A while back I was packing up after a fairly complex and involved Board awayday. I had my usual overflowing kit of materials, flowers, pens etc that are all stuffed into a flight case, plus a mobile whiteboard and my rucksack. I collected all my belongings and we waited as a group by the lift to leave. The mood seemed positive and everyone was chatting happily. The chair turned to me and said, ‘you work really hard at this don’t you.’
I don’t tell this story to big myself up, but to illustrate an experience of empathy. I felt really touched that he had noticed and acknowledged what I had put into the session. Contrast this with another experience where I had to explain I might have a challenge getting to a meeting on time because of a scheduled train strike and the response was ‘well, it’s a very important meeting you’ll just have to get here.’ I knew it wasn’t necessarily meant as harshly as it sounded, and obviously had no intention of missing the meeting, but the lack of any sense of human empathy was quite marked. The first experience created a sense of bonding, the latter made me feel isolated and disconnected.
It seems to me that now, more than ever, we need to be empathetic. Empathy is about seeing ourselves from the outside, and others from the inside. At the moment I am hearing great stories about empathetic and caring teams, I am also hearing people frustrated with the behaviours of others. This frustration is on occasion generated by a lack of empathy. We all have more complicated lives at now with many competing demands and different levels of anxiety; we cannot take things at face value. Honing our empathy skills is vital right now particularly as we are physically distanced.
If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from [their] point of view, until you climb inside of [their] skin and walk around in it. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
INSEAD’s research suggests that empathy is contagious and contributes to:
- Feeling safe to discuss hopes and fears
- Better negotiation and collaboration
- Conflict resolution
- Team formation and development
- Higher levels of commitment and motivation
To work on our empathy, we all need to be practising deeper listening and curiosity, both about ourselves and others. We need to challenge our thinking and our assumptions and ask for feedback on our interpersonal skills. Most of all we need to ask better questions.
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other. Meryl Streep