Novel approach to teaching empathic leadership using heuristics

Journal article

Introduction: National Health Service (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 and curiosity-driven perspective-taking, rather than emotional merging, offers a promising new way forward. Yet no practical method exists to teach empathic leadership. To fill this gap, we aimed to develop heuristics (‘rules of thumb’) for empathic leadership and create a course to teach them. Methods: 21 healthcare leaders attended a structured workshop. Using established heuristic development and curriculum design methods, participants generated, refined and prioritised heuristics for empathic leadership, then co-designed a training course to teach them. Results: The group produced 35 heuristics and prioritised 12, including ‘Listen first, speak last’, ‘Say sorry’, and ‘Walk the shop floor’. A one-day interprofessional empathic leadership course was then co-designed, featuring experiential learning, role play and implementation planning. Conclusion: We identified and prioritized heuristics for empathic leadership and produced a course to teach them. The short course may support healthcare leaders to strengthen empathic leadership in practice.

Authors: Howick, J; Bennett-Weston, A; Halpern, J; Browne, I; Burnett, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: BMJ Publishing Group
• Journal: BMJ Leader
• Pages: leader-2025-001448
• Article number: leader-2025-001448
• Publication date: 2026-04-13
• Acceptance date: 2026-02-19
• DOI: 10.1136/leader-2025-001448
• EISSN: 2398-631X
• ISSN: 2398-631X
• Language: English
• Keywords: career development; clinical leadership; curriculum; Education; empathy