The Importance Of Empathy In The Workplace
Fortunately, teams and leaders are becoming more focused on the emotional intelligence side of leadership, teamwork and collaboration in their organization. One word, which is being talked about more and more in recent years is ‘empathy’. Empathy is important for our own and others’ mental health and trying to understand empathy is even more important when it comes to our businesses and the development of our team.
The best definition I ever heard of empathy came from a speaker colleague of mine called Jon Acuff, who suggested that empathy is: caring about what the people you care about care about. I’ll say it again, because it’s so important and it’s beautifully constructed: empathy is caring about what the people you care about care about. And if you do genuinely care about what the people you care about care about, which may be caring about their family members, caring about their particular job or thing that they’re working on at that moment in time and you do genuinely care about what they care about, they will reciprocate and care more about you.
In return, this can help improve sales, improve collaboration, improve our relationships, and improve our world around us making us have a much better day, better week, better month, and better Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4, and will ensure that we can grow our business commercially as well. Essentially, a different way of looking at it, empathy is simply taking the time to understand, appreciate and recognize someone else’s feelings.
It may be shifting the focus from the question is someone doesn’t meet your expectations with an accusatory question of: “What’s the matter to?”, “Are you okay?” and simply leaning on our humanity a little bit. This could be from both a personal or professional perspective and if we’re doing this properly, it can in a very well, improve the quality of how we connect and interact with others.
What Exactly Is Empathy?
Empathy at its core is not feeling bad about something, nor is it being sympathetic towards somebody. Nor is it doing something out of compassion for somebody. It’s stepping into somebody else’s shoes and seeing things from a different perspective specifically from their perspective. It goes beyond sharing our emotions and extends into the intellectual emotional recognition of our experiences, thoughts and feelings with increased levels of empathy.
It’s not just our employees that it can help, but it can also improve our team performance as a whole. It can help with customer relationships, it can help resolve conflict easier, and it can help us become more effective leaders, as well as improving our and employee overall well-being. In return, demonstrating higher levels of empathy fosters higher levels of trust, encourages greater levels of openness, and in turn, a higher level of mutual respect. Not only that but it allows for more open and clear communication, because it allows us to sidestep the possibility for misinterpretation or misunderstanding that often are the result of workplace and private life conflicts.
So then, if we’re wanting to sell something, or improve collaboration within our team, or improve our relationship with our loved ones, it’s worth taking some time out to understand and focus on building empathy with others. But the good news for all of us is that we don’t have to leave it to chance. Demonstrating authentic empathy can be done intentionally and improving and developing our empathetic skill-set is like a muscle – the more you use it and the more you train it, the more empathetic you can become.
Why?
The reason is because we’re emotional creatures. However, our emotions can cause use to become irrational in our conflict with our decision making whether that decision-making is based on an emotional decision or not.
Empathy And It’s Impact On Decision Making:
In fact, a few years ago, a group of psychologists conducted an experiment to explore empathy and decision making and is widely referred to as the parking ticket test. The principle was super simple in its approach. A group of participants came into a media studio to conduct the study and when they were getting ready someone (actually an actor) also participating in the experiment came into the media studio and told one of the participants they’ve got just received a parking ticket.
The reality was that they hadn’t but as you can imagine, the person that they told was not happy at all. Now there’s a couple of different versions of this study. But in one of the versions, they were told by the other participants (also actually actors), that things could be worse and gave them a cold, dry an unemotional response lacking in empathy. In another version of the study, the subjects or participants (also actors) were given higher levels of empathy sometimes known as warm empathy. They showed this by all agreeing that receiving this ticket was a disaster! They empathized by saying: “I’m really sorry. This is so upsetting when it happens to me, I get so annoyed as well”. The experimenters then measured the person who had receive the ticket’s level of happiness.
As I mentioned before, people are emotional creatures and this can make us irrational in our decision making. As a result, those participants that were told to not to worry, cheer up, and things could be worse found that the person they were telling found that their happiness levels fell by about 7%. In contrast, those participants who had supposedly received the parking ticket were given warm empathy and felt understood and connected on a human level and engaged with the other participants and empathized with them, they reported that their baseline happiness went up before the study even started by 7% in the opposite direction.
This means that they were happier simply because someone took some time out to be empathetic with them, and understand what it was like to be in their shoes and see things from a different vantage point. But not only that empathy just doesn’t build happiness, it also builds trust, because of course trust has to be first built, and then it multiplies over time.
How To Leverage Empathy As A Sales Person
In fact, there’s another story that supports this in which a salesperson from a safety company used to use empathy as a way to get people to trust them. He deployed an extremely easy, practical and straightforward secret. One of the strategies that he sold his product is he used to be invited into people’s houses so that they could show them how to use the product and once they felt comfortable and they were about to sign on the dotted line to purchase the thing he was selling from them he told them that he’d forgotten something from the car.
He told them that he felt so embarrassed, offered up his vulnerability and asked them if he could just pop outside and grab the bits and bobs that he needed. As a result, his prospective clients empathized with him.
They understood his situation, because we all forget things from time to time. And in that moment of empathy and understanding, their level of trust for the salesperson increased. Why? Because he offered up his vulnerability and when we display a flaw, we genuinely look and appear more honest, more open, more transparent and more vulnerable and, in turn that results in more empathy, more trust, and in his context, resulted in more sales.
How To Elevate The Customer Experience Using Empathy
Not only that, but empathy can actually increase the customer experience. So, the question I would ask you and other organizations is “how many of you are questioning your levels of empathy of your employees and of your leadership team?” The question and degree of self-reflection should be irrespective of what industry you’re working in. It could be a marketing, sales, IT leadership or sports media industry. Essentially, empathy changes the quality of our relationships.
In fact, there was another study conducted involving doctors who showed empathy to their patients, in which they weren’t just listening to their symptoms and their problems, but they were actually empathizing about their situation, getting to understand the context and exploring their situation better, above and beyond just their symptoms. As a result of this empathy, they were able to help more than 500 more patients than in any other circumstances to feel more satisfied. In turn this influenced their patients to follow their treatment regime more than other patients who weren’t empathized with because they felt more listened to and they felt more understood and as a result felt more connected with the doctor.
As a result, the experimenters found that the patients were significantly more likely to follow the advice of the doctor and take their medicine to the prescribed level over the prescribed length of time. But not only that, empathy also helps us become more creative as well as it drives engagement, increases the level of employee retention within our organizations, and all the great things that you need as an organization to attract great candidates and build a solid customer base and turn them into raving fans about your products, services or indeed your organization.
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Duncan shares more tactical insights and strategies about achieving success, cultivating a high-performance mindset and fulfilling your potential on his Youtube Channel on Youtube.com/duncanstevens – To discover more about empathy for leaders or to even hire him to speak about high-performance leadership, influence or collaboration at your event you can follow the link below. Duncan is a professional keynote speaker and global authority on high-performance leadership, influence and collaboration.
