People feel conflicted about the role of empathy in the workplace. Is it important or just nice to have? Or can it even be a bad thing, preventing us from making difficult decisions.
But writers on Emotional Intelligence are clear that empathy is crucial to effective leadership. I agree and, in this piece, I want to explore the key role of empathy in all forms of collaboration.
What is empathy and where does it come from?
Empathy is our intuitive ability to see into the minds of other people and understand their thoughts and emotions (even feel them, if the person is close to us). We do this by drawing unconsciously on the subtle cues they give us and our own experience of being in similar situations: we simulate their state of mind. Our empathetic powers evolved because we have always lived in groups and it helped them to cohere.
Empathetic capacity varies between individuals. It’s distributed on a bell curve with some neuro-atypical people at one end, and super-empaths at the other, but most of us in the middle. As with other personality characteristics, our individual empathetic ability results from a combination of nature and nurture. Some brains have better empathetic wiring and we’re more likely to develop empathetic skills if our carers are attuned to our emotions when we’re young: psychopaths and sociopaths often have very disordered childhoods. In psychometric terms, empathetic people score highly on the MBTI ‘F’ (‘Feeling’) preference, and the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness – they focus on the human dimensions of problems. Women are on average more empathetic than men. And our empathetic capacity can increase as we have more life experiences: men, for example, often become more empathetic when they become fathers.
Highly empathetic people are not only adept at reading others but impelled to help them. You can recognise them by the way in which the atmosphere in the room immediately warms when they are there. They don’t fall out with people and readily forgive poor behaviour. They’re the people you turn to when you’re upset because they hear you and somehow know what to say and how to comfort you.
Understanding people and responding to them is crucial to decision-making and collaboration
Empaths are drawn to caring professions and the arts. But most workplace decisions, even in ‘cooler’ contexts, require insight into human nature. If you’re preparing a legal case, designing an operational project or formulating a marketing plan you need to have a feel for how people behave, how they are likely to react to your intervention, and how you might address this. We’re all familiar with the, accurate, stereotype of the pointy-headed intellectual whose clever schemes get nowhere because they just don’t understand or see as significant how people think and behave.
Though we invariably default to it, rational persuasion doesn’t work - as anybody knows who has failed to get buy-in to an excellent scheme backed up with analysis and facts. Indeed, we’ve been programmed by evolution to reject evidence that contradicts our prior view. To influence people you must speak to their emotions as well as their intellects, to understand where they’re coming from and what they want from the transaction. Then you may be able to find common ground and gently steer them in your direction – pulling rather than pushing.
To engage people in a common enterprise you need to understand and care about them and what matters to them. Good leaders spend time getting to know what makes their people tick. The classic study of elite teams by two McKinsey partners, Katzenbach and Smith, found that the members were deeply concerned about each other’s welfare. One leader said: ‘Not only did we trust each other, not only did we respect each other, but we gave a damn about the rest of the people on this team.’ Because everybody knew that they and their concerns mattered, these teams could agree a purpose they all genuinely owned, mobilise everyone’s contribution, and disagree constructively.
Empathy creates the right environment for insight. As you will know, the very fact of being listened to and having your feelings validated makes you receptive to new ways of seeing things. We learn fast in childhood because the gentle support and challenge we receive from our carers floods our brains with feel-good chemicals, like dopamine and serotonin, that increase neural plasticity and growth. And it’s true in adulthood too. If you listen, and make clear that you see and respect someone’s point of view, it’s more likely they will see yours too and you will jointly be able construct a richer and more illuminating view of the problem and maybe a ‘win-win’ solution.
What does this mean in practice?
There will always be conflicts between business needs and those of individuals. But when you have to take action that will hurt someone – scrap their pet project, give critical feedback, let them go, make redundancies - if you see things from their point of view, and avoid criticising them and damaging their self-esteem, they will find it easier to accept, and you to deal with, the situation. When dismissing someone, one of my clients always emphasised that it was a matter of mismatch, and the organisation’s fault for appointing the wrong person. Another client said that an employee had thanked him for the humane way in which he’d handled redundancies, making clear that it was an economic necessity and not the fault of the people concerned and giving practical help with resettlement.
You can hone your influencing skills. When you need to persuade someone, prepare: what do they want from the transaction, for their organisation and personally? Where is the common ground? Can you modify your aims and meet them halfway? What do you know about their personality and the type of approach they respond to? It’s a very useful imaginative exercise to write down an account of the issue from the point of view of each of the key people you need to convince.
If you want to grow your intuitive empathy, you can start to rewire your brain by systematic reflection. Practise putting yourself in other people’s positions and running simulations of what’s going on in their minds, by drawing on your own experiences in similar situations: ‘how would I feel, if…?’. And enlarge your experience by immersing yourself in drama and fiction. A study showed that the more fiction people read, the better they were at picking up cues to emotions from facial expressions. They had a bigger library of references on which to draw.
I recently came across a lovely description of the power of empathy at the very top of government. It was the job of the late Jeremy Heywood, Head of the UK Civil Service, to represent the Prime Minister and find an agreed way through complex problems with multiple stakeholders with different agendas. One of his colleagues said of him:
‘Jeremy was extremely intelligent, of course. But it would be a mistake to attribute his extraordinary career … to that. He had empathy…. an almost preternatural ability to think himself into other people’s shoes and to work out where they were coming from. Or where they would be coming from once he had explained to them why it was in their best interests.’
In my next piece on influencing I will look at how you can put across your point of view in the most compelling way.
Sources
Baron-Cohen, Simon, ‘Zero Degrees of Empathy – a New Theory of Human Cruelty’, Allen Lane, 2011
Katzenbach, Jon R and Smith, Douglas K, ‘The Discipline of Teams’, Harvard Business Review, March-April 1993;71 (2): 111 -20
Sharot, Tali, ‘The Influential Mind – What the Brain reveals about our Power to Change Others’, Abacus, 2017
Article by Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Kings College, London, in The New Statesman: www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/10/jeremy-heywood-succeeded-not-just-because-his-intelligence-his-empathy
The US political horror-show now on, quite grotesquely demonstrates the power of skilled appeal to emotions rather than factual evidence. I worked in high-schools for years; teachers are typically empathetic to a greater degree than many other professions, and we practised evaluating “where a kid was coming from” on the fly on a daily basis, in order to coax students to learn, soothe their angers, diffuse conflicts, etc.. Not claiming to be a master at it, but it was a survival skill for sure.
I love it that you emphasize the usefulness of fiction reading (and, one assumes, drama-watching, if well written and acted), in developing empathetic skills. This makes it all the sadder that literature courses are on a decline in universities, and engaging with challenging texts on the wane in high-schools in some places. One fears that empathy will wane as a result of the lessening of sustained human interactions IRL for the young, also.