2.3 Activity: challenge question by Gia Instructor

How does empathy help governance professionals navigate organisational transition effectively?

2025-10-14 00:47:55 UTC

Empathy is a very important of a well planned and thoughtful change process.

Showing empathy by acknowledging the impact of a change assists in employees feeling supported and heard as part of the process.

Engaging at an emotional level through thoughtful and transparent communication can also help bring employees along with the process by have a greater understanding of the 'why' of the change.

By being open to listening to and considering feedback employee engagement in the process will be strengthened.

If change leaders use an empathy lens it assists them to make decisions that consider the 'human' impact a change may have.

An example that comes to mind is empathy being applied to the process of a structural realignment and the direct impact it can have on people's emotions. If empathy is not applied it will have an adverse impact on the wellbeing and morale of the staffing group even they themselves are not materially impacted.

How does empathy help governance professionals navigate organisational transition effectively?

2026-03-15 23:14:24 UTC

Empathy allows us to manage change in that it helps us to understand how change feels for our people, not just how it looks on paper.

For example, if we are introducing a new portal based reporting system, instead of saying "this change is happening, you need to deal with that", we might say "I know this change seems daunting. We will provide a lot of training, and no one is expected to master it immediately".

How does empathy help governance professionals navigate organisational transition effectively?

2026-07-08 14:18:40 UTC

Empathy is a powerful emotion that helps us understand how others around us feel in any situation. By harnessing this emotion as a governance professional we can leverage this knowlege of how someone might be feeling and try to relate to their situation. For example when formalising or changing an employees postion description, we can lead from a postion of empathy and provide the employee reassurance of how this change might be feeling for them. We can give them time to respond knowing that this change will be difficult intially to review objectively and offer assistance from independent support personell if required.

When leading from a postion of empathy when reviewing a organisation structure we can put ourselves into the postion of the people who we're restructuring, giving us more understanding of the real world change we might be creating.