Part 3: Developing Empathy in Construction Leadership

February 25, 2026

In construction, empathy isn't a soft skill. It's how you make better decisions, mediate conflict, and build teams people actually want to work for.

In our first two articles, we explored self-awareness (recognising our own emotions) and self-regulation (managing those emotions under pressure). Now we turn outward to examine how emotionally intelligent people understand and influence the emotions of others.

These final two elements, empathy and relationship management are where self-awareness and self-regulation culminate in the ability to build strong, productive relationships. Whilst the first two domains focus on our needs, thoughts, and emotions, these final two are about understanding and managing those of others.

Understanding Empathy

Empathy is striving to understand someone's feelings and perspective. It's frequently ranked as the number-one leadership skill. Data from the London School of Economics found that those with empathic leaders reported higher engagement (76%) compared to those with less empathic leaders (32%).

However, empathy is multifaceted. Management articles have overhyped emotional empathy, but there's another equally important type.

Cognitive Empathy is where we understand the thoughts and feelings of another person without necessarily feeling the emotions ourselves. When you're watching a film and realise the good guy also has wicked intentions, you understand what they're thinking. You don't need to feel that wickedness, you simply understand their thoughts. This is particularly useful when mediating discussions between conflicting team members, where you need to understand both perspectives without becoming emotionally invested in either.

Emotional Empathy is about connecting with someone's emotion by remembering when we felt the same anxiety, grief, disappointment, or anger, even in different circumstances.

Either type of empathy is not about being a walkover or trying to please everyone. It's also not sympathy, where we feel sorrow or pity. Put simply, if we can understand how people think and feel, we can help them manage their own thoughts, feelings, and actions.

The Importance of Perspective

Empathic leaders are approachable. They make employees feel valued and safe because they've seen things from their perspective. Perspectives aren't about right and wrong, or agreeing with someone or not. They're simply how one person sees things. The more perspectives leaders can gather, the better their communication and decision-making will be.

There's a crucial difference between understanding how someone feels in a particular situation and determining how we would feel in the same position. A friend at school scored 68% on a maths test and burst into tears. The author had celebrated achieving 65% and struggled to empathise. Looking back, she realised that if she had sidelined her own assessment of success and tuned into her friend's disappointment based on her subjective standards, she would have truly been putting herself in her friend's shoes.

For example, if someone is deeply upset because their dog has died, cognitive empathy means understanding their grief without needing to love animals ourselves. Emotional empathy means connecting with their emotion by remembering a time when we felt similar grief, even if the circumstances were different. We don't need to agree with someone's reaction or feel the same way, we simply need to understand their perspective and connect with the underlying emotion.

Strategies for Developing Empathy

  • Unplug and Really Listen

    Give people your undivided attention. Put your phone away, don't interrupt, and sit in the feeling with them. When you empathise with someone, it's not about fixing or making light of a situation. It's about sitting in the emotion with the person and acknowledging their thoughts and feelings. This is where you truly connect with people.

  • Check for Understanding

    Once you've listened, check you're understanding correctly: "It sounds like you are feeling anxious at the moment." You're naming their emotion, the same technique used in self-awareness for identifying your own emotions. If you've misjudged, the person can correct you.

  • Imagine Your Colleague Was a Close Friend

    We have different relationships with work colleagues, and we like some people more than others. Borrow the kind of empathy you feel for close friends and apply it to your team. This will help you tune more fully into their perspective and reduce bias.

  • Remember That Empathy Goes Both Ways

    Leaders have difficult choices to make, and it's impossible to meet everyone's needs simultaneously. Employees need to practise empathy for leaders by considering their emotions, the challenges of their role, and the pressures they face. Ask them how they feel. Few people do, but understanding each other doesn't need to be top down.

Relationship Management: Bringing It All Together

Whilst self-regulation is about managing our own emotions and behaviours, relationship management is about managing the emotions and behaviours of others. There's little chance of managing relationships well if we have no idea what we or others are feeling and can't prevent ourselves from behaviourally losing it amongst our teams. Successfully managing others' spiralling emotions rightly requires us to have a modicum of calm.

Highly developed relationship management allows people to coach, influence, and inspire others, encourage good collaboration, and manage conflict when it arises.

Strategies for Relationship Management

Relationship management is the most difficult domain. Success demands the dextrous combination of self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy, plus expertise in communication, collaboration, vision, managing expectations, coaching, and many other skills. Your skills in managing relationships will improve with continued practice in the three parts of emotional intelligence.

  • Showing Some Emotion

    However far down the path we are towards skilful emotional management, talking about our own emotions will instantly strengthen our personal relationships. The author remembers when her leadership coach shared that her father had received a health diagnosis. After sharing her news, she asked if that made the author feel closer to her. The answer was obvious of course it did. This was her coach's way of illustrating that if she didn't share what was going on with her, she would remain a distant, disconnected leader. She would not only miss out on understanding others' emotions, but also starve them of the opportunity to truly bond with her.

  • Emotional Contagion

    Emotions pass between people like a virus. Research has shown that putting an actor in with a group and instructing him to engage positively not only favourably infected their moods, the tasks they were completing also improved. Setting the emotional tone is a great responsibility because we're stimulating others' emotional states. Someone dominant in a conversation should pay particular attention to the fact that others are listening, watching, and absorbing their mood. When you have strong awareness and control over your emotions, you can have a profoundly positive impact on organisational culture.

  • Adapting with Integrity

    Great managers and leaders adapt to the group or situation they find themselves in, whilst remaining true to their values. The term social chameleon describes someone who adapts their persona based on who they're talking to, which can be a useful tool to connect with people. However, if what they say (to please their audience) differs from what they do, they'll generally fail to form deep, trusting relationships due to straying too far from their own integrity. Adapting yourself to the group you're with is an astute social skill, just don't forget that it all has to be connected and based on who you authentically are.

Playing to Strengths

Leaders with adept relationship management skills help each team member develop their own self-awareness, identify where individuals are technically and behaviourally strong, and discover which aspects of their role make them feel most enthused and energised. A leader can then orientate team members to work the majority of time on things they love and excel at, which does wonders for their productivity and happiness.

Conclusion: The Complete Picture

Throughout this three-part series, we've explored the four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness (recognising how we think, feel, and behave), self-regulation (managing disruptive emotions and impulses), empathy (understanding someone's feelings and perspective), and relationship management (managing others' emotions and behaviours to coach, influence, and inspire).

As Daniel Goleman's research from Harvard Business School determined, emotional intelligence counts for twice as much as both intelligence and technical skills in determining success. Success is positively affected by stronger relationships, comfortable conflict, increased collaboration, psychological safety, and resilience, all benefits of strong emotional intelligence.

The key insight from "Cracking Culture" is this: open yourself up to the idea that you can take every ingrained thought, behaviour, and emotion and adapt it to how you want it to be. With dedication, deliberate practice, and tuition, we can become extremely accomplished at anything, including our emotions and how we behave. If you have a propensity to react angrily, feel anxious in certain situations, say passive-aggressive things, or struggle to shift yourself out of a bad mood, these things are not you. They are simply how you let yourself feel and behave.

Skilfully managing emotions and behaviour is the game changer of happier employment. When we learn to recognise and manage our own needs, thoughts, and emotions, as well as learning to understand those of others, we can achieve a far more harmonious way of working together. This is key to a happier workplace. Start with self-awareness, build your self-regulation, develop your empathy, and watch your relationship management flourish.

This is Part 3 of our Emotional Intelligence in Construction Leadership series. 

This article draws on concepts from Paula Mitchell’s book ‘Cracking Culture’ and our experience delivering emotional intelligence training in the construction industry.