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WALK IN OTHERS’ SHOES
This is what I learned from spending time shadowing patients—and being one myself.
In 1990, when I was a 26-year-old pediatrics intern fresh out of medical school, I had the privilege of working at Intermountain’s Primary Children’s Hospital for a big, gentle bear of a man named Marty Palmer. Marty was the first child protection pediatrician in the Intermountain West, as well as a bishop for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was an exceptional person and a real role model to me—smart, tremendously accepting of diversity, a master clinician. Doctors would send him their most difficult patients and ask if he could figure out what was wrong with them. Marty also seemed to mentor the most challenging (read: pain-in-the-ass) residents at his continuity clinic. When I inquired about that, he didn’t hesitate to mention that I fit right in, especially the pain-in-the-ass part.
One day, a woman in her thirties who had several kids showed up late for her appointment with me. Not just a little late: when I looked at the clock, she was 20 minutes late, then 25, then 30. We had a rule then that if a patient came 30 minutes late for an appointment, the doctor could cancel the appointment entirely, leaving it up to the patient to reschedule if they wished.
My schedule then was challenging: every third or fourth day, I would work all night in the hospital and then head over to an outpatient clinic to see patients. Tired and stressed, I canceled the woman’s appointment and announced to everyone within earshot that I was going home to sleep. No sooner had I done so when the woman walked in. “I’m still going home,” I said to Marty. “She’s 35 minutes late.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” he replied.
I was taken aback—this woman seemed pretty clearly out of line. Nevertheless, I fought through my fatigue and saw her. When her appointment was over, Marty had another piece of news for me: he wanted me to go visit this woman and her children in their home and then trace the exact steps she took to get to our clinic. I wasn’t sure what this little exercise was supposed to accomplish, given all the demands on my time, but I did it. The experience was life changing.
I got on a bus and rode clear across town, got out, waited, and transferred to a second bus. The whole trip might have taken me 20 minutes if I’d driven, but on public transportation it took 90. The woman lived on the second floor of a bleak low-rise building. She let me in and graciously showed me to a living area crammed with boxes and personal items. As we chatted, I noticed for the first time how weary she looked. She was not much older than I was, but given the lines on her face, the bags under her eyes, and her old clothing, one might have thought her in her forties.
As this woman told me, she was a single mom and lived in this tiny two-bedroom apartment with her kids as well as several other adults and children. With no access to a car or childcare, she had to take her kids with her to medical appointments and everywhere else using public transportation. Reflecting on these circumstances, I realized that the very fact she had made her appointment at all was little short of a miracle. I was ashamed of myself for having treated her so poorly and acted so selfishly.
Like many physicians, I pursued medicine to help people. I sought to show kindness and compassion, especially to those who came from difficult circumstances. My father was a general surgeon who dedicated himself to caring for everyone, rich and poor. “Rich people will do fine,” he’d say, “but poor people, they really need us, because the odds are stacked against them.”
And yet, I had never really been exposed in a visceral way to what it meant to live in poverty. I had grown up in a middle- to upper-middle-class family in Pittsburgh, and we always had enough money for the basics as well as extras like private school and summer camp. Now that I had taken the time to witness difficult living conditions up close, at least for a couple of hours, I was determined not only to treat patients kindly but to venture beyond my own narrow perspective and show real empathy and compassion. I wanted my actions to match my personal beliefs.
EMPATHY’S MOTIVATIONAL POWER
Most leaders who seek to drive change are smart and well-intentioned. They aim to achieve strong business results and do right by their customers, employees, and communities. But there’s a difference between having good intentions and really understanding what customers, employees, partners, community members, and others are experiencing. In healthcare, and I suspect in most other industries and endeavors, empathy—the ability to walk in others’ shoes, to truly grasp life from their perspective—is foundational to any attempt to drive change, not least because of the impact it has on your own perspective and priorities. As researcher Brené Brown teaches, empathy is “the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness—not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”1 By bringing the struggles of others to life, empathy ignites a fire deep within you to make change happen.
The lesson Marty taught me changed my life, but it was hardly the only experience that cued me into patients’ struggles. My cancer diagnoses did, too, but one other experience stands far above even these in helping me cultivate empathy. In 2011, I was in Pittsburgh, sitting at my brother’s kitchen table, when I received a call from a foreign number that I didn’t recognize. It was my son Alex’s friend Diana, phoning from Tübingen, Germany. Alex, then 19 years old, was visiting her in that quaint medieval city. Apparently, he was out at night when he fell down a set of stone steps and suffered a potentially catastrophic brain injury. A stranger found him unconscious and called EMS, who took him to the emergency room. According to Alex’s friend, the situation was dire. He could pass away at any time.
Sitting there at the kitchen table, I felt as if my world had just collapsed. As a pediatric ICU doctor, I had often cared for kids with traumatic brain injuries. Now, half a world away from Alex, I felt the terror and helplessness that I’d seen in so many of my patients’ families. Still, I managed to spring into action. I called the hospital in Germany, told my wife, Mary Carole, the devastating news (she was in Abu Dhabi at the time), and arranged for the two of us to meet with our other two children in Germany. While preparing to board a flight to Europe, I called the neurosurgeon caring for Alex and consulted on his care, urging aggressive action (removal of pieces of his skull) to save his life.
The next three weeks were absolutely brutal—far more painful than anything I’ve experienced in the course of my own health challenges. I stayed at Alex’s bedside 24-7, monitoring the smallest details of his care—every ventilator breath, every medication. At a number of points, it seemed unlikely that he would make it. But Mary Carole helped us to stay strong, telling us, “OK, he’s made it through another hour. Now, the next hour. Then the next.” Ten years later, simply recalling these moments brings tears to my eyes and a sick feeling to my stomach.
Perhaps the most difficult time occurred three to four days into it, as I waited for the results of a CT scan that would offer clues to the extent of the brain damage Alex had sustained. Sitting with the radiologist, waiting for the scan to appear on the monitor, I wondered if my son would ever be able to walk again, or speak, or smile. That is to say, if he lived. And if he didn’t live, or if he couldn’t live a meaningful life, I wondered how our family would survive it. Frankly, I wasn’t sure that we would.
The waiting was nauseating. Fortunately, the scan was positive. If Alex’s condition stayed stable, there was at least the prospect of a meaningful recovery. And even if he couldn’t live anything like his previous life, Mary Carole and I decided that we would make the best of it. At least we’d still have our son.
Little by little, Alex managed to pull through. In a twist of fate, he received a ride back home from Germany on a medically equipped plane operated by Cleveland Clinic’s intercontinental critical care transport team, a business that I’d started during my time at the Clinic. He spent months in inpatient and then outpatient neurological rehab and has since made a full recovery. He went on to finish college and has graduated from medical school and is a resident in obstetrics-gynecology.
Living through the experience of almost losing a child has deepened my empathy for patients, lending it a new fierceness. Ever since then, if I hear that caregivers are not taking care of patients well or are behaving egotistically, I take it personally and become absolutely fired up to fix it. Nothing annoys me more than a disregard for patients and their experience. I simply can’t abide it. And that’s because I know what it feels like to suffer as a patient’s loved one.
More broadly, my personal experiences on the patient’s side have left me aware of how privileged I am as a wealthy white male doctor and CEO to have access to high quality, affordable care. Although so many patients receiving a bone marrow transplant are forced to relocate, at great expense and inconvenience to their families, I was able to go to Intermountain’s transplant unit, located just a couple of miles from our house. Instead of having to stay for weeks at a hotel, my wife could come home every night and sleep in our own bed. Likewise, some months after receiving my CAR-T treatment at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, I received a bill for $587,000 in the mail. It was sent to me in error—I received that treatment free of charge as part of a clinical trial. But as I held that unexpected bill in my hand and recovered from the initial shock of receiving it, I could only imagine the terror it would strike in the heart of someone who knew they would have to pay.
My awareness of my own privilege inspires me to work hard every day to remedy the inequities in our system, and to do it as quickly as possible. Further, being a patient has left me with a clearer sense of what all patients share in common. No matter who we are, where we come from, or what ails us, when we become patients, we all want to be heard. We want to be helped to the full extent possible. We want to be treated with dignity. We want clarity, honesty, and genuine concern from our caregivers. And in the United States at least, we want reassurance that our care won’t break us financially.
Understanding these desires as well as the utter helplessness patients feel when they receive a serious diagnosis, I’m more determined than ever to help my organization deliver extraordinary care that is safer, of higher quality, more affordable, more compassionate, and more equitable. I’m also more determined to create a model system at Intermountain, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare to eventually bring systemic change.
Empathy is so powerful that it often doesn’t only motivate the person who feels it to act—it unleashes others who witness that action. As a young doctor teaching and serving as a staff neurologist at the University of Western Ontario, John Noseworthy was asked to drive to the airport to pick up a medical school professor from Mayo Clinic who would deliver a lecture to the staff the following day. Noseworthy was excited: he would have a chance to spend time with this professor, who had an international reputation and would receive an award from the university the following day.
When the professor’s plane arrived, he wasn’t on it. Noseworthy was puzzled—nobody had called to say the professor had canceled. Eventually, Noseworthy went home, wondering what had happened, disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to meet this luminary.
The next day, the professor called to apologize. He had missed his flight but had taken another, later one, arriving early that morning. “May I ask what happened?” Noseworthy inquired.2
“Oh,” the professor said, “I was with a patient and couldn’t make the flight.”
Noseworthy was stunned. As he knew, few specialists with international reputations would miss their flight to receive a big award simply because they were with a patient who needed their attention. But this doctor would—and did. “It was like a two-by-four hit me in the forehead,” Noseworthy recalls. “It was an extraordinary situation, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
This doctor had so much empathy for the patient’s suffering— not to mention personal integrity and humility—that he was willing to put himself second and his patient first. Observing him, Noseworthy was inspired to behave similarly. He became drawn to Mayo Clinic, seeing it as a place that fostered such empathy and dedication and encouraged staff to act on it. When an opportunity arose to work at Mayo and drive change there, Noseworthy didn’t hesitate. Years later, he ended up becoming Mayo’s CEO.
BUILD BRIDGES; DON’T BURN THEM
As important as empathy is for motivating change, it also unleashes people to drive change by easing conflicts and helping build more productive, trusting relationships. We might not achieve all our objectives in the short term, but we open the way for more long-term progress because we keep potentially fruitful dialogues open. Empathizing with others leads them in turn to empathize with us, laying a foundation for future collaboration, even when times are tough.
For a glimpse of this dynamic at work, consider our challenges in Utah to address the new coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 pushed communities across America to the breaking point as medicine and politics became hopelessly intertwined. Healthcare professionals advocated for lockdowns, mandatory masking, and other public health measures, while government officials and private citizens in many cases pushed back, mindful of the massive economic toll these measures would take and fearing encroachment on their liberties.
During the summer of 2020, as Covid-19 cases in Utah were starting to rise and strain our resources, citizens and political leaders in some parts of Utah questioned whether the pandemic was really as bad as we were saying it was. After then-governor Gary Herbert issued a mask mandate for kids returning to school in the fall, some local parents were terribly upset and spoke out publicly in protest.3 “Covid is a hoax. It’s a lie. It’s a political stunt,” one woman said.4 Others objected to masks on constitutional grounds, regarding the mask mandate as an attack on individual rights.5 The protests that summer drew national attention, with some observers ridiculing the protesters.6
In this context, it would have been convenient for us to disparage anti-maskers as well in our attempts to lobby for what we regarded as evidence-based, medically necessary masking policies. We did, of course, speak out forcefully about the importance of masks, and we continue to do so. But rather than take a hard line and criticize leaders for being slow to adopt the public health measures we wanted, we took a more collaborative approach, inviting a handful of key political leaders—including the governor, lieutenant governor, and legislative leaders—to visit one of our intensive care units. We wanted them to see firsthand the toll taken by the pandemic on both patients and our frontline providers and caregivers.
In organizing this event, we empathized with political leaders, many of whom thought differently about Covid and how to respond to it than we did. We respected their thoughtful and well-meaning perspectives. Although they might have disagreed with us, they, too, wanted to see our community thrive—they just had different ideas about what that meant in these circumstances. We understood, too, that the pandemic had forced them to make impossible decisions between public health and economic well-being. We appreciated the pressure leaders were under from groups that vehemently resisted masking. Given the tensions that existed in Utah, we knew these leaders were taking a political risk—not to mention a risk to their health—simply by donning protective clothing and visiting our facility.
If we had lectured to these leaders, we would have irritated them, likely causing them to harden their resistance to our ideas and making future cooperation less likely. So, we simply sought to show them the facts on the ground of which they might otherwise not be aware. We let them see patients who were all alone in an ICU bed struggling to breathe. We let them speak with our nurses, constituents of theirs who recounted helping patients have final conversations with loved ones over FaceTime. To enhance the intimacy and authenticity of the event and to show respect for our patients, we didn’t publicize it or invite the media to cover it. Our hope was that exposure to the sheer humanity of what was happening would spark more dialogue so we could listen to one another and understand our respective positions.
That’s exactly what happened. Although we’ve continued to articulate different viewpoints from those of some political leaders and others in our community over the Covid response, including testing and the role of vaccination, the leaders who visited our facility were able to empathize more fully with our caregivers and the pressures they were under. The resulting feelings of trust opened up new possibilities for change and collaboration going forward. Political leaders on the other side of some public health issues know that I will hang in there with them and try to work collaboratively. I know that about them as well.
You might wonder if it’s really possible to empathize with others with whom you disagree, given how deeply you might feel about an issue or a position. I think it is. I couldn’t believe more strongly in masks and vaccinations than I do. Weakened by multiple myeloma, my immune system doesn’t respond as well to vaccines as most people’s do. For me, the decision of others to mask up is a matter of life or death. Yet I still understand the motives and impulses that lead citizens and public officials to different conclusions. They’re responding to the truth as they see it, doing their best to safeguard values that are just as important to them as mine are to me.
My friend, former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey, recalls how during the Vietnam War era he hated Richard Nixon because he, Kerrey, had gone to war in 1969 and blamed Nixon for ensnaring the country in that horrible conflict. Kerrey had been wounded in the war and earned a Medal of Honor while serving as a Navy SEAL. Some 18 years later, when Kerrey was in Santa Barbara, California, teaching a class on the war, he went for a walk on the beach and felt moved, once and for all, to forgive the former president. Staring into the waves, feeling empathy for the former president, regarding him as a fellow human being with both flaws and noble qualities, Kerrey shouted, “I forgive you, Richard Nixon!”7
Kerrey also recalls how in 2019 he served as the grand marshal at the Veterans’ Day Parade in New York City. Breaking with the presidential tradition of laying a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery, former President Donald Trump decided to speak at the parade, a move that some felt politicized the event. “I went to the parade prepared to be angry at him for doing it,” Kerrey said. “And I watched him while he was speaking, and I felt empathy for him. I saw a human being up there. It doesn’t mean I voted for him. I didn’t. It doesn’t mean I like his policies. In most cases, I didn’t. It doesn’t mean I embraced his behavior. In many instances, I didn’t. But I saw him as Donald J. Trump, human being.”
With enough time and discipline, all of us can feel empathy, even for our opponents or people we strongly dislike. When an issue becomes politicized, we create barriers between people, lumping them into groups or camps or parties. But while those distinctions might be grounded in truth, in the end we are all human beings who share needs, concerns, and qualities in common with one another. It takes work, and it might not be possible all at once, but when we open our hearts and make that imaginative leap, we lower the psychological barriers that separate us from others. We increase the odds that others will lower their barriers as well.
GOING SLOW TO GO FASTER
When our attempts to lead change cause conflict to arise, our natural inclination can be to become impatient and try to ram through our agenda. We know the right course of action (or think we do). We desperately want to take an idea to reality. I’m as guilty of this as anyone—I like to move fast. But as I’ve come to understand during my time at Intermountain, we have so much to gain by resisting our impulse to act and instead slow down, ask questions, and take time to listen and empathize. In my own development as a leader, I’ve focused on pausing and letting others have a chance to think through issues rather than forcing a quick decision. I know that I might not win everyone over to our cause. But if I take my time, I’ll usually be able to engage a broader group of people to collaborate and push change forward. Solutions will prove more durable, relationships among team members will strengthen, and my team will have a more active hand in running the organization.
During the spring of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I sought to accelerate change at Intermountain in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Believing intensely in DEI’s importance, I was thinking like an ICU doctor confronted with a patient in respiratory distress: rather than stand around, I wanted to jump in, intubate the patient right away, and put them on a ventilator. Fortunately, several members of my team urged me to slow down the process lest I come across as just another arrogant white male leader. With their help, I realized that if we didn’t take time to listen and empathize, we would fail to galvanize our people, and our change efforts would lose steam. Well-intentioned leaders do this all the time, taking bold action only to see progress falter as people become distracted or leave the organization.
Resisting the urge to promulgate action from on high, my leadership team and I embarked on a listening tour that extended over a period of about six to eight weeks. We convened groups of front-line caregivers, inviting diverse groups of people to participate. We included clinical and nonclinical staff, people at all levels in the organization, and a full spectrum of identities (ethnic, religious, gender, LGBTQ+, and so on). Holding sessions on Zoom, we asked participants to share their personal perspectives on what it felt like to work in our culture and how we might improve.
I knew we had work to do in this area, but what I heard stunned, saddened, and humbled me. One Black nurse-midwife recounted how she always had to wear her stethoscope so that patients and colleagues would accord her a modicum of professional respect. Another caregiver told us of a nurse from New York City, who had come temporarily to help us care for Covid patients, who was called the N-word by a patient within her first 12 hours of working at Intermountain Medical Center. Still other caregivers described being passed over for promotions or fielding a constant barrage of microaggressions on the job.
Our chief clinical information officer, a Kenyan native named Seraphine Kapsandoy, made a particular impression on me, describing how “exhausting” she found it to operate in what she experienced as an uncomfortable work environment. “I have to work twice as hard to show my worth and gain access to the same opportunities as others,” she said.8 In fact, she found it demoralizing just to have to sit down again with leaders to talk about her travails as a Black woman. The organization had promised in the past to improve equity but failed to make any headway. Why should she believe it would be any different now?
Years earlier, when she worked as a nurse on our transplant unit, a patient called her the N-word and refused to allow her to take care of him. In situations such as these, she had tried to work with managers and human resources but found she couldn’t get the support she needed. “I just learned to absorb it, go home, talk with my family, but come back the next day and just keep working,” she said. She could count several talented colleagues who decided not to put up with it and who subsequently left the organization.
Consulting with employees like Seraphine, we assembled a far-reaching plan to drive equity deep into our organization. Working with a broad group of leaders across Intermountain, we revised our Fundamentals of Extraordinary Care statement, the bedrock upon which we define our goals, including a plank on equity that compels us to “eliminate disparities and create opportunities for caregivers, patients, members, and communities to thrive.”9 We adopted equity as a value, proclaiming our intention to “embrace diversity and treat one another with dignity and empathy.” We created an ombudsman so employees had recourse when our HR systems didn’t work properly to resolve equity-related issues. Finally, we invested in the implementation of projects—50 of them across the organization thus far—to help us make our patient and employee experiences more equitable. For instance, we’ve changed our stroke care and the way we help new moms with breastfeeding to ensure that everyone achieves the same great outcomes. As we’ve done this work, we’ve also strived to show empathy for our white employees, some of whom are feeling displaced, disoriented, and fearful as we implement policies or statements emphasizing equity.
We have been able to set ourselves on this more sensitive and I think more successful path to change in part because we had the support of more conservative-minded leaders inside our organization who were all-in because they now had a visceral sense of what diverse employees were experiencing and could empathize with them. It hasn’t been comfortable having conversations about equity, and we’re still just beginning our journey, but by taking time to listen, we were able to normalize the conversation and build momentum to initiate real, meaningful reform. We’re not yet a national leader in DEI, but in our particular social, cultural, and political context, we’ve made important strides—relentless forward progress, as I like to call it.
MORE NUANCED SOLUTIONS
When we take time to listen and empathize, we not only get more buy-in—we also often wind up moving toward a more thoughtful handling of issues than we would have had if we’d simply imposed our own views. I’ve seen this happen as my own team has struggled to handle vexing, highly politicized issues that cut to the core of their own personal belief systems.
As an example, consider our formulation of policies around Covid-19 vaccinations. In our area and nationally, well-meaning citizens harshly disagreed with one another about vaccination and the ability of government and private organizations to mandate it. Some supporters of vaccination wanted to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible and felt that public health concerns justified the imposition of mandates. Those who opposed the Covid-19 vaccine mandate distrusted vaccines for a whole slew of reasons, some of which I felt were legitimate and others less so, and they saw mandates as little more than tyranny and an attack on individual rights. The debate very quickly became toxic, with people on each side vilifying the other.
We had a lot of work to do on vaccination. By May 2021, only 45 percent of people in Utah were fully vaccinated, and only about 65 percent of Intermountain caregivers.10 We desperately wanted to get our caregiver numbers closer to 100 percent. But how? Other organizations took a hard line, imposing mandates. The results were mixed: yes, more people became vaccinated, but by forcing employees to receive vaccination or risk losing their jobs, these measures hardened the views of opponents and alienated them from the system, arousing discontent and paving the way for greater tension later.
Our leadership team was conflicted about how to proceed. We all believed wholeheartedly in the medical value and safety of vaccinations. Some of us advocated for a mandate at Intermountain, while others were less enthusiastic, fearing blowback and even the departure of staff at a time when we were experiencing a labor shortage.
I will admit that I initially was too strident in my own support for vaccination. As some of my colleagues continue to remind me, I tended to dismiss anti-vaxxers in harsh terms as “crazy” or “nuts.” Thankfully, members of my team with different viewpoints helped me to soften my stance somewhat. After my chief of staff, Katherina Holzhauser, conveyed her own hesitancy around the Covid-19 vaccine, I gained more understanding and compassion for anti-vaxxers. My empathy further grew after others shared stories of a nurse in our organization who felt terrified of getting the vaccine because she had lost three pregnancies already and feared that the vaccine would jeopardize her current efforts to finally become a mom. Even if the science indicated that the vaccine didn’t pose as much danger as this nurse and others believed, people had other concerns that mattered to them, and I needed to respect that. As much as I still favored vaccination, I had to remain keenly aware of the damage caused when we alienated people by mandating a health measure they so strongly opposed.
We wound up taking a more nuanced approach. We held off on issuing a mandate for as long as we could, giving people the choice as to whether or not to get vaccinated. At the same time, we offered members of our SelectHealth insurance system $100 cash rewards for getting the vaccine, a measure that resulted in nearly 30,000 additional vaccinations. Through that and the spread of messaging that encouraged vaccination, we were able to get about 75 percent of our employees fully vaccinated, with another 10 percent partially vaccinated. To further protect patients and staff, we also made sure to outfit our staff with the protective clothing they needed and put strict protocols in place to limit transmission. To our knowledge, no patient has ever been infected with Covid by an Intermountain staff member, a result that makes us proud.
In October 2021, we eventually did issue a mandate, but only because we had no choice: the Biden administration issued mandates that would greatly limit our ability to serve Medicare, Medicaid, and other patients if we didn’t comply. Even though our decision was forced on us and we offered exemptions in compliance with the law on religious or medical grounds, our mandate touched off a firestorm of criticism from opponents on Twitter and Facebook.
Our initial policy wasn’t perfect, but we got the vast majority of people in our system vaccinated while providing choice, dignity, and ongoing education. We did our best to listen to people and respect them, and the result was a more nuanced policy that evolved over time and got the best results possible without exacerbating tensions in our community any more than we had to.
Individuals inside Intermountain noticed this outcome and appreciated it. In the wake of the announcement of our mandate, a centrist-minded member of my leadership team issued a text message to our group that will stay with me for a while. “Proud of the professional approach,” they said. “The chips will inevitably fall where they may, but you have all done a very professional job in an incredibly challenging, divisive, and difficult environment.” Like other tough issues we’ve faced, this one might have broken our team. Instead, it brought us closer together.
FOSTERING EMPATHY
There are many tactics leaders can deploy to foster more empathy in ourselves and our teams. Some of my favorites include accompanying customers (in our case, patients) during their purchase and consumption process, asking personal questions at every meeting, holding information roundtable discussions on a periodic basis at which anyone can raise any topic, and starting every meeting by recounting a powerful experience someone in the organization had with a customer.
A common denominator underlies these and similar techniques. Becoming more empathetic entails cultivating genuine curiosity about others—including and especially those who think differently than you do—and devoting time and effort to satisfy that curiosity. For some of us, curiosity comes naturally. In my case, it goes to the core of who I am—I am constantly motivated to experimenting and exploring. Not long ago, in fact, when I was desperately ill with multiple myeloma and wondering if the end was near, the prospect of continued learning actually brought me some solace. Mary Carole and I found ourselves discussing what might lie on the other side of death. “Well,” I said, “I guess that might be my next adventure—to find out.” I really do intend to learn up until the very end, and maybe even afterward. For me, a great day is one filled with big ideas, interesting people, a chance to learn, do something different, or make a difference.
Whether or not you are naturally empathetic, I encourage you to fuel your understanding of others by unleashing your curiosity to the fullest. If the demands of leadership have caused you to push curiosity aside, then put it back front and center. Doing so can be as simple as pausing when you’re tempted to issue a directive or give an answer, and instead ask other people what they think. John Noseworthy remembers a pivotal moment when another leader at Mayo Clinic pulled him aside to give him some career-enhancing advice. “When people ask questions,” this leader said, “Why do you always give an answer? Why not instead use the question as a conversation starter to get others to contribute their ideas?”
So often as leaders, we assume we must know everything. We don’t. It’s usually best to let our curiosity lead us and extract what others think. Not only does it bring new ideas to the surface, it allows us to feel more empathy for others and build relationships with them, opening the way to change.
It’s so important for leaders to try their best to walk in other people’s shoes. Others might behave in ways that anger or annoy you, but their behavior takes on different meaning when you remember that everyone has some problem they’re dealing with and is bringing unique life experience to the table. Assuming the best and treating others generously is not only the right thing to do, it fuels our passion for change, and it enables us to resolve tensions and arrive at mutually satisfying solutions with customers, colleagues, and external stakeholders. Before you can unleash others, you must first take the time to understand them, whether you agree with them or not, especially when emotions run high.