Lead with empathy. Agreed. But how?

In my last article, I wrote about why empathy is required. The next obvious question is how to practice that in real life.

Every human is unique. So, how to practice empathy depends upon the individual and the person in perspective. If you Google the phrase “how to practice empathy”, you will get umpteen suggestions. Let's not get in there. I will just share my experience and a few tips which have helped me.

I get reminded of an instance from the early years of my career. The railway reservation system at Ahmedabad was down. Senior railway officials, supervisors, and operators all were under pressure with huge queues of passengers waiting outside for the counters to open on time. The time for counters to open was 8 a.m. and it was already 7:30 a.m. The panic level was increasing. As a responsible support engineer, I was there early morning to face the challenge. There were a lot of heated arguments around me which increased my pressure. However, I just kept myself disengaged from that noise and kept my focus to resolve the issue. One another thing I did was to provide regular progress updates to those officials. To everyone’s relief, the system was up before the scheduled time. The ticketing went normal, and the customer had a ton of praise for me. I may not have known the phrase emotional intelligence or empathy at that time.?But as I reflect now, I believe it was the same – I was acting with empathy to the customers and was on their side to resolve the issue. Still cherish those moments, after 23 years.

I have worked in support organisations as well as sales organisations. Customer empathy is more often visible by the successful services teams, though it is present in a little subdued form in Sales/Presales. Let me share my top tips for practising empathy as I muse about my professional career. The following three simple points always worked for me in practising empathy with customers whether presales or postsales.

1. Be available. When there is a need, being present is the first thing needed for empathy.
2. Listen. Once there, active listening is the next step. Listen without preconceived notions or prejudices. Never get into the solution or what you have to offer until the customer has completed what he/she has to convey.
3. Align: Aligning and connecting with their problem. Try to get into the shoes of the customer before acting on it trying to find out what the real challenge is. Be on the same page as your customer.

I have another recent example where one of our customers was not happy with us. He was perceived as a very difficult person. Often, there were disagreements between our presales and the customer. While the guy was technically strong, issues didn't cease with the customer. So, we decided to bring in a change. We got another presales person to align with the account. This guy just practised the same three things I mentioned above and now that person is a top supporter of us. It's just that little empathy which worked.

Empathy is something which relates to the heart. I believe empathy is very natural when conversations happen with your heart involved and with a positive mindset. It is a skill, like any other, which needs a bit of practice. “Learning – Doing – Being” is a technique for individual transformation, something I learnt as a part of a meditation class from BuddhaCEO Quantum Foundation.?To be empathetic, you need to be self-aware and understand the need to care for others. Then start implementing it in daily life regularly – consciously and gradually you will become one who is empathetic by default. You may not even realise but you will be acting empathetically.

I want to end this article with a simple but effective quote from Daniel Goleman – “A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain”.

Why don't you share your experience with “How to lead with Empathy” in a comment below? Look forward to an engaging dialogue.

#IWork4Dell?#Empathy?#SimplifyWithSourabh

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This post is part of the series?#SimplifyWithSourabh. The idea for this initiative came from my friends and colleagues who wanted me to share some bytes from my experience.?#SimplifyWithSourabh?includes posts based on my experience where I try to simplify a concept related to life or technology. The views mentioned are my own.

This article is also a part of an initiative in the group?Soltech, Recognizing enterprising technophiles across the cloud. I would encourage all the technophiles to join the group for more relevant feeds.

PS: Picture Courtesy - Austin-Kehmeier- Unsplash