Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks that empathy is more than just a soft skill — it's crucial in both personal and professional life.
"Empathy is not a soft skill," Nadella said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on Tuesday. "In fact, it's the hardest skill we learn — to relate to the world, to relate to people that matter the most to us."
Nadella described how his experience as a parent to a child with disabilities reshaped his outlook on life. His son Zain, who died in February 2022 at the age of 26, was quadriplegic and had cerebral palsy.
"For the first, I would say even multiple years, I was more in grief about what happened to my plans," Nadella said. "Watching my wife Anu and what she was doing — she gave up her job as architect and would walk, drive him up and down Seattle to every therapy possible. I watched that and came to reflect on it and then realized that nothing happened to me. Something had happened to my son and I started seeing the world through his eyes."
Nadella described how this experience was a breakthrough for him.
"It reshaped me as a human being, as a parent, as a partner, and as a leader at work," Nadella said.
This isn't the first time Nadella has spoken about the importance of empathy at work — he's previously said that having empathy for your team can play a crucial role in career development.
"If you have empathy for your people, they will do their best work and you'll make progress," Nadella once said on an episode of LinkedIn's "Hello Monday" podcast.
Studies have found that empathy is one of the most important leadership skills. Almost 90% of US workers surveyed said that having an empathetic manager increases their job satisfaction, productivity, and cultivated loyalty, according to a 2021 Ernst & Young report, while over half said that they had left a job because their boss wasn't empathetic enough about issues at work or in their personal life.
On a broader level, Nadella also thinks empathy plays a key role in driving innovation.
"Innovation is about meeting the unmet unarticulated needs of customers. What's the source of it? You could say it's design thinking, but design thinking is empathy."
Nadella spoke on Tuesday in Berlin while accepting the Axel Springer Award, which the company says is given to "outstanding personalities who demonstrate an exceptional talent for innovation, create and transform markets, shape culture, and also face their social responsibility."
Disclosure: Axel Springer is Insider's parent company.
