Leading with Empathy - Understanding the Needs of Today's Workforce

Author: Gautham Pallapa

Summary

As we as a society get a better understanding about the diversity of the people living on the planet and the multiple crisis that are emerging (a global pandemic, racial, economic, gender injustice, climate catastrophe, wars), we recognize how important empathy is in the realm of leadership. The Covid-19 global pandemic disrupted the workspace and generated a lot of trauma and mental health issues.

Therefore empathy is a valuable skill for a leader. Happy people are productive people. Empathy comes into play when managing teams, but also when dealing with customers.

Quotes:

S. 22 As we embrace our role as emapthic leaders, we also need to be cognizant of the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is driven by feelings of pity or concern for another person without really comprehending what it feels like to be in that person’s situation. One can feel sympathy for homeless people, someone crying on the street, or painfully hobbling along with crutches on an icy footpath. However, empathy refers to the ability to imagine oneself in another’s situation; experience the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that person; and take action to help reduce pain and suffering for the other person.

S.125

Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist who popularized Emotional Intelligence, attributed five critical components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, social skills, and empathy.

S. 127

From “Dare to Lead” by Brené Brown She refers to four qualities of empathy:

• To be able to see the world as others see it
• To be nonjudgmental
• To understand another’s feelings
• To communicate your understand of that person’s feelings

S. 129

Cognitive Empathy

Cognitive empathy is the ability to put oneself in the other person’s shoes and rationally experience what the other person is going through

Emotional Empathy

This is the ability to share feelings of another person and have a deeper understanding with the person.

Compassionate Empathy

This is the most active form of empathy. It involves not only being concerned about another person and experiencing their emotional pain, it also involves taking effective actions to help reduce the pain or origin of suffering.

S. 132

The Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy

On the other hand, sympathy introduces a level of disconnection and distance by creating a complex power dynamic where the sympathizer is better positioned than the recipient, even though it is not intended to be that way.

…, empathy is the ability to create a safe space for others to feel their own emotions completely and to be able to understand their experience.

S.152

Label the Emotion

This is a popular technique that psychologists and leadership experts recommend. By labeling your emotion, you are shifting your perspective from an abstract concept to a tangible object. You are starting to define your feeling of fear and increase your awareness of the emotion you are undergoing. Practice by saying that you are feeling an emotion rather than expressing yourself with it. For instance, if you are anxious about a meeting, acknowledge it by saying, “I am feeling anxiety,” rather than “I feel anxious.” This subtle shift in focus shifts your mindset from being the emotion to experiencing the emotion, making it manageable and allowing you to address it.

S. 153

Assign Time to Develop Self-Awareness

Many leaders are so involved in the act of leading that they forget to stop and introspect. Some find reflection and introspection unpleasant as such session tend to highlight personal areas that they perceive as weaknesses and failings rather than opportunities for improvement. A small portion of leaders considers that spending time thinking about themselves makes them self-absorbed, self-centered, or even egoistic.

S. 155

The Benefits of Exhibting Emotional Intelligence

• Better collaboration
• Better adaptability
• Better communication
• Better leadership

S. 162

How to change limiting beliefs

Step 1: Realize that you have an advantage over others.

Failing is not the same as being a failure. Failing implies that one has actually attempted, a feat that not many people could have accomplished.

S. 163

Step 2: Invalidate your limiting beliefs. The power of a limiting belief lies in how deeply one believes in it. An effective strategy to prevent it from taking over is to introduce doubt in one’s mind. Here is a simple exercise to help you. For each limiting belief that you have identified, find at least three pieces of evidence against your belief.

Step 3: Transform your limiting belief into a motivator Once you have enough evidence to invalidate and doubt the legitimacy of your limiting beliefs, practice this simple step to convert it into a motivator for your personal growth. Add a “yet” to the end of any limiting belief that disparages you. For example, “I don’t have enough experience to get that promotion—yet” or “I can’t solve this hard problem—yet.”

S. 190 Empathetic Leadership focuses on understanding the need of team members, being sensitive to their deficiency and growth needs, and selflessly striving to provide them for the team members. An empathetic leadership style increases psychological safety within the organization. It makes everyone realize that they are important parts of the same team trying to accomplish the same purpose. It increases productivity, team morale, and loyalty. Empathy is one of the essential traits of a good leader.

When a leader can look at a fellow workforce member and put themselves in their shoes, understand the pain and stress they are undergoing, and value their happiness above their own, they are genuinely empathic.

S. 197 Leaders really should want to make people happy. When you ask someone to tell you more about something that is clearly impacting them, mean it. Give them your full attention so that they know you are meaning what you say. Also, when you ask, “How can I help?” realize that you are signing up for something, usually hard.

Leaders cannot really exude empathy when they are stiff and stand-offish. They need to demonstrate that they are comfortable enough to wear their heart on their sleeve. Many leaders have been trained to have a stiff upper lip and not show emotions in the workplace. This is unfortunate and forces them to try to put on a façade when they are at work. Instead, learn to be sensitive and share personal aspects of life.

S. 199 Encourage people; appreciate what they are doing and how much they are doing. Appreciate in public. Give feedback in private.

S. 200 Psychological safety is the ability to be oneself and show emotions without fear of any adverse consequence to one’s persona, brand, career, status, or social standing.

S. 201 Psychological safety at work describes an environment where one believes that one can freely speak up about any idea, concern, question, and mistake without being humiliated or getting oneself in any trouble.

S. 232 The typology of Organizational Culture is based on the information processing style and responses to difficulties and opportunities. Westrum described three types of cultures: pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. Depending on the organizational culture’s safety aspect, these types have been categorized by the leaders’ and managers’ preoccupations.

S. 245 Empathy is necessary now more than ever with ever-increasing diversity in the workforce. From an age-diversity perspective alone, some organizations can have up to four generations of team members, and catering to their needs becomes challenging. Empathy in the workplace can help increase respect and trust among co-workers, and elevate behavior from process or policy-driven to performance or relationship-driven.

S. 246

The Benefits of Empathy in the Workplace We have discussed many benefits of empathy in the workplace. To summarize:

• Happy people are productive people. Empathy increases psychological safety, trust, and happiness. When these increase, people are more willing to take risks, and when they take more risks, they innovate better and are more productive.
• Empathetic businesses have better sales and retention. Cognitive empathy helps drive sales. It also helps retain loyal customers, since customers can relate and see you as empathetic.
• Teams bond better, with greater collaboration. Empathy improves teamwork. Teams better share goals and performance metrics. They understand what impacts other members. They try to reduce the pain that their processes or behavior could inflict on others. They collaborate better to achieve their goals.

S. 249ff.

Execution As teams adapt to more remote workers and days, organization leaders should focus on optimizing the flow of value within the organization and modernizing workforce interaction methods. There are six unspoken laws that we need to consider as governing principles for execution:

• Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” This law has its origins with Edward J. Murphy, a major in the US Air Force in the 1940s, whose work involved testing experimental designs in safety-critical systems. The nature of his work exposed Murphy to events, prototypes, and systems that did not conform with the expected response, and this law was coined to describe unpredictable behavior.
• Pareto principle: “80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.” This is commonly known as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few. In essence, the Pareto principle helps us identify the most important assets or inputs for an entity (the vital few or the 20 percent) and utilizing them optimally to create maximum value. We can also interpret it as identifying the most critical inputs, outcomes, or causes and using them to cover 80 percent of target use cases or scenarios. Do not wait until you understand 100 percent of a situation.
• Conway’s law: “Organizations design systems that mimic the organizational structure.” Conway’s law is an aphorism that implies organizations design systems that mirror their communication structure. “Inverse Conway” is a concept introduced by Thoughtworks in 2015 as a mechanism for organization restructuring around better software development. The Inverse Conway maneuver states that the right organizational structure will create the right kind of software feature or function. While this is heavily weighted toward software companies— with the reasoning that for a software module or feature to function, multiple teams much communicate with each other—we can extend this law to different industry verticals by substituting software function with value created. Therefore, the broader interpretation of Inverse Conway’s law then becomes: An organizational structure that is designed to optimize the flow of created value within the organization will reduce friction through the organization from idea to consumption of the value that the organization manages.
• Brook’s law: “Adding more people to a late project only makes it later.” Fred Brooks coined this law in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month.2 According to Brooks, the main factors contributing to his law are: People newly assigned to a project have a learning curve and ramp-up time to familiarize themselves with the project, outcomes, features, techniques, and workflows. Even veterans in an industry still need to educate themselves on organization-specific cultures, workflows, and methods. “Hitting the ground running” is an aspirational phrase that project sponsors have when they assign new people to a late project with the hope that they can pull in timelines. The more people on a project, the more complicated communication becomes. Communication overhead rapidly increases with additional people, and logistical challenges of being in sync with ongoing work, being aware of current project status, and being cognizant of project impediments increase drastically with more people on the project. Dividing specialty tasks optimally with many people is sometimes difficult and can result in long wait times, increasing the project’s overall duration. Brooks points this out in his book with an example: “While it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, nine women can’t make a baby in one month.”
• Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.” The most cited example to support this law’s effects is the tale of nail factories in the Soviet Union. To measure how performant factories were, central planners decided to use the number of nails manufactured (more widgets created means more productivity, right?) to measure the factory’s productivity and issued minimum expected targets. To meet and surpass these targets, factory operators produced millions of tiny nails useless for any practical purposes. When the central planners realized this, they switched the targets to nails’ total weight instead (total tonnage of production). The factory operators responded appropriately by producing enormous and heavy nails that exceeded target but were once again useless. A few digital examples of Goodhart’s law incentivizing wrong behavior are using click-through rate (CTR) as a target for advertisements or the number of bugs detected in a test cycle. Imagine the number of spurious defects filed if we incentivize testers by measuring the number of bugs identified in a test cycle. The amount of time it will take for teams to thoroughly address each of these defects would be substantial. Conversely, think of how bloated software would be if developers are measured by how many lines of code they write.
• Metcalfe’s law: “The more devices connected to a system, the more useful it becomes.” Metcalfe’s law was first developed for telecommunications networks and the Internet but has expanded to other areas. For instance, a social platform’s value increases as the number of people adopting the platform increases. The same can be said about Uber, Lyft, Doordash, or any digital platform that brings together two different communities. We can also utilize Metcalfe’s law for technology adaption within organizations trying to modernize their existing infrastructure and toolset. Unless enough people adapt to new technology, it will not generate enough value and instead incur technical debt. Therefore, organizations need to look at technologies with low barriers to entry, low integration costs (integration into their existing systems), a low user learning curve, and a good user experience, especially for a highly remote workforce.

S. 253

Signal the End of a Working Day

A challenge of existing from home is losing essential cues that indicate the end of a working day. Introduce the concept of a spindown that serves this purpose. A spindown is a ritual where, every day, the team regroups at the end of the workday and discusses the team’s wins for that day. This meeting is scheduled on the team calendar for the same time every day. Next, they call out team members who helped them remove a blocker, taught them something new, or went above and beyond in sharing knowledge or skills. The teams do not talk about existing impediments or blockers (the team discusses these at the beginning of the next day); the ritual aims to have a positive end for a day. Spindowns help remote teams in many ways:

They signal the end of a working day, psychologically relax the mind, and reduce stress. Talking about what they accomplished provides necessary dopamine and serotonin release to team members. The act of callouts releases serotonin and oxytocin in team members and helps them be proud of one another and helps them bond better, which, in turn, increases the team’s psychological safety.

S. 256

The third step is to introduce pairing at various levels within the organization. There are many studies that demonstrate the benefit of pairing and increased value creation. In addition to those benefits, remote pairing generates better quality of work, better morale, and real-time collaboration. It increases bonding between pairs (oxytocin release), team accountability increases, and immense mentoring capabilities. Teams that practice pairing and pair rotation constantly report higher cohesion and Psychological Safety within the team— essential in these stressful work conditions.

S. 259 With a remote workforce distributed over geographies and time zones, leaders must discourage synchronous communication such as status meetings to propagate information.

S. 266 POWER to Make Meetings Valuable POWER (see Figure 7.2) is a technique taught by my mentor Lyssa Adkins4 and has proven to be effective in several organizations. POWER stands for:

Purpose. Start the meeting by stating the purpose of the meeting and why participants are here.

Outcomes. Clearly state the outcomes or deliverables for this meeting. What are your expectations as a meeting organizer?

What’s in it for me (WiiFM). Impress upon the participants what value they will derive from this meeting. People are more involved when they perceive value (their return on investment).

Engage. Engage your participants with excitement and passion. Humans are emotion-driven and reciprocate the feelings of others. Bringing your passion and excitement to the meeting will help participants relate to you and your expectations.

Roles. Be very clear about the roles and responsibilities of participants. Ensure that you are following proper meeting invite etiquette and clearly outline your expectations from your attendees.

Following these approaches will not only increase the signal-to-noise ratio within your organization, it will also drive effective communication and reduce meeting sprawl.

S. 270

How to Increase Psychological Safety

Incraese ccoperation: Create stable, balanced, and cross-functional teams that are built around value streams and a common purpose. These teams should have a representative from each functional area in the value stream and be empowered to create value, deliver it to production or to the customer, and manage the value. They need to have a common purpose, shared responsibility, shared OKRs, and shared incentives. This will improve cooperation within the team and introduce shared accountability. It also helps share risks within the team. Quality, security, and resiliency are responsibilities of everyone on the team, and the shared OKRs will drive that behavior. Make sure that the teams have a common toolset as well. Conformity will help camaraderie in this case. It will also enable the team members to help each other when they have challenges with a tool, or there will be consensus in changing toolsets if that doesn’t work out for them.

• Celebrate failure
• Encourage experimentation
• Promote fun
• Reduce your work-in-progress
• Enable flexible work hours
• Encourage downtime
• Promote sustainable pace
• Make working from home comfortable
• Provide wellness and emotional support resources

S. 289 To build high-performing teams, leaders need to prioritize trust, empowerment, and empathy over deadlines and performance.