I feel you
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I'm sure you've been in this situation. You start your presentation and you have everyone's full attention. Five minutes in, someone at the far end of the table pulls out their phone, making it as apparent as they can that they already understand all there is to know. Everything about their behaviour from this point on says, 'I'm too busy for this meeting, and it's not important.'
I have three points to make:
If you're too busy and it's not essential, why attend the meeting?
Acting like this is just f*cking rude.
You're suffering from a real lack of empathy.
In their book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss refer to this type of dramatic arc nicely as the 'agony of the supersmart', or ASS. They also share an excellent (if slightly blurred) chart to visualise this scenario.
Given the tumultuous past few months, now seems an opportune time to consider the role of empathy in our lives.
Writing about many of the topics I cover in a (relatively) short weekly newsletter means that I can only scratch their surface. Rather than write a definitive guide on how to adopt an empathic mindset, I'll attempt to offer some insight on how empathy is relevant to our work-lives in the current context.
[For reference, empathetic and empathic are interchangeable and while I've always tended to use the former, psychology and management writing tends to use the latter so will stick with that today.]
Empathy is the ability to read and understand other's emotions, needs, and thoughts.
In his book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Paul Bloom goes further, describing it as "the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does."
He distinguishes three different types of empathy.
In the case of emotional (or affective) empathy, you physically experience a weaker degree of what somebody else feels. Research has even shown that it's possible to see pain occur in the same area of the brain where we experience genuine pain.
Cognitive empathy, by comparison, refers to "our capacity to understand what is going on in the minds of others."
Finally, there's compassion, which describes our ability to feel concerned for someone, rather than sharing their suffering.
You can read more about Bloom's ideas on empathy and the effects of behavioural biases on our decision making in this excellent blog post on the Farnam Street website.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman highlights the difference between our 'fast', intuitive 'System 1' brain and our 'slow', rational 'System 2' brain. Empathy works in much the same way, and we can consciously adopt one mindset over another.
Can we, therefore, learn to be more empathic and improve how we apply it?
Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford and the author of The War for Kindness, says yes; it is a characteristic that can be actively encouraged or discouraged.
Similarly to the themes I touched on last week in Neuroplasticity and learning new things:
"People often have that notion about empathy—that each of us has a "level" of care built in to us, which, like our adult height, will never change. But our brains are plastic, and change in response to experiences, habits and practices. The same goes for empathy.
For instance, in a landmark study published two years ago, neuroscientists trained people in "loving kindness" meditation, a contemplative practice focusing on building people's care for others. After several months of this practice, people reported greater empathy, understood others' feelings more precisely and acted more generously to strangers.
A simple ten-month program that harnesses the proven power of neuroscience to elevate your mental and physical baselines while cultivating a mindset that allows you to achieve everything you are truly made for."
If we can increase our levels of empathy, how should we use it?
First, offer it to yourself.
Life can be incredibly stressful; no more so than at the moment as we're simultaneously learning how to adapt to restrictive circumstances as well as question our futures. In these circumstances, the best strategy is to approach our challenges with a sense of curiosity.
As leadership expert Peter Bregman wrote in Harvard Business Review:
"Being curious about ourselves is how we begin to know — really know — who we are. That can be scary. But also, possibly, exciting and freeing. The hardest part? Slowing down enough to actually feel. Do you have the courage to slow down?
You need courage because slowing down will, by its very nature, bring up unfamiliar and unsettling feelings. And, to avoid feeling, we typically move. Over the past few weeks I have often felt lost, surrounded by people scrambling to move. They are making plans, pivoting their businesses, voicing opinions, networking, setting direction, filling their schedules with Zoom calls. I'm on some of those Zoom calls and when, after listening to how everyone else is pivoting, people ask me how I'm pivoting, my answer is, "I don't know.""
He also outlines the benefits of starting from a position of curiosity with other people:
"I need to ask questions and be open and listen and learn. Which takes humility. Humility is not knowing. And that, eventually and almost always, leads to empathy which leads to compassion."
Attempting to understand and incorporate empathy into training isn't anything new. Around 20% of corporations in the U.S. offer empathy training to managers. Maintaining awareness of this appears increasingly tricky in an ever more distracting world, though, particularly now the lines between our work and home lives are so blurred. Yet it is even more critical than ever since it feeds directly into building trust, which is vital when working remotely.
Frei and Morriss know a little bit about trust, having been brought in firstly by Uber and then WeWork to repair toxic cultures. In Unleashed, they describe the three critical elements of building trust among a team as authenticity, logic and empathy.
They make the case that individuals and companies alike are at a great advantage if they can demonstrate empathy. Sadly, we've become collectively cynical about the intentions of many companies, believing that their priority is to:
"enrich themselves, not to be of service to their customers (or, heaven forbid, their employees). This belief gets reinforced by everything from less-than-living wages to draconian non compete agreements to the willful mishandling of our personal data."
Trust between leaders and their team, or indeed between companies and their customers, is a business imperative.
Take Patagonia, for example, which has been in the news over the past week because it has boycotted Facebook advertising (albeit only for one month). They are an example of a business that puts empathy at the heart of their business, prioritising social impact over financial returns. Founder Yvon Chouinard set out to build a company whose mission was to take care of customers, employees and the planet. Since 1985 they've donated 1% of all revenue to environmental non-profits, which as of last year was 1% of $1 billion in sales!
In the short term, how can people take an empathic approach to day-to-day work?
You could check out the latest Three Big Points podcast for some tips from authors of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, Molly West Duffy and Liz Fosslien.
Or, in summary, and to save time, you could just read these suggestions:
Be present. Listen attentively. Be curious. Put away your phone. In the past, I have even banned non-essential devices from meeting rooms, and there's no reason why you can't do the same during video calls.
Reduce the number and duration of meetings. Since we can no longer wander between desks or meeting rooms, give people time to recharge before the next video call. Change 30-minute sessions to 25 minutes, 60-minute meetings to 50 minutes etc.
Create 'it's ok if..." lists. Working-from home in these circumstances has meant we have had to create new norms, so why not make expectations crystal clear? You could, for example, write up that "it's ok if you turn your video off for some calls", or that "it's ok if you have lunch with your family and go for a walk', or ' it's ok if you don't work 9-5 if other times are better for you.'
Practice gratitude. Much of the gratitude exchanged between people in an office environment happens during informal moments, such as between meetings. Since we are no longer physically together, make time to offer thanks to people at the end of the day. A simple 'thanks for your help with the presentation, 'or 'you did a great job today' can have a massively positive impact on the recipient.
In these most discombobulating of times, being aware of the feelings of others is not just the right thing to do; it also has a positive effect on performance at work. As if you needed any more encouragement!
Have a good one.
Ollie
Any Other Business:
10 lessons in HR decision-making from the Covid-19 crisis by Rob Briner in People Management.
Arms-length managers must channel their inner coach: Support and trust will help empower home workers to do their best work autonomously by Andrew Hill in the FT.
Ditch the shirt - your next office will be a clubhouse by Mark Bridge in The Times.
How to build collaboration and innovation over the coming months with Lynda Gratton and Jenni Emery.
Morra Aarons-Mele discuss Introversion and Anxiety in Remote Work on Distributed podcast with Matt Mullenweg.
Will Covid kill off the office? by Rory Sutherland and Matthew Lesh in The Spectator.