Empathetic Leadership and Cultural Consciousness in Leading: Lessons from Iceland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland

During our cooperation in different international projects with partners from other Scandinavian and Nordic-Baltic countries, I have tested various leading styles with the goal of ensuring the personal balance and work enthusiasm in the group. The paper analyses in practical terms and at the meta-level, the cooperation and leadership model we developed working with university teachers from six different Nordic and Baltic countries (Estonia, Iceland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland). I review the cooperation format, its pluses and minuses. This is done through the prism of Collectivism and Individualism. Building on the data analysis described above, suggest as a new approach, Emphatic Leadership and Culture- competent Leading. Empathetic Leadership and Culture-competent Leading is the notion I introduce to describe the model where cultural awareness, personality-related aspects, and principles of democracy and inclusion are entailed relating to the empathetic understanding of the co-workers, including their cultural preference styles. This is a qualitative piece of work that builds on experience analysis. The methodology is ethnographic research using description and theoretical analysis. the methods of participant observation and action research. Semi-structured questionnaires were administered to the participants as semi-structured individual and group interviews at the end of the first round of project periods (three different projects completed). The work period analyzed includes our five different group-leading periods (2017–2024), one of which partly coincided with the Pandemic period (2020–2022). The ongoing project period (three projects) was analyzed through interviews.