Telling Stories to Develop Empathy: An Experiential Exercise for Future Leaders

Empathy is often defined as the ability to comprehend another person’s feelings and to re-experience them oneself. Although it has commonly been recognized as an essential leadership skill, its teaching and development have not received a lot of attention in the leadership literature. This article presents the Global Citizen Story (GCS), an experiential exercise aimed at developing leaders’ empathetic skills in cross-cultural settings. The exercise, which requires that students write and tell a fictitious story in the first person, consists of four stages: researching, imagining, writing, and telling the story. The exercise allows students to empathize with a person from another culture who is facing a serious challenge. It targets the empathetic skills of both the students telling the stories and those listening to the stories. Although the exercise was created in the context of a global business MBA course, it can be adapted to any course (graduate and undergraduate) focusing on developing empathy as an essential leadership skill.