Note: This post is an installment in the STRIPES series. For more background on what STRIPES is, check out the July 15, 2020 post.
Empathy: Now sold at Circle K and other fine retailers.
Can I be totally honest for a bit? This is the post in the STRIPES series that I was most nervous to tackle. I generally have not been accused of being exceptionally empathetic over the course of my life and career. For years, I felt like empathy and “EQ” were things that may have been nice to have, but weren’t essential for success in the office or in your career. It seemed to me that the most important thing you could do was to have knowledge and skills so you produce great quality output. I more or less thought it was more important to be right than worry about what was going on to the people around me or how they felt.
Now that I have a broader view of leadership and just general office productivity, I can say definitively that I was wrong. What I missed in those early years is that often that model doesn’t scale. It’s inherently based on everyone acting independently of others in the group. The problem with this is that no individual can achieve as much as a team can. If you add up the collective output of 10 people working independently in an uncoordinated fashion, you will invariably end up with poorer results than if you have 10 people working as a cohesive team. And ultimately, teams (and frankly, societies in general) work better when we have empathy for each other.
Before we go too much further, let’s make sure we level-set what empathy is. Empathy is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “the ability to identify with or understand another’s situation or feelings.” Or alternatively, “the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person.” Ultimately, I have always thought of empathy as being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and show understanding for where they’re at – essentially to be able to imagine how someone else feels and (here’s the important part) adjust and act accordingly.
A good tangible example of this is when it’s raining really hard and you’re driving down the street towards an intersection, and you see someone standing by the crosswalk without an umbrella but you have a green light. You by all rights can keep going – you do have the green light after all – but you also know how it feels to be wet and cold. And so maybe you let that person go. You cede being “right” because you extend yourself somewhat to care for someone else based on their situation.
Look, there are very few public domain images that relate to empathy, so you get someone crossing a street. I’m not a designer.
But what about in the office? Fortunately, despite all of its horrible effects the Covid pandemic has given us a ton of opportunity to think about empathy in the workplace. Millions of people right now are part of families with small kids and two working parents. As such, they need to deal with near constant distractions from their children – and generally most managers seem to be understanding if a four-year-old wanders into the Zoom frame to ask for a cup of milk. Even if you aren’t a parent, you can understand how it feels to be in that parent’s situation and you give them a pass for what could be considered as distracted behavior just six months ago.
In general, I think this whole pandemic has forced us to think through what is going on in other peoples’ lives – and adapt accordingly. I know that for many asking “how’s it going?” is something done reflexively, but I’ve certainly been asked (and am also asking) with more genuine concern these past few months. We’re all more aware that this situation is hard on a lot of people. I have had more than one friend who has had a family member die during the pandemic (due to Covid or non-Covid reasons) – and was not able to be with their loved one due to quarantine restrictions. For those of us that are usually task-and-results oriented, this has been an opportunity to stretch ourselves and be more in-tune with our colleagues’ situations and state-of-mind because for most of us - it’s front and center.
If you aren’t an intrinsically compassionate or empathetic person (and we all know they’re out there), let me appeal to you with cold, dispassionate reason: Discerning peoples’ emotional state and situation and engaging with them accordingly doesn’t just make you empathetic – it makes you more effective. I can tell you with 100% certainty that when I pay close attention to how people are doing and adjust how I interact with them because of what I’m perceiving – positively or negatively – they are far more likely to respond favorably to whatever I am asking of them. This is true of people who report to me, people who do not, and people more senior than I am.
It’s really difficult to overstate the power of relationships in a professional environment. In his speeches Lee Cockerell always says “Listen, people: it’s about people!” He’s absolutely right; unless you work for a sole proprietorship, you absolutely rely on others to achieve your goals and they rely on you to achieve theirs. If your relationships are purely transactional with disregard for other people’s well beings, I don’t think you’re setting yourself up for success long term. Certainly, you aren’t building the trust that is so necessary for long-term results for either of you. If you want to build that trust, then understanding where they are at, and matching your message’s wavelength to the wavelength of where they are is a powerful way to start.
Like I said in the beginning of this post, I admit this is an area that I continue to struggle with occasionally. I like to think that I’ve gotten quite a bit better in the past five to ten years, as I’ve actively been working on developing empathy for others, which is not to say that I’m perfect; I still have lots of room to grow here. I would encourage you think through if this is something you do intuitively - and if it’s not, start practicing right away. What I do is when I’m meeting with someone, I try to take stock of how they’re doing – I listen for tones of stress, anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, etc. Then I make a note of what I’m sensing in my notebook. Just by writing it down, I feel like I do a better job keeping it in the front of my mind. I’ve noticed that this has become a lot more second-nature than it used to be.
Ultimately, all I am saying is that you can be a better co-worker if you are situationally aware of how everyone around you is doing and adapt accordingly. Doing so will not only improve your overall performance in the office, but will help you build relationships with your colleagues that can go deeper and return better dividends than just improving your annual review. If you are really sincere about it, it may actually make you into a better person.
Questions for reflection:
When you have a conflict with a coworker, would you rather be demonstrably right or understand where the other person is coming from?
If someone is talking to you and it seems like they’re really preoccupied, do you ignore that preoccupation or do you ask about it?
Have you ever worked for someone who seems to care very little about what’s going on in your life? Were you more or less likely to give them your all than if they were genuinely interested in you? What does this tell you about how you should act?
