2.6 Empathy

Understanding empathy

Think about some of the actors who famously practise the art of method acting. Through that approach they have taken the time to really understand what their character would be feeling, hearing and seeing and then used that to ‘become’ the character. Notable examples include Adrien Brody in the film The Pianist and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon.

Patricia Moore is an example of someone who built empathy in the workplace to develop a new innovative product. She was the only female designer out of 350 men in her organisation and she asked a simple question during a design session for a new fridge: ‘couldn’t we design the door so that someone with arthritis would find it easy to open?’. She was told by a colleague ‘we don’t design for those people’, which prompted her to conduct a radical experiment in empathy (Krznaric, 2015, p. xi): she dressed up and ‘became’ an 85 year old woman. She said she didn’t want to be an actor pretending to be an elderly woman so she used theatrical makeup, clothing and a walking stick and transformed herself into an elderly woman. She kept up this persona from 1979 to 1982 and her experience gave her a first-hand understanding of how difficult it was to walk up steep stairs, use can openers and open fridges, etc. She realised that there was a gap in the market and she took product design in a new direction. Based on her insights and experiences she created products that were suitable for use by the elderly and for those with arthritis.

Expanding your empathetic potential

To cultivate a habit of being empathetic, Krznaric (2015, p. xiv) suggests the following six habits of highly empathetic people:

1. Switch on your empathetic brain – Understand that empathy is core of human nature and that it can continue to develop and grow.
2. Make the imaginative leap – Make a conscious effort to step into someone else’s shoes no matter who that is, whether it is friend or foe. Acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives.
3. Seek experiential adventures – Explore lives and cultures that are not the same as your own whether this is through direct immersion or empathetic journey mapping.
4. Practice the craft of conversation – Be curious, be inquisitive, be like a child again asking questions and listen and connect. Don’t be an examiner, be the interested enquirer.
5. Travel in your armchair – You cannot always go to the place to build empathy, but you can put yourself into someone else’s mind using art, literature, film and online social networks.
6. Inspire a revolution – Start to generate empathy and use it to create social change and extend your empathy skills to embrace the natural world around you.

Empathy is not an easy skill to practise at work, and according to Business Solvers 2021 Empathy Study, 70% of CEOs felt that they struggled to demonstrate it at work consistently. However, empathy is a growing priority in the workplace, particularly with ‘Gen Z’ (those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s) employees, 90% of whom say they are more likely to stay in their jobs if their employer is empathetic.

Empathy vs sympathy

Empathy is very distinct from sympathy, which is more about feeling pity for someone else (Krznaric, 2015, p. x). Feeling sorry for someone is not trying to feel with them and understand their emotions or point of view, as this short animation illustrates: How empathy works – and sympathy can’t.

The table below (adapted from Waters, 2022) summarises the differences between empathy and sympathy.

Why is empathy important?

Have you ever started to listen to someone tell you how they are feeling and then begun to offer unsolicited suggestions on what you think they should do? Watch the following video, which shows the consequences and reactions of trying to ‘fix’ your partner rather than just empathise with them.

This is a risk with not building empathy – we try to fix and ‘solutionise’ things.

Having empathy can help you improve communication, build important relationships and it has been shown that it can reduce discrimination and unethical behaviour.

Empathy in leading hybrid teams

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the knowledge that people around the globe were facing similar challenges seemed to connect us and increase our levels of empathy. Since restrictions have eased, we have had to shift and adapt to hybrid working and try to move seamlessly between in-person and virtual work. We used to collaborate around whiteboards in an office and now we are doing this via digital tools online. The expectations remain the same even if the method and modality of working has shifted. So what can you do as a leader to develop and have empathy with your teams, even if you no longer bump into them in an office?

Activity 11 Connecting with your team to build empathy

First, watch the video in which Natasha Davies, Policy and Research Lead for Chwarae Teg, talks about how leaders can be more empathic for hybrid ways of working.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_2_2022_sept106_empathic_approach_compressed.mp4

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Transcript

NATASHA DAVIES

New ways of working are inevitably going to mean new ways of leading and managing teams and organisations, which is obviously going to have an impact on the skills and attributes that we need from our leaders as we move forward.

We did some research actually during the pandemic that helped us highlight a number of areas where training might be needed. And it was around things like, managing virtual teams, self-awareness, how different leadership styles might impact or work differently in a hybrid dispersed world of work, training around resilience, motivating team members, managing wellbeing, being a particularly key area. And training some of the softer skills that we think might be really important.

So we're prioritising things like wellbeing, but also thinking about communication, and empathy, and that kind of thing. Through the same research that we did, we also identified a number of attributes that our stakeholders felt that leaders and managers are going to need. And that is very much leaders who are effective communicators, who can actively listen, who prioritise regular contact with staff, who embrace new ways of communicating in a virtual and digital world. Empathetic leaders who understand how different ways of working, how changes in how we work, might affect individuals differently.

Leaders who can act as role models, who set out clearly what they expect, who don't regularly overwork themselves, because we know overworking really is a risk in a more dispersed world of work. Leaders who really lead by example, managing their own wellbeing, and the wellbeing of their teams. And then also leaders who are emotionally intelligent, who are open and transparent, and are visible across the organisation, and I think who recognise that things that perhaps happen quite naturally around being visible, or approachable, or contactable, when we're all working in the same physical location, we're going to need to be quite proactive about those in the future.

And I think it's really important as well to remember that in this space, this is quite a dynamic space. This is something that-- we're not going to implement new ways of working now that are just going to stay static I think we're going to constantly be finding new ways of organizing our workplaces, particularly as new technology becomes available that can facilitate that collaborative working that perhaps we've relied upon doing in person in the past. And so I think we're going to need leaders who are open to learning, adapting, and embracing new ways of doing things as we move forward.

I think there are many things that can be done to help leaders develop a more empathetic approach. Inevitably, training is going to be part of that. But I think something that perhaps gets missed in this conversation sometimes is that empathy requires self-reflection, and self-reflection requires time. So I think it's really important, that within organisations, we're creating the space and time for leaders to be able to reflect on their leadership style, on their leadership skills, and to develop their leadership skills. And as a leader, sometimes that can be quite a difficult thing to do, because I'm so busy doing the day job, it's easy to forget that actually being a leader is an important part of my day job as well, and I equally need to be developing my skills in that space.

And so I think I think creating spaces with an organisation so that leaders can take that time to do the self-reflection, the development, is important. I think investing in the development of our leadership team is important. And I think probably doing that collectively, so that leaders are able to learn from other leaders within the organisation. I think it's quite difficult to just send somebody away with the instruction ‘right, you need to be more empathetic’, because that's going to look different in different situations.

So I think, yeah, investment in opportunities for your leadership team to develop collectively, but also to engage in some peer to peer support, to learn about new styles and approaches, what's worked well, what's enabled people to really connect with their staff, and understand how their changing world of work is affecting them. Because I think when we're thinking about managing this shift in ways of working-- yes, it's important to think about the ways of working themselves, but also change can be quite scary for people. And for some, this shift is going to be quite significant change in how they work. So I think it's just-- it's ensuring that our leaders are able to understand how change can leave people feeling quite uncertain, and how that can affect them in their day to day as well.

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Then read the following article for some practical tips on empathetic leadership: Leadership: How to show empathy to hybrid work teams.

Make some notes on what you find and what questions you could ask when connecting with your team to build empathy. It is a skill that takes practice and working remotely can create barriers that you may not have even thought of but you may have only thought about how productive they are instead of being measured by the visibility of being online.

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