Moving Beyond Collaboration: A Model for Enhancing Social Work's Organizational Empathy

Many first-year field students and new practitioners enter the "fog of practice" seeking a strong mentor who will teach them to survive and thrive in the practice world. They are armed with much social work-related ideology but perhaps too little organizational knowledge and savvy. This challenge may be traced back to another historical professional debate: the imbalance between micro and macro social work education and training. This article addresses the challenge by introducing the overarching competency of organizational empathy, defined as an understanding of the practice environment one occupies. The major objective of this article is to help bridge an academe-practice knowledge gap, thereby giving the social work practitioner enhanced opportunities for broader organizational influence, collaboration, and leadership.