions.
Kenyan citizens are faced with an unpredictable future when American turbulences undermine fair development partnerships. Educational programmes, medical schemes, and highway construction programmes rely on consistent support that evaporates when policymakers eliminate empathy-driven decision making from their calculus.
Many Kenyan voices warn that such losses could jeopardise some of our regional progress and spark a broader discussion about our reliance on global partners.
