The Art of Empathy and Why it Matters

I've been reading a lot about the importance of empathy in the work place and I could not be more pleased to see this starting to creep up into our corporate cultures!

Mind Tools offers skills on empathy, The Center for Creative Leadership posted on the Importance of Empathy in the Work Place and Forbes suggests 4 Ways to Practice Empathy at Work.

According to Dr. Brené Brown's research on the impact of shame and vulnerability in organizations, shame is pervasive, destructive and painful. We would love to believe that emotions in general are not present at work, but we know of course they are. How they are able to be manifested, talked about and managed is another situation. The emotion of shame, the belief that we are "not enough" is often at the root of some of the most challenging behaviors we see in work environments. I wrote more in depth about this in a previous post on The Number 1 Cause of Bad Behavior in Teams and Organizations.

According to Dr. Brown, the emotion of shame can be defined in simple terms as the fear of disconnections. In other words, the fear that we are not good, smart, experienced, valued or promoted enough and are not viewed through a positive enough lens by others whose opinions matter to us. One of the most interesting findings to come from this research is that the greatest elicitor of shame in an organization is the fear of irrelevance. We all want to matter.

What does all of this have to do with empathy? Well Empathy is the antidote to shame. Shame makes us want to hide and go quiet about our real feelings. In response to harboring and hiding such painful emotions, we often see the pain leaking out of us in unproductive ways through poor behavior, attacks, criticism, judgment or disengagement. What heals and soothes the feeling of shame is empathy. The belief that we are truly seen and heard and that our experience is validated as 'true for us'.

When I work with leaders on this core skill set of empathy their greatest fear is that they will get it wrong. That they will SAY the wrong thing to someone who is expressing frustration, anger, pain or other hard emotions. I get that, we are generally well intentioned in our hope to sooth another persons pain but often in doing so, we miss the mark. Rather than offering true empathy, we try to dismiss their feelings, negate them, fix the problem for them or minimize their experience. Unfortunately, these actions only serve to deepen the shame, what truly soothes the pain is simply being heard and acknowledged...in other words, connection.

If you are also worried about getting empathy wrong, there are 4 key steps to empathy and while each step is not always easy, actually very few of them require you to say anything!

• Step 1: Taking the perspective of the other person (listen to see the world as they see it)
• Step 2: Try to understand what emotions they might be experiencing based on what you hear.
• Step 3: Stay out of judgment (Accept their truth as their own. You don't have to agree, simply allow.)
• Step 4: Name the emotion you hear and reflect it back to them.

Only the 4th and final step actually requires you to SAY anything! At a minimum, you might name the emotion "Ah, wow, that sounds frustrating/disappointing/maddening" or you might begin to build on that statement to speak to what you understand about experiencing that emotion "Ugh, I imagine with that much frustration it must feel hard to take action or move forward." Try on their emotion inside you, let yourself come into contact with it and speak from that place.

This, in the end, is why we often avoid actual empathy because it causes us to try on the emotions of another and that is an inherently vulnerable act. We may not want to 'go there' so we would rather offer them solutions and suggestions to move them past this pain so that neither them, nor us, have to feel it any more. While well-meaning, this approach does not offer a balm to the pain, it is pushing their pain aside. When we feel truly seen and heard, we are less likely to engage in unhealthy or destructive behavior towards ourselves or others.

We can literally heal others with our empathy! The first step to developing this skill is to develop your emotional literacy, expand the number of emotions you can name. The Center for Non-Violent Communication offers a great Feelings Inventory list. Start practicing labeling emotions you feel throughout the day and then start trying to identify how others might be feeling.

It is harder than it sounds and we will continue to get it wrong. The goal around empathy is not to always get it right but to always be willing to try, get it wrong and try again. It's worth it, every time.