196 / Energizing Your Team Through Radical Empathy with Erin Diehl

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a way of interacting with ourselves and others that’s rooted in empathy and compassion. The ultimate goal of NVC is to foster authentic connections between people regardless of their differences. That focus on human connections makes NVC a powerful conflict resolution tool—once there is a genuine human connection, the original problem tends to solve itself. You can use NVC in almost any relationship or environment, including in families, schools, governments, businesses, and personal relationships. NVC can also help you reshape your inner dialogue to promote self-compassion, improving your relationship with yourself.

Do you constantly get swept away by your emotions? Would you like to learn how to control your emotional reactions at home or at work? Or maybe you’re uncomfortable with emotions, and don’t understand why you or anyone else feels them? Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is a comprehensive look at what emotions are and why we have them, how we can get better at managing them, and why the well-being of humanity might depend on us doing so.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a way of interacting with ourselves and others that’s rooted in empathy and compassion. The ultimate goal of NVC is to foster authentic connections between people regardless of their differences. That focus on human connections makes NVC a powerful conflict resolution tool—once there is a genuine human connection, the original problem tends to solve itself. You can use NVC in almost any relationship or environment, including in families, schools, governments, businesses, and personal relationships. NVC can also help you reshape your inner dialogue to promote self-compassion, improving your relationship with yourself.

Two of the most common communication faux pas are the failure to effectively listen and the failure to adequately express yourself to others. These issues result in misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and the inability to resolve problems.

In 4 Essential Keys to Effective Communication, Bento C. Leal argues that these communication errors are the most damaging to relationships. However, he claims you can avoid these mistakes and their negative outcomes by learning how to integrate empathy into every step of the communication process. In this guide, we’ll explore three important abilities that will allow you to do this: approaching conversations with empathy, listening with empathy, and expressing yourself with empathy. In our commentary, we’ll discuss other recommendations for communicating effectively from books like Nonviolent Communication (Marshall B. Rosenberg) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey).

From sibling arguments to temper tantrums, parents constantly have to manage conflict. These challenging moments are pivotal opportunities to promote your child’s psychological development. The Whole-Brain Child explains the neurological and developmental reasons for many of your child’s meltdowns and misbehaviors. When the different parts of your child’s brain—such as the logical left brain and the emotional right brain—are not integrated, it makes your child mentally and emotionally off-balance, which causes her to act out.

The book teaches you how to diagnose signs of dis-integration, as well as strategies to help your child to re-integrate her mind. With these tools, your child will develop a stronger relationship with you, increase her self-awareness and emotional self-control, and build the foundation for a lifetime of healthy relationships and mental and emotional stability.

In Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee argue that the most important trait for a leader to have is emotional intelligence. A leader who’s emotionally intelligent will create a positive climate for their group in which productivity, collaboration, and performance will soar. The authors argue that a critical mass of emotionally intelligent leaders and groups is the foundation of a sustainably successful organization. The purpose of Primal Leadership is to teach individuals and organizations how to lead with emotional intelligence so they can achieve long-term success.In this guide, we’ll explain what emotional intelligence is, why emotionally intelligent leadership is critical for group effectiveness, how to lead with emotional intelligence, and how you can boost your own emotional intelligence and the emotional intelligence of your group and organization. Throughout the guide, we’ll connect the author's concepts to theories and recommendations of other experts in cognitive science, behavioral psychology, business, and management.

In The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp argue that many leadership models are unsustainable because they don’t prioritize self-management and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. This causes leaders to burn out, lose their passion, and succumb to an unhealthy culture of competition and greed. As a result, employees disengage, turnover soars, and organizations break down from within. To overcome these issues, the authors argue that leaders must learn to understand and manage their emotions and mindset, communicate effectively with others, and align their actions and behaviors with their goals and commitments.

Dethmer, Chapman, and Klemp present 15 commitments that conscious leaders must uphold to run an effective organization, which we’ve synthesized into eight primary behaviors. We’ll explain what each behavior is, why it’s important, and how to put it into action. In our commentary, we’ll further discuss how to improve your leadership abilities and adopt the authors’ recommended behaviors, citing experts like Brené Brown (Dare to Lead) and Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth).