Jackie Peterson, Empathetic Museum
About the Empathetic Museum
The Empathetic Museum was established in 2013 as a metric for institutional transformation around the core value of empathy. This is reflected in the ways museums operate as, are perceived as, and are deeply connected with their staff and communities. Since then, members of the Empathetic Museum have offered professional development and created toolkits to support institutions and museum practitioners in actively developing and sustaining organizational cultures that prioritize care, connection, inclusion, belonging, and participation.
What is Empathetic Leadership?
I have served as a member of the Empathetic Museum since 2020, and in that time, I have witnessed empathy being elevated in conversations around institutional equity, community engagement, and institutional approaches to social justice. Many organizations and their leaders grappled with questions like: What does empathy look like in action? How are my organization’s mission and values reflective of empathetic practice? How can I use empathy to create and/or sustain a more inclusive institution? My colleagues and I helped a number of organizational leaders (and in some cases, entire institutional staff) build empathic practices into their day-to-day relationships with each other and those in their communities. And while we have worked with different leadership styles and approaches, there are a set of characteristics that we have observed that would define empathic leadership. So I offer the following definition:
Empathetic Leadership…
- Can come from anywhere within an organization and does not require a specific title or pay grade
- Is rooted in a deep sense of connectedness to others: staff/employees, peers/colleagues, community members, students, organizational partners, etc.
- Models behaviors such as self-reflection, active listening, mirroring (a practice of understanding what others are communicating), sharing and holding space, vulnerability, and acting in integrity
- Is willing to foster an inclusive environment through transparency, open communication, collaboration, trust-building, care, and repair
- Is willing to enact or support policies, community agreements, and institutional norms that center people in the wholeness of their identities and lived experiences
- Is willing to get out the way and empower others to lead and to operate at their best with the capacity they have
The Necessity of Better Leadership Models
One of the ways empathetic leadership can serve as a preferable model for museums, history organizations, and academia is by disrupting the white supremacist structures that they are built on. White supremacy culture is by nature exclusive, fear-based, and anti-democratic. Writ large, we are witnessing in real-time the ways institutions rooted in white supremacy culture are self-destructing and harming scores of people on their way out. The more our history institutions continue to cling to white supremacy, the less sustainable they become on all levels.
In my experience as both a public history practitioner and member of the Empathetic Museum, sustaining work in the history field in particular requires thinking differently about our institutional structures and who benefits from them. Nonprofit and corporate environments are often organized around meeting bottom lines: profit or a mission. White supremacy culture values outputs, progress, linearity, binaries. This way of operating is in many ways antithetical to the work of history organizations, which in theory, is rooted in preserving the stories, truths, places, and ideas of people. This kind of work—if done authentically—necessitates timelines that may not be deemed “efficient” because it involves listening and building trust. “Profits” aren’t the measures of success, but rather how many students were connected to community-led projects, how many personal papers have been preserved and archived, or how many historic structures have been rehabilitated or activated for a community’s use. The dividends of empathy can be measured in long-term, non-extractive relationships and partnerships, sustained community engagement based on reciprocity, and diverse ways both staff and community can plug in to support the institution beyond financial contributions. The concept of a “board” could mean community members, those with lived experience, or those with non-financial connections to offer. Re-centering the work around the people within the ecosystem of history organizations dictates what the true priorities should be and how to accomplish the work at hand.
Most corporate and nonprofit entities are hierarchically structured such that one person serves as the leader of the organization with final decision-making authority and is accountable to a board. Hierarchical institutional leadership upholds gatekeeping, often seeking to promote those with privilege (years of corporate or for-profit experience, degrees or education from prestigious schools, socio-economic status, English as a first language, etc.) over those with lived or learned experience. This is often what contributes to toxicity: the higher up people get in an organization, the more they are required to maintain and perpetuate the hierarchy. Similarly, hiring outside an organization and its community to fill top leadership roles risks bringing in leadership models and practices that are disconnected from mission and values, often to the point of causing harm or dismantling any trust or forward momentum that has been built. But in my experience, empathetic models value everyone as capable of contributing and leading, with a wide range of experience and skills. Empathetic leaders recognize that everyone in their sphere of influence has the capacity to lead in their own unique way from whatever position in the institution they occupy. Leaders cultivated through authentic relationship-building inside and outside an institution can ensure its long-term health and success. This is one way the work of the Empathetic Museum continues to evolve: finding ways to support people at all levels of the museum field to sustain the work of empathy—even without the support of upper levels of institutional leadership. By offering greater access to tools for leadership development and building more empathetic institutional cultures, we can help circumvent some of the hierarchical gatekeeping.
Looking to the Future
As we continue to experience multiple crises in our world, it is apparent that no one will remain unaffected by them. People within history-related institutions will need to ensure that these spaces are equipped to not only care for those being impacted, but also to do the work of meeting challenges and building and supporting their communities through these challenges. This where empathetic models of leadership are critical.
From an Empathetic Museum perspective, wide-sweeping crises cannot be addressed or solved by well-meaning individuals who wield power without intention. Whether it’s book bans, bans on teaching certain histories, natural disasters that threaten to destroy community archives, or shrinking funding for equity and inclusion initiatives, an empathetic model of leadership looks to solve problems collectively. Empathetic leaders leverage the experience, skills, and power of those around them in service of connectedness and meeting needs. Leaders who operate within an empathetic model pull in others, listen deeply before acting, share decision-making, and take accountability when things don’t go as planned. They encourage taking time to reflect on processes, responses, and outcomes, using mistakes as learning opportunities and celebrating wins small and large. Importantly, empathetic leadership seeks to dismantle hard lines of hierarchy and titles by ensuring everyone at all levels of an institution or organization has opportunities to lead in the ways they are most capable. Ensuring people feel seen and heard goes a long way toward sustaining organizational or institutional cultures that value everyone in their ecosystems. Building this kind of foundation allows organizations and institutions to be more nimble, take greater risk, and move in appropriately responsive ways that are rooted in trust, transparency, and shared values.
By not embracing empathetic leadership models, the history field runs the risk of losing relevance and public trust. When crises arise, the history field has an opportunity to serve as a model of preparedness and responsiveness rather than reactiveness. With empowered communities and organizations, proactive strategies can help with organized responses to crises that leverage connection and care rather than unplanned ones that potentially do further harm. Armed with empathy, the history field can prioritize what communities need and value most rather than arbitrarily preserving what a disconnected leadership and institutional structure dictates. In my work with the Empathetic Museum, we have helped reorient many of the organizations we have worked with in this way. The challenge that has remained is sustaining the work: how can institutions build empathy and empathetic practice into their very DNA so it outlives funding cuts, administration or leadership changes, staff turnover, or community crises? I am hoping this working group will offer an opportunity to think creatively about this, to elevate examples of success stories, and task ourselves with becoming a resource for the field.