Empathetic Inquiry: A Superskill for Modern Leaders
Every week I meet a high-achieving leader who still believes that suppressing their feelings is the “responsible” thing to do, and that if they manage their team “right,” they’ll eventually stop needing to “deal with everyone’s moods.”
This couldn’t be further from the truth…
And as AI intensifies work, many more professionals are grieving the uncertainty of their employment, so tomorrow’s leaders don’t need more frameworks; they need more powerful, empathetic skills.
Empathetic Inquiry: A Primer
The ability to invite emotion in ways that enhance collaboration and performance is rapidly climbing the leadership superpower list this year, not because our multi-generational workforce is getting more emotional, but because humans have always been, and will always be, emotional beings.
Inviting emotion is not a process or a methodology. It is a healing, conversation skill that can minimize or prevent compensating behaviors that quietly seed resistance and derail performance.
Empathetic inquiry (a skill or practice):
Inquiring about another person’s experience from more than one sub-rational perspective (emotional, physiological, and behavioral) and following their answers for deeper understanding.
Out loud, empathetic inquiry sounds deceptively simple, but the questions you choose do the real work, and the art of it is learning to match the question to the moment from moment to moment.
When to use it…
When you sense suppressed emotion in yourself, or when you observe subtle emotion cues in another person (e.g., closed-off body language, a change in tone of voice, a lump in the throat, a reluctance to speak, a reluctance to maintain eye contact, etc.)
NOTE: You do not need to know or even guess what emotions might be present behind these cues; you simply need to recognize that they are data and prompts for deeper inquiry.
How to start…
Start by asking a WHAT question that gives the other person(s) permission to be more candid. For example:
“What keeps getting in your way this week?”
“You appear somewhat [emotion]? What’s beneath that?
“What’s the story you’re telling yourself this week?”
“What’s the thing you really want me to understand?”
Just one of these lands differently than the typical “how’s it going?” check-in question; it invites more emotion to the table and surfaces topics that may be hard to address in meetings.
How to go deeper…
Continue by asking a HOW question that gives the other person(s) room to elaborate. For example:
How are you greeting that obstacle?
How can our team better support you?
How do you know that story is the entire story?
How can I show you I understand?
How questions like these - that go deeper without pushing the person to reframe, repair, or resolve anytime immediately - gently nudge a person to observe their stress from a variety of perspectives (e.g., the self, the team, the boss, etc.) and elaborate.
During this elaboration, you stand to learn much more about what’s driving their compensating behaviors, seeding their resistance, or derailing their performance.
NOTE: Alternating between WHAT and HOW questions without trying to diagnose or fix the apparent problem takes discipline. It is a leadership superskill because it is pretty much the opposite of what many of us have been taught when encountering a person simmering with emotion.
It can feel awkward at first, but it ensures that the conversation doesn’t default to a command-and-control exchange - especially in a workplace hierarchy!
How to resurface & regain momentum…
Once you’ve hung out in the WHATs and the HOWs for a little while, it is important to bring the conversation back to their agency to initiate some small, new action. For example:
"What's one thing you’d be willing to try, just to see what happens?"
"What's one effort you’d like the team to make?”
“What part of that story is worth stress-testing?”
"If perfect just isn’t in the cards, what's a good enough version we could still learn from?"
These kinds of questions help bring a person back to the present reality and reconnect with their strengths and the strengths within their reach, to ideate, iterate, and regain momentum.
…plus, it gives you, the leader, something to follow up on!
And here’s the BEST part…
Empathetic inquiry does not require a lengthy closed-door meeting or blocking your calendar for an entire afternoon. Empathetic inquiry can reshape a conversation in as little as 15 minutes because it changes not just how you pay attention, but also the quality of your attention.
It doesn't slow the work down; it clears out the friction that’s been slowing work down all along.
