Clarifying Empathy: What It Actually Means in Construction Leadership

Why experience, perspective, and listening shape how leaders understand people.

In many of my programs and workshops, I include a simple exercise called The Ultimate Leader. Where participants are asked to think of someone they admire, respect, or look up to as a leader. That person might be someone they currently work with, someone earlier in their career, a mentor, a coach, or even a public figure. Once the person is identified, participants write down the traits that make that individual an “ultimate leader.” Why do we admire them? What behaviors or qualities make that person someone others trust and want to follow?

The lists tend to be quite similar across very different groups; field leaders, project managers, executives, coordinators, or trade partners, many of the same traits appear again and again. And almost every time, somewhere on the board, one word appears: Empathy.

That result sometimes surprises people. In construction, empathy can sound like a soft or abstract leadership trait—something more associated with HR seminars than with jobsite leadership. Yet when people think carefully about the leaders they respect most, empathy consistently appears in the list.

The “Ultimate Leader” Exercise

The ultimate leader exercise mentioned above serves two important purposes. First, it creates a moment of intentional thought. In construction environments, most of our attention is directed toward production, coordination, safety concerns, manpower, budgets, and the next problem that needs solving. Rarely do we stop long enough to define the kind of leader we are actively working toward becoming. Writing those traits down gives that path a bit more clarity and shape.

The second benefit of the exercise is that it allows us to hear what our peers expect from leadership as well. Across groups, the traits tend to be remarkably consistent. Respect, trust, consistency, listening, and practical competence come up repeatedly. These responses reflect something important about leadership credibility in construction. Titles alone rarely create respect. Credibility is built through a combination of competence, consistency, and how we treat the people around us.

Within those lists, empathy appears almost every time. That observation naturally raises an important question: what do we actually mean when we say empathy?

Empathy in Construction Leadership

In construction environments, many of us hear the word empathy and immediately associate it with emotion—feeling what someone else feels, absorbing their frustration or stress, or being naturally tuned in to the emotional state of everyone around us. For some people that kind of emotional awareness comes more naturally. For others it does not. Either way, it’s frequently expressed that as leaders, this can be detrimental if we are just picking up the emotional temperature of everyone around us. Nothing would get done because we would be busy counseling everyone on-site. But this doesn’t mean we don’t have, or shouldn’t engage empathy either. So then what are we supposed to do?

If empathy is defined too narrowly, many capable people may assume they simply “aren’t empathetic.” In practice, however, many leaders in our industry are already demonstrating forms of empathy every day on jobsites, in coordination meetings, in trailers, and in offices. Often it appears not as emotional intensity but as perspective-taking, curiosity about other people’s pressures, and thoughtful responses to situations that affect multiple people.

When this topic comes up in workshops, I often share something about my own experience. Empathy sits in my bottom five CliftonStrengths. Eesh…right? But cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective—comes fairly naturally to me. It’s the emotional empathy that takes more intention and energy for me to engage. I CAN engage it, and sometimes deeply, but it requires more time and energy. When I step into someone else’s emotional experience, I often carry that weight longer than the person I was trying to support.

Over time, that reality forced me to become more thoughtful about the environments, people, and situations I engage different types of empathy. This isn’t a lack of care; It’s an awareness of capacity. Many leaders in construction recognize something similar. Our work environments require quick decisions, steady judgment, and the ability to manage pressure across many relationships at once. Emotional bandwidth is not unlimited, and understanding how empathy actually works can help us use it more intentionally.

The Brain Science Behind Empathy

One of the reasons I find empathy interesting is that it is not just a personality trait or leadership buzzword. There are real cognitive and neurological processes behind how we understand other people. Over the past several years I have spent time studying neuroscience and brain science, partly out of personal curiosity and partly because understanding how our brains process information can make leadership and communication concepts more practical.

From a neuroscience perspective, empathy generally operates through three mechanisms: memory-based simulation, perspective-taking, and observation of emotional cues.

Memory-based simulation occurs when we have experienced something similar to what another person is describing. In those moments, our brains can reference stored emotional memories. If someone describes a challenge we have faced ourselves, our brain retrieves that emotional template quickly and almost automatically.

Perspective-taking, often referred to as cognitive empathy, allows us to imagine situations we may not have personally experienced. Even without direct experience, we can reason through what another person might be dealing with. For example, a project engineer may not have personally run a chaotic jobsite, but we can reason through the pressures a superintendent might be managing—multiple crews, safety responsibility, schedule pressure, and constant adjustments.

The third pathway involves observation of emotional cues. Humans are wired to read non-verbal signals from the people around us—tone of voice, posture, pacing, and facial expressions. Neuroscientists often refer to mirror neuron systems, which activate when we observe another person’s actions or emotional expressions. These systems allow our brains to simulate what we are witnessing, helping us connect with experiences we may never have personally lived through.

The important takeaway is that shared experience is not required for empathy. It simply reduces the cognitive effort required to reach that understanding.

Experience and Perspective in Construction

Experience does tend to expand empathy capacity, though not automatically. One reason is that experience builds what we might call a pattern library. Someone who has worked across multiple roles—laborer, foreman, superintendent, project manager, estimator, or owner representative—has accumulated different reference points for understanding the pressures associated with each role.

When conflict arises, those experiences provide additional perspective. We may remember what it felt like to hold similar responsibilities or face similar pressures. That broader perspective often makes it easier to interpret situations more accurately (or more quickly).

Experience also increases awareness of the larger systems surrounding construction work. Earlier in our careers, it is easy to focus primarily on the immediate task or the crew in front of us. As experience grows, we begin to see the broader set of pressures that influence decisions: client expectations, contract obligations, schedule risks, financial exposure, safety liability, and the long-term reputation of the company.

That expanded awareness can deepen empathy if curiosity remains present. Experience alone does not guarantee empathy; reflection (and intention) does.

Empathy Across the Construction Hierarchy

Empathy is often discussed as something leaders should demonstrate toward their teams. That direction certainly matters, but healthy systems require empathy to move in multiple directions.

Field leaders carry the pressure of safety, manpower coordination, and daily production decisions. Project managers balance budgets, schedules, and client relationships. Executives often carry strategic, financial, and reputational responsibilities that may not always be visible to the teams below them.

Empathy can move downward, sideways, and upward within organizations. One reason upward empathy is less common is visibility. Often we cannot see the full set of pressures facing roles above us, just as leaders may not always see(or remember) the realities unfolding on the ground.

In those gaps, assumptions tend to fill the void of the unknown. Phrases like “management doesn’t get it” may be heard in passing, while leadership may wonder why certain constraints and pressures are not more widely understood from the ground.

In many cases this tension reflects misunderstanding rather than a lack of empathy capacity. When visibility increases, empathy often becomes easier.

Listening plays an important role here. Former FBI negotiator Chris Voss describes empathy in negotiation as tactical empathy, emphasizing that listening practiced with intention allows us to understand the thinking and motivations behind another person’s behavior. Contrary to popular belief, listening is not passive. It is one of the most active leadership skills we can practice.

Closing Thoughts

When participants complete the Ultimate Leader exercise at the beginning of a workshop, empathy nearly always appears somewhere on the board. Not because we expect leaders to absorb every emotional signal around them, but because we value leaders who make the effort to understand others and respond thoughtfully.

Empathy in construction leadership does not require feeling everything someone else feels, nor does it require identical experience. More often it begins with a willingness to step briefly into another person’s position and ask a simple question: What might this look like from their side of the fence?

In an industry where projects depend on coordination across field teams, offices, trade partners, and ownership groups, people who develop this kind of perspective often become the translators who help organizations function more smoothly. Interestingly, when we revisit the Ultimate Leader exercise later in a workshop, many participants begin to recognize that empathy was never about emotional intensity alone. More often, it was simply about understanding people well enough to lead them, the team and the project effectively.

Resources

I’ve included this simple Ultimate Leader Worksheet below. Feel free to spend a few minutes and jot down your own thoughts on what ultimate leaders practice.

8 - The Ultimate Leader.pdf

Download PDF • 394KB

Be sure to write down your answers, don’t just keep them in your head. Research suggests this step is more powerful than it might initially appear. Psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews of Dominican University of California studied goal-focused behaviors in the workplace and found that individuals who wrote down their goals were 42 percent more likely to achieve them. When participants shared their goals with someone on a weekly basis and remained accountable for their progress, more than 70 percent either accomplished their goal or were more than halfway there (Gardner & Albee, 2015). Neuroscientist John Medina, in Brain Rules for Work, explains that writing creates a tangible record we can revisit and measure progress against over time. He describes writing as functioning almost like “verbal epoxy,” helping experiences and intentions solidify. (May be something to writing old school, with pen and paper rather than just typing certain documents huh?)

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Amy Powell — Founder & CEO, Well Works. I translate research into tactical leadership and communication tools for construction teams. Learn more about our research-informed work and programs at livingwellworks.org.