Lack of Practice

At its core, empathy is a behavior—something you say and/or do. Similar to any other behavior, if it isn't natural to you, your skill at it will only improve with deliberate practice. Think of empathy as a muscle—it needs to be exercised regularly to get stronger. If you don't use it, it atrophies.

Historically, in the hard-charging traditional business world, empathy has been undervalued or even ignored. Empathy can be hard to measure, and it is usually left out of the cluster of key performance indicators, which include metrics such as revenue, profit, and quality.

Though empathy is difficult to measure, it affects everything around us. How we feel at work might seem superficial, but it's not. How we feel greatly influences how we perform.

As researchers Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath have found, “Feeling cared for by one's supervisor has a more significant impact on people's sense of trust and safety than any other behavior by a leader. Employees who say they have more supportive supervisors are 1.3 times as likely to stay with the organization and are 67% more engaged.”¹

Caring—or a lack thereof—explains why empathy is the most critical driver of overall performance. Leaders who don't practice empathy fuel their teams with the emotional equivalent of low-octane fuel. The journey is full of knocks and more prone to breakdowns. No wonder people who aren't cared for leave. After all, no one has quit their job after having the thought, “My boss was too empathetic.”

Right–Wrong Mind-set

Another challenge to empathy is rigid thinking. For most of us, education (both formally in school and informally at home) was built on finding the one, singular right answer. In fact, we got rewarded with gold stars and high grades for showing that we had learned what was right. And when we strayed from the right path, we'd get punished with low grades, red pens, and detention. As a result, we deeply internalized this right–wrong way of thinking.

Fast forward to adulthood and working in an organizational environment. In your workplace, decisions are made all day, every day. No one works on an island—there are lots of times when you'll need to get input from others before choosing which way to go next. When someone disagrees with you, do you cling harder to being “right” than you do to maintaining a connection with them? Do you dig in to your position even more?

Clinging to a need to be right closes you off to the perspective and experience of others. You don't listen—you fake listen. You only care about others to the level that they agree with you. Only the expression of certain thoughts and feelings is okay. Everything else is out of bounds.

With their high need for control, leaders with a right–wrong mind-set are stuck in their own way of doing things. They really don't want to hear what others have to say. They just don't care. This lack of caring keeps them from creating genuine empathic connections. And you can bet their team members pick up on that and adjust their own behaviors accordingly.

Fear Mentality

Many leaders I've worked with are afraid of all of this “feelings stuff.” They think it's going to overwhelm everyone and bring progress to a screeching halt. They don't really want to get to know their people. Bob, a managing partner at a consulting firm told me, “If I get to know them, what am I going to find out? I don't know if I want that much information!” For leaders like Bob, explicit feelings are off limits. They believe emotions are too messy. Or maybe they've taken a personality assessment and they've labeled themselves as a type who prefers logic and analysis over feeling and intuition.

Other leaders fear that if they open up to their people, they will be seen as “soft.” Their vulnerability could be something to be taken advantage of. Maybe they experienced a situation like this in the past, and they don't want to experience it again.

Then there are the leaders who think that work is no place for empathy. They've honed their leadership sensibility in the Michael Corleone school of business. Michael Corleone, the fictional mafia kingpin, was played by Al Pacino in the three Godfather movies. In the first film, he famously tells his brother Sonny, “It's not personal; it's strictly business.”

At Godfather, Inc., the corporate culture is extremely low trust. Everyone (including the senior executives) is motivated by fear. Namely, they're scared that someone's out to kill them. Granted, this fear is well founded, because in their mobster world, knocking each other off is business as usual. Such behavior has been going on for generations.

Although The Godfather is an extreme, and fictional, example, the “it's strictly business” mind-set is far too real. I've worked in dozens of companies where the unspoken norm is, “You want to share your feelings here? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

In addition, the way many organizations run promotes a fear-based mentality. Continuous waves of downsizing leaves people feeling like “headcount”—mere fungible commodities. This creates a low-trust environment. In order to cope with the stress, people emotionally disconnect from their remaining colleagues and reports. When we're disconnected from others, we don't empathize with them.

Impatience

Empathy, truly understanding someone, doesn't happen in an instant. In the digital age, information travels at the speed of light, but human interactions move much more slowly. To get the complete picture—cognitively and emotionally—takes some time. Demonstrating empathy means being patient.

Patience is in short supply in today's business environment. In fact, many of the companies I've worked with have codified impatience as a core competency, reframing it as “bias for action.”

It's understandable that a bias for action would be valued in organizations. It takes action to deliver results. However, bias can create a series of downward performance events (see Figure 5.1).

Leaders with a bias for action may be operating with the unconscious belief that they don't have the time to offer empathy. After all, they're busy people with lots to do. But this belief has an unintended impact: making those around them feel less valued and understood. When people feel devalued, their motivation plummets. These lead to declines in performance. Ultimately, results suffer.

To be effective, today's leader needs to embrace a paradox. On the one hand, they need to know when it's time to slow down and move at the speed of cultivating relationships with empathy. On the other hand, they need to know when to accelerate into action mode to get things done. To harness the power of human performance, sometimes the best way to move fast is to go slow.

The Hot–Cold Empathy Gap

There's a running dialogue that I often have with my wife, Mary. It's gone on for years now. It sounds something like this:

(And so on and so forth.)

In our back-and-forth, Mary and I demonstrate how easy it is to unwittingly fall into the trap that psychologists call the hot–cold empathy gap. It's the cognitive bias where we fail to recognize how much our own experience influences what we think of as reality.

The hot–cold empathy bias applies to much more than the literal temperature. It also refers to our own emotional states. For example, hot states include rage, terror, and hunger. Cold states include emotions such as calm, boredom, and concern. When people are in a cold state, they find it difficult to relate to what someone in a hot state is going through and vice versa.

At the same time, people also don't recognize how much the way their present emotional state influences their opinions. For example, if you ask someone “How happy are you with your job overall?” that answer will depend on how happy they feel at the moment you ask them.

Assuming that others see, feel, and think about things the same way you do will keep you stuck. Leaders suffering from the hot–cold empathy gap find it challenging to relate to what their employees are going through.

Bernice, a participant in a leadership workshop, shared a story of a leader with an extreme case of the hot–cold empathy gap. Bernice's aunt had passed away, and she asked her boss for an afternoon off to attend the funeral. The boss looked slightly befuddled, and said, “Do you really have to? I think we need you here at the office more than your aunt needs you today.”

Power

The higher a leader climbs in an organization, the more disconnected he or she can become.

Over two decades of research, Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, concluded that people under the effect of power act as though they had a traumatic brain injury. They become “more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view.”²

In further research, psychologists Michael Inzlicht and Sukhvinder Obhi found that when people experience power, it changes how sensitive their brains become to the actions of others. In other words, they specifically studied how power influences empathy.

Inzlicht and Obhi began their experiment by asking subjects to recall and write about a time where they remembered feeling either powerless or powerful. This was to prime them to a powerful or powerless state. Next, the subjects were shown a video of a human hand squeezing a ball.

Just watching a hand squeezing a ball activates mirror neurons in the brain. While watching the video, participants' brain activity was measured using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS was used to measure the degree to which these mirror neurons were firing, which is considered a standard scientific metric for determining empathy.

The results found an inverse correlation between feelings of power and mirror neural activity. The more powerful subjects felt, the less empathy they had. The less powerful, the more empathic. As the authors of the study put it, “Power, it appears, changes how the brain itself responds to others.”³

Just because power influences a leader's level of empathy doesn't mean he or she is destined for a lifetime of cruel and callous behavior. There are plenty of leaders who are incredibly empathic. They do this by staying vigilant. They stay on guard against the pitfalls of power that can lull them into a place of not caring about others.

Smart empathic leaders seek out new ways to build bridges between themselves and people at all levels in the organization. They look for ways to close the power–empathy gap. As an example, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor, a software company, shares his cellphone number with all company employees.⁴ He invites them to reach out via voice or text whenever they want. It's a way for him stay open and keep information flowing.

These challenges—lack of practice, right–wrong mind-set, fear mentality, impatience, the hot–cold empathy gap, and power—keep leaders and organizations stuck in the past. To succeed moving forward, authority must give way to inclusion. High-performing teams and companies will be people-centric. Empathy is a critical part of this equation.

Listen with Purpose

It's one thing to let others talk. It's quite another to listen with purpose. You may have found that listening seems like the most boring thing in the world. If that's true for you, you haven't given listening a fair shot.

Kyle is a senior executive for a large financial organization that has more than 12 million customers. I first met Kyle more than a decade ago to help his teams become more aligned. I was struck by how well he listened. One of the first things he said was, “I'm a banker by training. You're the expert on teamwork and leadership. I want to learn everything I can from you. What have you learned from talking with our team? What should we do?”

There's nothing passive about listening. Seeking understanding is an active, dynamic process. Although you can't technically see reality 100% the way anyone else can, your goal in listening is to get as close to that as possible.

Dynamic listening takes intense focus and purpose. Dynamic listening can be exhausting. And, yes, sometimes, it can be really boring. You'll want to jump to your ready-made conclusions.

But don't do it.

The feeling of being listened to—really listened to—is a fast track to connection. The biggest thing that gets in the way of listening with purpose is quite simple: it's offering up your complete and undivided attention. Many leaders feel they don't have time for it. If you think you don't have time for it, ask yourself: What is not paying attention costing you? The answer might be the wake-up call you're looking for.

Practice Being Open

Appreciating that others see and feel things differently is a prerequisite for openness. But it's just a start. Openness means being receptive to new ideas, feelings, and experiences. Such openness takes courage, and that courage looks very different for different leaders, depending on their character.

Letitia, a senior leader at a global insurance company, was adamant that her leadership team cultivate the trait of being open. As a matter of practice, whenever the team gathered for off-site meetings, she'd book a reservation at an ethnic restaurant from a part of the world that none of them had been to. It was her way to get them to expand both their palate and their thinking.

To grow your openness with others, start by being open with yourself. Do an honest reckoning: are you a leader who tends to control? Do you want to keep driving your agenda forward? Or are you a pleaser, who abdicates your own opinions around others?

Take an inventory: How open are you with your own feelings? With your own thoughts? How much do you admit to your own shortcomings? How much would you be willing to share these discoveries with others? Spending time on this kind of self-evaluation will give you valuable insights.

With practice, your capacity to be more open and present with others will increase over time. It won't feel like quite so much work. You'll also discover a whole new level of depth in your relationships, and others will enjoy a deeper connection with you.

Cultivate Curiosity

If you're going to be an empathic leader, you need to be curious. Curiosity, by its nature, means being engaged. You can't be curious and stay in your comfort zone at the same time.

Curiosity helps us develop empathy. When we meet new people, try new things, and go to new places, we can't help but be broadened in the process.

A key to developing curiosity is inquiry. Be like a small child, and continually ask why? When you get the answer, ask why again—keep probing to gain more insight. It will help you move beyond complacency.

If curiosity is so great, why aren't more people more curious more of the time? What's the downside?

If you're going to be curious, there are a couple of big costs to pay. The first one is time. It takes time to engage with others. If you feel as though you've already got too much on your plate, you won't have much physical or mental space to focus on taking in anything new.

The second cost is ego. If you're operating as a “know-it-all,” you have an underlying belief that any new stuff really isn't of much value. Not only does it waste your valuable time, it wastes your valuable attention. In your know-it-all head, you'd rather focus on the important things that you're already familiar with. In fact, you may even see yourself as the resident expert at what you know and do. Anything new might be a threat to that expert status.

Having an uncurious attitude keeps you in the realm of the familiar. And although that might feel comfortable, it also comes with a big problem. Your habitual actions keep you stuck in a rut. Or, as Benjamin Franklin more eloquently put it, “If you do tomorrow what you did today, you will get tomorrow what you got today.”

Engage with Strangers

Unless you live as a hermit, you meet new people every day. They're everywhere: in line at the coffeeshop and grocery store, waiting their turn at the dentist's office. Instead of checking your social media feed for the 20th time, why not strike up a conversation? If you ask a great open-ended question, you can get them talking. You may ask something that you notice in their appearance. Or maybe you just ask them a thought-provoking question, such as, “What do you wish you knew?” or “What's the next great adventure you're going to take?”

Then, of course, once you've asked the question you need to listen. Strive for understanding. Be open to being moved from the interaction. It may feel scary to strike up a conversation with a total stranger.

Don't think of it as a popularity contest. The point isn't to make a new best friend. Think of it as an opportunity to work on building empathy. Each time you practice, you'll hone your ability to pick up on the cues as to what people are thinking and feeling. You'll be intentional about connecting.

When I've coached leaders and assigned engaging with strangers as homework, they've reported back how enjoyable the process can be. Meng, an IT manager, noticed it helped him improve the quality of all of his conversations. He remarked, “By being so completely focused on learning about them, I got out of my own head! I used to have this running commentary wondering what people thought of me. Now, I'm so much more relaxed.”

Break Your Habit Patterns

We're creatures of habit. What we did yesterday we're likely to do today. Over time, this can get us trapped in stagnation.

In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a sarcastic weatherman who complains about everyone and everything around him. In a fantastical twist of fate, he's forced to relive the same day—Groundhog Day—over and over again. At first, Phil sees it as a curse. Then, Phil starts to try new things—learn to play the piano, get to really know his coworkers and the townspeople—and he slowly begins to build relationships. He even saves some lives in the process. In fact, it's only when he develops empathy for those around him that the curse is broken. Phil learns the power of connection. And because this is a movie, he lives happily ever after.

It doesn't take a paranormal experience to be able to reap the benefits of breaking your patterns. For example, have you ever noticed how much richer your day's experience is when you're on vacation? That's because you aren't coasting along, using the same neural firing patterns that you use when you eat your same breakfast off the same plate at the same seat at the same table in the same kitchen that you sit in every morning. In your routine, it's easy to slip into autopilot.

You don't need to go on vacation to break patterns. Try new things or do old things in a new way. Take a different route to get to work. Park in a different spot. Call an old friend out of the blue. Notice how you respond. When you stop going through the motions and embrace novelty, your sense of connection to people, places, things, and events will be heightened.

Spend Time in Another Person's Shoes

When Scott Moorehead graduated from college in 2001, he joined his family's business, Moorehead Communications. His parents didn't go easy on him. They had him work for a year in nearly every single position at the company. He held each of these jobs—and there were 32 of them—between a half-day to three weeks. Seven years later, Moorehead took over as CEO. His job rotation memories stuck with him. As he describes it, they “made me a very employee-centric CEO.”⁹

If you want to accelerate your capacity for empathy, there's nothing like spending time in other people's shoes. You might think you know what their life is like, but when you go through the moment-to-moment experience of doing what they do, you gain a much deeper appreciation for their perspective.

When you practice this technique, you'll watch your previously held assumptions melt away. You'll no longer have to rely on second- or third-hand descriptions. You'll have your own first-person story to draw on.

One caution with this technique: although there's great value to getting to the front lines and learning from that experience, be mindful of how you spend your time there. Be a learner, not a spy. More than one manager in these circumstances has stepped into “undercover boss” mode and used it as a micromanaging opportunity.