Empowerment Leadership Model for Social Change (ELM-SC): A Framework for Empathetic Design Thinking

Empowerment Leadership Model for Social Change (ELM-SC): A Framework for Empathetic Design Thinking is framed as a combination of technical-empathetic and socio-psychological thinking toward designing a solution for social change. The ELM-SC design integrates the empowerment leadership process to achieve social change design as a joint effort with a different technical or human design thinking mindset that empathetically engages the individuals, followers, and community to discover, define, decide, design, and deliver the desired social change. Empowerment leadership is presented as a means of empowering people and organizations for societal impact and community well-being. The book serves as a guide for social change agents to improve the quality of life and well-being of humanity and as a mechanism for effecting broad-based socio-economic transformation. Intentional acts of developing and enabling individuals to achieve results through education, training, and access to material resources are integrated as part of the plan for sustainable change. The key empowerment leadership attributes with respect to developing leaders for social change are presented in the context of a transformational leadership process that empowers individuals and followers for maximum productivity in other- or community-centered services. A detailed discussion of the supporting elements of a transformative empowering leader's interactions and attributes with respect to developing leadership empathetic mindset to social change is given full attention. Leaders can move through social change service as they build a progressive understanding of how they can become transformative leaders at the micro-levels that their organization needs for success. Full discussions on leadership empathy set up the groundwork for empathetic understanding in human-centered design thinking and in cultivating hands-on engagement in the lives of the individuals and community.