Empathetic Skills: 7 Ways to Show People You Understand Them

Empathetic skills are the learnable behaviors that let you understand how a situation looks from someone else’s side and show them you have understood it: giving full attention, asking questions that check your read, paraphrasing, taking their perspective, acknowledging their feelings, holding back the quick fix, and making your understanding visible.

If empathy has always sounded like a personality trait, something warm people are simply born with, it is hard to know how to get better at it, and even harder to talk about it convincingly in an interview. There is often a second worry underneath: that being understanding at work means being easy to push around. Both worries fade once you look at what empathy actually consists of on an ordinary workday.

What makes empathy a skill rather than a trait

A critical review of organizational research on empathy, titled “I feel your pain,” separates it into three forms. Affective empathy is sharing another person’s emotions. Cognitive empathy is understanding what they think and feel. Behavioral empathy is what you do to communicate that understanding. Researchers still disagree on exactly how empathy should be defined and measured, but the three-way split makes one practical point hard to miss: your colleagues cannot see what you feel or what you understand. They only see what you say and do.

That is good news if you do not think of yourself as naturally empathetic. The form of empathy people experience at work is behavioral, and behavior can be practiced even on days when the feeling is faint. You do not need to become a different person; you need a handful of habits you can use on purpose.

It also explains why empathy responds to training. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of workplace training programs found that they effectively develop emotional competencies, regardless of profession or the specific focus of the program. Its scope covered empathy together with related competencies such as emotion regulation, so it shows that this whole family of skills can be developed rather than measuring empathy on its own. For you, the conclusion is the same either way: where you start is not where you have to stay.

Seven empathetic skills you can practice at work

Each of the seven below is a behavior, not a mood. In a real conversation they blend together, but each one can be practiced separately, and most can be tried in the very next conversation you have.

1. Giving full attention

Active listening starts with concentrating fully on the person in front of you and not judging what they are saying while they are still saying it. That means not composing your reply, not glancing at your screen, and not deciding halfway through what the real problem is. It also means signaling that you have heard them, through eye contact and the small acknowledgments that tell someone you are following.

The reason this matters is simple: understanding only counts for the other person once they can see it. In your first months in a new job, much of your work is taking in information from other people, which makes full attention the empathetic skill you will use most often, and the one people notice first.

2. Asking questions to check your understanding

The second skill is asking open-ended questions that test whether you have understood what the person actually means, rather than questions that steer them toward the answer you already have in mind. Good checking questions leave room for a reply you did not expect.

This is the skill that does the most work in difficult conversations. When a colleague tells you they are stressed by their workload, a question about what is weighing on them most tells you far more than an assumption would, and it tells them you are taking the problem seriously.

3. Paraphrasing what you heard

Paraphrasing means restating what someone has said in your own words to check that you understood it. Pair it with a simple discipline: wait until the other person has finished before you respond.

Together, the two prevent snap judgments and catch misunderstandings while they are still small. They also show the other person that their message landed. Colleagues, customers and managers often bring different assumptions to the same conversation, and a quick paraphrase is one of the cheapest ways to stop a simple misreading from turning into a conflict.

4. Taking the other person’s perspective

Perspective-taking is the deliberate attempt to see a situation from where the other person stands, including the stresses and challenges they are dealing with that you may not see. A useful self-check before you judge someone’s reaction: have you considered their background and their experiences, or only how the situation looks from your own desk?

This is the cognitive side of empathy, and it matters most when the other person’s situation differs from yours: a colleague trained in a different discipline, a customer under pressure, a manager answering to people you never meet. It also answers a common worry. Understanding why someone holds a position is not the same as deciding they are right. You can see a colleague’s side clearly and still disagree with them.

5. Validating feelings without agreeing

Validating someone’s feelings means acknowledging the emotion, recognizing that from where they stand the situation is frustrating or worrying, without accepting their position or granting their request. You can also validate a feeling when there is nothing you can fix right away.

This is the distinction that keeps empathy from turning into softness. You can stay firm on the substance of a decision and still show that you understand how it lands. And the moment of being understood matters more than it might seem:

I ended up in a team where I’m really happy, and I’ve become very personally involved with many of my colleagues. We’re so close that I can come to work on a bad day and say right at the start, ‘I’m in a really vulnerable place right now. Such-and-such has happened, and I don’t think I can give as much of myself today as I usually do. So if I seem a bit absent, that’s why — it has nothing to do with you.’ And I’m met with understanding.

That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and she is the first to say her team is closer than most. You do not need that kind of closeness to give a colleague what she describes. A feeling acknowledged, without anyone needing to agree, argue or fix anything, is what validation offers the person on the receiving end.

6. Holding back the fix

When a colleague describes a problem, the empathetic response is often to resist solving it straight away. Listening with eye contact, open-ended questions and short summaries of what you have heard communicates that you understand. Jumping straight to advice can signal that you have not grasped the actual problem, or that you would like the conversation to be over.

If you like to be useful, this is the counterintuitive part: the fix can wait until the person feels heard. It also takes some pressure off you. You are not obliged to solve every problem you listen to, and when you are unsure what someone wants, you can simply ask whether they are looking for ideas or mainly want to talk it through.

7. Making your understanding visible

The last skill ties the others together. Behavioral empathy is everything you do that turns understanding into something the other person can see: following up a day later on the deadline that worried them, adjusting a plan once you know what is weighing on a colleague, or remembering what someone told you last week. Because colleagues cannot observe what you feel, this is the part of empathy they actually experience.

It is also how you talk about empathy credibly to an employer. Calling yourself empathetic proves little; describing a specific situation, what you noticed, what you asked and what you did next shows the skill at work. If you are not sure which of these seven you already do reliably, and which slip when you are busy, a self-assessment of your work skills can show which strengths you can honestly point to and which are still worth building.

The skills that make empathy show up at work

Look back over the seven, and a pattern appears: very little of it depends on how much you feel. It depends on how you listen and talk, how you treat people day to day, and how you behave when your work is tied to theirs.

Communication is where most of the seven live. It starts with a genuine desire to understand the other person and with adapting to the way they prefer to communicate, and it treats full attention and active listening as core conversation skills rather than politeness. Its hardest tests are the tricky situations: an angry colleague or customer, feedback you have to give, an apology you owe. Those are the moments when defending yourself feels more natural than understanding first. Empathy here shows in your attention, not in a stock phrase about understanding someone’s feelings.

Professional Behaviors shape how people experience you long before any difficult conversation. Showing genuine interest in colleagues, treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, showing humility and expressing appreciation are small signals repeated every day. So is speaking about people as if they were in the room, and steering clear of the habits that quietly erode goodwill, such as constant complaining or acting superior. None of this means agreeing with everyone; respect is about how you treat people, not about giving up your own view.

Teamwork is where understanding turns into trust. Supporting a teammate who is struggling, forgiving a colleague when something goes wrong, and being someone who means what they say and does what they commit to all draw on seeing the situation from another person’s side. Empathy also keeps necessary disagreements constructive: once you understand why a colleague holds their position, it is easier to stay on topic, keep it from becoming personal, and notice when trust has slipped and needs a reset. It is what makes honest disagreement possible, not a reason to stay quiet.

The free Job Skills Test measures each of these three, as part of twelve work skills in total, so you can see which one to prioritize instead of spreading your effort across all of them. A lower score marks the next thing to practice, not a verdict on your character.

Building on what you already do

Some of these seven probably describe how you already treat the people you are closest to. The step is doing them on purpose at work as well, including with colleagues you find harder to read, and choosing for yourself which skill to work on first. None of it asks you to change who you are.

If you have ever caught yourself halfway into offering a solution and wondered whether the other person even wanted one, you have already spotted the exact moment these skills come into play. As your work comes to involve more people, from customers to colleagues in other departments, how well you understand them shapes more of what you can get done, and every one of these habits gets stronger with use. What helps now is a clear view of where you are starting from.

Find your starting point

Getting that view is the one step left, and it is a small one. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of your work skills: all twelve, from how you communicate and collaborate to how you handle setbacks and manage your time, including the three covered above. In 7 minutes, it shows where you stand and which skills will make the biggest difference for you to work on next.

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