Leading with Empathy | A Learning Experience Design (LXD) Case Study

Last week I was privellege to be part of a webinar series name Upskill2023 condcuted by IEEE Young Professionals Sri Lanka and I was asked to do an online session on "Leading with Empathy"

Normally the talks about leading with empathy relates to corporates where the impact of bosses can make on team mates by being empahthetic is higlhigted. In this case, the audience were students and I wanted to give an impact to them by relating it to their context.

Experiement

Therfore, I did a test at the beginning, where I showed a video of an unknown person begging for money and asked what you would do.

And I made sure that to get the responses by lining the gender. I did this because I was curious to know whether gender has an impact on being empathetic. And the results was this.

Only 40% of the total respondens said they will give money without being judgemental. And interestingly, only 16% of it was females.

Explanation

Then I went on to explain them what Sympathy an Empathy is using below diagrams.

As in this picture, when a person in a trouble, it is like, he is in a muddy puddle. We can have different approaches in this scenario.

Sympathy is feeling sorry for the person. Here the 2nd person will not get into the shoes of the 1st person to understand his crisis. Therfore sympathy will make the 1st person feel like victimised and will increasse the sorrow more

Empathy is understanding the trouble from and share the emotions together with them. Here the 2nd person will step into the shoes of the 1st person to understand it well. Empathy will create a sense of belonging and create postivity in the 2nd person to come out of the trouble

Compassion is having genuine desire to take the person out of the problem. Here the 2nd person will try to stay shoulder to shoulder and initiate actions to take the 1st person out of the trouble.

The words used in different scenarios it self will differentiate in which state you are in as in below diagram.

Therfore, being Empathetic is essential for every leader because they do assoicate with different individuals from diversbackround. Since the major role of a leader is to get things done from peope, being empathetic will make the team members feel belonging and will make the put their best effort all the time.

Though compassion is the best state to be in as a human being, leaders may not be able to be compassionate all the time, because they may not be in a postion to take actions to different trobules of team mate. But certainly the conversations needs to be in that tone to make them feel more belonging.

Execution

Since being empathetic is an essential thing for everyone, below three things can be the key to become a more empathetic person.

Active listening will always initiate the feeling of being valued. Acknowledging emotions will ensure that the next person is understanding us. Avoiding the comparision will help to go the next step, which is to be compassionate by initiating actions.

End Result

Since the audience is unviersity students their role to lead by empathy is in all the teams they are part of such as clubs, societies and sports. I took more time to explain practical context of being student leaders and getting things done by team members and the dire need of being empathetic, because the people they lead are not paid employees by volunteers.

Finally, as a validation for the learning experince i gave to them I gave the below scenario for them to answer.

And the results was amazing.

The first level of succss for me as a trainer was, the increased level of engagement by the audiencem where the respondent count for Q2 went up to 42 from being 25 for Q1.

This is a 68% increase of engagement

Next, the results.

50% of the audience picked the most empathetric answer and 43% picked the 2nd most empathetic answer, making 93% of the audience stepping in as leaders with empathy.

The point to note here is the change in mind set.

As per Q1, only 40% chose the empathetic answer, where 60% was not seeing things empathetically. But at the end of the program, only 7% was not looking at things empathetically, which is a 88% conversion in mindset by learning experience.

Within a 60 mins online session, getting a 68% increase in engagement of audience, and 88% change in mindset is always a great feeling for a Learning Experience Designer (LXD)

Self Reflection

Just the end of this session, I saw a funeral notice from a student about his beloved father. Then I start seeing the condolances messages in a different way.

It triggered me that "Deepest Sympathies" is the " I feel for you" type, and should not be used at all, but some other words to be emphathetic one. which is " I feel with you" type.

Not sure what can be the best set of words to be used in such scenario, which relfects empathy.

For the time beign, I took the empathetic approach, by not putting a comment, instead inboxed him the below.

"Your father can be proud of whom you became as a human being. May god give strength to your family"