What would appear to be an ongoing shift towards more “human-centred” leadership is indeed a positive one and understanding and embracing empathy is a big part of that. People invariably want leaders who listen, understand individual circumstances and recognise that employees have lives beyond the workplace. But empathy without accountability can create its own problems and getting the balance right can be challenging. A book that I highly recommend on this topic is The Empathy Edge by Maria Ross.

Self-awareness is regularly described as one of the foundations of effective management and leadership and it’s easy to understand why.

Leaders need to recognise their strengths and limitations, understand their emotional triggers, appreciate how their behaviour affects others and remain open to feedback. Without this insight, even technically capable managers can unintentionally undermine trust, motivation and performance.

However, there is another construct that may be just as important—and perhaps even more directly connected to whether a leader succeeds.

That construct is self-efficacy: the belief that we are capable of taking the actions required to manage a particular situation or achieve a particular outcome. This raises an interesting question:

Emotional intelligence is widely recognised as an essential leadership capability and there is an enormous amount of data to support this. In short, it influences how we manage pressure, respond to feedback, navigate conflict, understand others and build productive relationships.

Yet emotional intelligence presents a difficult contradiction (or paradox) in that it those with the greatest gaps in this competency area that may also be the least able to recognise those gaps.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way people work. It can write, summarise, analyse, automate and answer at a speed no human can match. That creates a clear challenge for leaders: if technology can do more of the technical work, what becomes more valuable about human work? One answer is empathy.