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• Duration: Full-day or half-day sessions (or your chosen format)
• Location: Your venue or online

Who is this course for?

This course was developed based on  (Howick et al., BMJ Leader, 2026), drawing on Professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s . It is tailored for leaders, managers and aspiring change-makers across the healthcare sector who want to deepen their capacity for empathic leadership.

Overview

Empathic leadership in healthcare has been shown to improve patient and practitioner outcomes and financial performance, while lack of empathic leadership has been linked to avoidable harm, burnout, and increased patient complaints.

Drawing on a structured workshop involving 21 healthcare leaders, Howick et al. (BMJ Leader, 2026) identified and prioritised 12 heuristics for empathic leadership: short, memorable rules of thumb such as "Listen first, speak last", "Walk the shop floor", and "Say sorry." A one-day interprofessional course was then co-designed to teach these heuristics through experiential learning, role play, and implementation planning.

The experts agreed that the objectives of the course are:

1. Define empathic leadership and describe how this differs from other leadership styles.
2. Describe and apply heuristics for empathic leadership to real-life scenarios.
3. Develop a personalised implementation plan for empathic leadership heuristics.
4. Analyse the organisational and environmental influences on empathic leadership within their local context.

Format

This course is workshop-based, featuring:

• Facilitated small-group discussions
• Interactive stories and case vignettes
• Realistic role-plays and simulations
• Heuristic tool-kits and decision aids
• Reflection, peer coaching, and feedback cycles
• Engaging exercises to consolidate learning

Feedback

Course satisfaction:

• Participants’ average satisfaction with the course is 9 out of 10.
• On average, participants rate the likelihood that the training will make their organisations more empathic as an 8 out of 10.
• Participants rated their confidence in applying their learning from the training as an 8 out of 10.

Comments from previous course participants:

• “I really enjoyed the training. It created a safe space to explore empathic leadership and to reflect as a team”
• “[Following the training] I plan to use the heuristics developed today in every day practice and to share with my team”
• “There are many small, easy changes that can be made individually that will make a big difference.”
• “The course was a fantastic chance to step away from meetings and reflect on leadership.”
• "The course was interactive, interesting, and engaging!”

Preparation

No formal preparation is required; participants may be asked to reflect beforehand on challenging interpersonal leadership moments.

Assessment

There is no formal assessment.

Contact

For further information about this research programme and its delivery, please contact Professor Jeremy Howick at jh815@leicester.ac.uk.

Course team

• Course Lead: Professor Jeremy Howick
• Co-facilitator: Dr Amber Bennett-Weston