Leadership That Listens: How Empathy Builds Stronger Teams, Clients, and Communities in South Sudan
By Tito Tong John, Nairobi, Kenya
Monday, 09 June 2025 (PW) – It always amazes me, when I hear someone in leadership state how much they hate dealing with people. Then they complain about the lack of commitment or loyalty from their team. This is no mystery. The two situations correlate together.
Leaders that are tone deaf; not attuned to the impact of their decisions, or just don’t care about others aren’t leaders. They might be exercising power, but they aren’t leading. Leadership is about people. There is a specific kind of relationship a leader creates when he or she is able to discover and tap into the motivation of others. It’s always done by recognizing and valuing what is important to other people.
The reason for this isn’t mysterious. “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.” A friend of mine characterized leaders simply like this: “Leaders don’t inflict pain; they bear pain.’” This is a unique burden carried by leaders.
For leaders to be truly effective, they must be empathetic to the needs and concerns of those they lead. However, they can’t expect to unconditionally receive empathy in return. This isn’t a reflection that people don’t care about the leader. Instead, it’s a reflection that most people just can’t accurately imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes.
Leaders are always vulnerable to being put on a pedestal or in a pillory, rather than being empathized with. However, the more human a leader is, the more approachable and transparent they are, the more others relate to the leader as someone like themselves. As opposed to a mysterious figure they don’t understand
Cultivating the sense of humanity is what I am going to give my own thoughts on. Self awareness is whatleaders need to be aware of how others see them. Most people have an inaccurate understanding of how they are seen by others. But studies show that the greater the alignment between a leaders’ self-perception and everyone else’s perception of the leader, the more effective that leader is.
The best way to learn self-awareness is to get in the habit of asking others about the things you do. You can use a tool, such as a 360-degree assessment. Or you can simply ask someone a “feed-forward” question along the lines of: “I intended to make this impact/relate in this way/respond like this. How well do you think I did? What are one or two specific suggestions for how I could improve?”
If you ask those questions often enough, you’ll develop a much more accurate perspective of yourself. Some leaders inaccurately believe that this question will cause others to see them as weak or unsure of themselves. That’s not what this question is about. It’s a calibration question; “I intended to hit target x. Did I? If not, how can I improve my aim?” Calibration is not weakness. People already know what they are thinking about you. You are just bringing it into the light.
Empathy is not my strong point. I’m not on Oprah’s short list to fill in on a sick day. One of my friends lamented that many of his biggest leadership challenges have come from missing what someone is feeling.
“You’re pretty intuitive”, my friend said, “You usually pick up on where people are at”. But I can get so goal-driven that I forget to respond and help people in bad situations. The result is often opposed to my goal to be winsome and draw people in. Instead, I accidentally push people away or contribute to them not feeling valued. “Due to many of those mistakes, you’ve learned that empathy is important. It’s helped you to practice empathy when it doesn’t seem necessary”, he said.
When one of his children told him about their day, he tried to identify and reflect back the experience before he responds to what they said. “That sounds like that was pretty exciting!” or “I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds frustrated.” This example is one way he practises empathy. Sometimes, that’s all his kids need to hear. The moment that he takes to do that, it helps him slow down. When he slows down, he creates space to connect with the other person.
Care for others. Very early in his consulting career, he took a contract with a small non-profit. Just before he was hired, the executive director had put everyone on notice; “You are all replaceable.” It was amazing at how efficiently she gutted the morale of her team. As he tried to adapt the project design to best meet the needs of the communities they served, she resisted me at each step. It became clear that not only did she not value her team, but she didn’t understand or seemingly care about bringing value to the communities they served.
He quit the project shortly after. Not surprisingly, the non-profit shut down within a couple years. He loves working with people who genuinely care about others. Therefore, he has a hard time working with clients who view their staff as disposable, customers as just wallets, the community as just an economy and families as just obligations. He feels zero motivation to help that type of client win.
He discovered something interesting: his highest performing clients, the ones who most effectively achieved their goals and the most profitable ones were the ones who consistently cared about people. Of course, they needed to do more than just care about people. But that care is a motivator and a compass which drives them forward to grow, create opportunities, offer more value and run a better organization. This is what people want and it makes good business sense. It creates loyalty and it’s what generates grace for inevitable leadership mistakes.
When leaders don’t do this aspect well and when they operate like machines, they often miss the impact of their decisions. They tend to alienate others. They are unable to garner or retain respect. They generate opposition.
In conclusion, leaders who do this well tend to display social responsibility. They build the communities they live in. They tend to experience good employee relations. When issues or mistakes happen, they are more likely to experience understanding and support from employees and customers than complaints. In my experience, they are more profitable, more effective and happier in what they do. Not a bad return. Take good care.
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