Building and Nurturing Empathy in Teams

We spoke about the importance of Emotional Intelligence to Psychologically Safe teams and successful leaders many times before in articles such as Insta EQ - Just Add Heart,  Empathy and Communication in Psychologically Safe Teams and Emotionally Intelligent Team Leaders Not Mindless Execs And Middle Managers. At the centre of a high EQ - our ability to understand and relate to the feelings of others - aka “empathy”. No matter how much of it we believe we have in a team, it’s always worth working on getting more of it. As we were designing our Empathy Hackathon Play for the Playbook we once more, reconsidered both the point of it and the role it will all play out in the hybrid work environment. The point is clear: increasing empathic understanding correlates to a few components of Psychological Safety such as Flexibility and Openness making it necessary work. 

We said this before:

“When team members communicate from a position of mutual understanding and consistently demonstrate caring compassion towards each other, it allows true openness, reinforces their sense of courage, increases their morale, nurtures continuous learning and ensures progress, solidifies their ability to last a unit and overall strengthens the team bubble thus enableing Psychological Safety.”

It’s not an easy area to affect beyond just talking about it though. Being intentionally deeply caring and empathic has not been permitted or demanded of us in a professional environment before so it’s only natural it will take some work and getting used to. It also takes training. Learning and practising. Becoming willing to be open and vulnerable takes exercising. 

Where empathy is lacking or insufficient, the way the team communicates in frequency, content and intention are all continuously and negatively challenged, and teams find themselves constantly in search of process definition, while their exchanges are tensed and forced. Conflict is dreaded and avoided and when it arises anyhow, it’s often catastrophic and intensely traumatic, language is guarded and self-censored and of course, no one truly speaks up or is utterly honest, because they simply don’t trust their team members to “have their back” enough for vulnerability to be safely possible. 

Vulnerability is necessary to grow together and anyone who has spent 5 minutes listening to Brene Brown furiously agrees it is paramount, but it will not appear as behaviour while empathy is absent. It is only when we feel “seen”, “heard”, “understood” and “accepted” that we will allow ourselves to be vulnerable, as being mindful and understanding of each other’s commonalities makes it a lot safer. 

This is one of the reasons why at the beginning of the pandemic we created a “Remote Working - Stay Connected” pack of questions and added them to our Psychological Safety Dashboard solution. In it, we have packed questions and affirmations such as “I find I never even have time to replenish my coffee between zooms” or “We all worry about our jobs” or “I worked a lot more over the past few weeks at home than in the office” or “Every one of us is weary and tired at times” designed to reassure team members of the shared reality. They are not scored, they aren’t there to bring data but to express everyone is experiencing the same things and help with establishing the common ground of a difficult reality.

But as we said, there’s intentional work to be done as well, and in tomorrow’s video, we detail why and we’ve designed the Empathy Hackathon Play together with some of the teams we work with. The intention is to help people open up in a specifically designed space and to whet their appetite for continuous sharing which should be one of the most important goals a team has.

If we are empathic we can’t help but be compassionate and therefore be kind. Incidentally being kind is not only for the benefit of others as it also demonstrably makes us happier so this is not to be done out of a moral imperative only but because it is also one of the clear methods to increase wellbeing in positive psychology with writing and hand-delivering a “thank you” letter to someone you’re grateful for or buying gifts being some of the many proven ways in which we can increase our happiness. Studies and papers such as Happy people become happier through kindness: A counting kindnesses intervention. or Spending money on others promotes happiness show that rather counter-intuitive connection between being kind and being happy very clearly. 

Even if your team is not at a level where they can work on themselves and there’s no solution like ours in place to help with that betterment work, there is still plenty you can do about Empathy at your own individual level. Ask yourself how much empathy, compassion and kindness you’ve been expanding towards your teammates of late - how many times have you really put yourself in their shoes? Have you justified any of their actions through the prism of what you know is happening in their lives? Have you been more lenient? Have you offered to help even if just by listening? Do you even know what challenges they are facing? Do they know yours? Are you a team that’s leaning on each other and knows loads about each other or one that hides behind the “being professional” facade and impression manage by fearing they would appear like they’re prying? Once you ask yourself those you’ll know what to do next.

Have a week full of heart and understanding ahead to keep or become Psychologically Safe. 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become healthy, happy and highly performant.