A Novel Approach to Teaching Empathic Leadership using Heuristics

Introduction: NHS failures at Mid-Staffordshire, Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent reached the same conclusion: leaders who fail to listen and understand put patients at risk. The NHS response has been to promote compassionate leadership. Yet compassion often entails emotional merging, which can blur boundaries and lead to fatigue. By contrast, empathic leadership, curiosity-driven perspective-taking rather than emotional merging, offers a way forward. Yet no practical method exists to teach it. We tested whether simple heuristics (“rules of thumb”) could fill this gap.

Methods: Twenty-one healthcare leaders attended a structured workshop. Using established heuristic development and curriculum design methods, participants generated, refined, and prioritised rules of thumb (heuristics) for empathic leadership, then codesigned a training course.

Results: The group produced 35 heuristics and prioritised 12 for teaching healthcare leaders, including “Listen first, speak last” and “Walk the shop floor.” A one-day interprofessional empathic leadership course for 25 participants was then co-designed, featuring experiential learning, roleplay, and implementation planning.

Conclusion: Addressing persistent failures in healthcare leadership while avoiding compassionate leadership's limitations, this study was able to prioritise heuristics for empathic leadership and co-design an innovative course to teach them.