Empathy in the Workplace

Techniques to help you hear, process, and respond.

Study after study has shown that listening is critical to leadership effectiveness. So, why are so few leaders good at it?

Too often, leaders seek to take command, direct conversations, talk too much, or worry about what they will say next in defense or rebuttal.  Additionally, leaders can react quickly, get distracted during a conversation, or fail to make the time to listen to others.  Finally, leaders can be ineffective at listening if they are competitive, if they multitask such as reading emails or text messages, or if they let their egos get in the way of listening to what others have to say.

Instead, leaders need to start by really caring about what other people have to say about an issue. Research also shows that active listening, combined with empathy or trying to understand others’ perspectives and points of view is the most effective form of listening.  Henry Ford once said that if there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put oneself in another person’s place and to see things from his or her point of view –as well as from one’s own.

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Research also shows that active listening,
combined with empathy or trying to understand
others’ perspectives and points of view
is the most effective form of listening. 
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by Christine M. Riordan 

Business management magazine, blogs, case studies, articles, books, and webinars from Harvard Business Review, addressing today's topics and challenges in business management.

Almost every company competes to some degree on the basis of continual innovation. And to be commercially successful, new product and service ideas must, of course, meet a real—or perceived—customer need. Hence the current managerial mantras: “Get close to the customer” and “Listen to the voice of the customer.”

The problem is, customers’ ability to guide the development of new products and services is limited by their experience and their ability to imagine and describe possible innovations. How can companies identify needs that customers themselves may not recognize? How can designers develop ways to meet those needs, if even in the course of extensive market research, customers never mention their desires because they assume those desires can’t be fulfilled?

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A set of techniques we call empathic design 
can help resolve those dilemmas.
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by Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport

Formally the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, the D.school has made a global impact by encouraging students to find out what is most useful....

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“It’s a guided approach to building

that empathy muscle until, pretty soon,

they are out there doing it on their own,”

Mr. Kelley said....

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At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.

Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.

When communicated as it is in this video, empathy can be truly inspirational. What the Cleveland Clinic movie reveals is the true scale and complexity of the challenge of understanding a complex social situation in order to design a system that supports many and various needs.   

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When communicated as it is in this video,

empathy can be truly inspirational.

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Tim Brown  CEO at IDEO

For many in the innovation field, the hardest task is listening – real listening, deep listening. To listen without building a mental model or rushing to a conclusion is a cultivated skill.

To listen to a person’s summary of your product or service and honor their experience as the only experience that matters is not only a great courtesy, but it can be a competitive advantage; that is, if you are willing to collect feedback from a lot of customers and apply adaptive intelligence.

The hardest part is just listening.

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In the Design Thinking methodology of

innovation, the first major phase is

Empathy.

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Don’t look now, but all of a sudden the topic of compassionate management is becoming trendy.

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A growing number of business conferences

are focusing in on the topic

of compassion at work.

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There’s the International Working Group on Compassionate Organizations. There’s the Changing Culture in the Workplace Conference. Then there’s Wisdom 2.0, dedicated to “exploring living with greater awareness, wisdom and compassion in the modern age.” The speakers are no slouches: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Bill Ford (yes, that Bill Ford), Karen May (VP of Talent at Google), and Linked In CEO Jeff Weiner top the bill. At TED, Karen Armstrong’s talk about reviving the Golden Rule won the TED prize in 2009 and has given rise to a Charter for Compassion signed by nearly 100,000 people.

I took part in a conference in London to explore the benefits of creating a culture of compassion at work.

My role was to introduce and interview the speakers - leading business professors, consultants, psychologists, scientists, teachers, healthcare professionals and others who have been studying compassion and how it can transform companies and organisations...

Here are six things I learned about

why this matters:

1. Stress is bad for business...
 

2. Compassion boosts the bottom line...
 

3. Givers come out on top...
 

4. Compassion makes us happier and healthier...
 

5. Kindness is contagious...
 

6. Everyone wins...
 

Andy Fraser - Journalist focusing on empathy and compassion

image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_labour

SCALING AND SUSTAINING A HUMAN-CENTERED APPROACH 

IN THE EVOLVING PRACTICE OF DESIGN

IDEO is expanding the power of design thinking by helping organizations to scale and sustain empathy. 

Remarkable things can happen when empathy for others plays
a key role in problem-solving. In today’s global marketplace,
companies are being asked to design for increasingly diverse
users, cultures, and environments. These design challenges
can be so systemic and wickedly complex, the task of aligning
all of a project’s stakeholders can seem impossible. But it’s not.

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Design empathy is an approach that draws

upon people’s  real-world experiences

to address modern challenges.

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When  companies allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s
needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams,
and even their organization at large—they unlock the creative
capacity for innovation.

By Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard

IDEO is an innovation and design firm that uses a human-centered, design-based approach to help organizations in the business, government, education, healthcare, and social sectors innovate and grow.

Some bosses seem to completely lack empathy. Not only does this make life pretty miserable for their employees, empathy turns out to be very important to leadership success as well. The good news, we can increase empathy.

So why is it that some bosses are great and others are so bad? One big reason is an empathy deficit that seems to get worse the higher up you go in an organization. In Robb Smith’s TED talk he notes how CEOs have the lowest emotional intelligence in the entire workforce. Empathy, what Dianne Stober calls, “one of the most basic capacities required for understanding one another,” is often lacking in leaders. Oh yeah, and it matters to business success! Forbes notes that “the reality is that for business leaders to experience success, they need to not just see or hear the activity around them, but also relate to the people they serve.” We already know how important engagement is, and you can imagine how much engagement falls off around a lack of empathy.  Just think of the shift in engagement when being told to Skype in to a funeral!

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With empathy so important, how does one
develop this quality that seems elusive
to so many leaders?
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In Ginny Whitelaw’s latest book, The Zen Leader, she describes how to boast empathy in her chapter on the flip From Controlling to Connecting. She describes how the energy patterns of FEBI can be a power tool to help summon real empathy that fully allows you to ‘become the other person.’

by Anthony Attan

How do you use your toilet paper? Are you a folder? A wrapper? A scruncher? We're betting it's the later.

But what does it say about you as an individual, and why does it matter anyway?

Deana McDonagh discusses why you can't

design anything for someone if you don't

understand them first, and how creating

empathetic products changes....  

An IDEO researcher practicing "creative listening."What would an Argentinian car mechanic know about childbirth? If you’re Jorge Odon, father of five, quite a bit. Or at least enough to design a low...

By practicing “creative listening,” he was able to step out of his expertise and identify value in an idea that came from a complete outsider, with the intention of building on it and making it better.

This same skill is key to good improv theater: actors listen to the words of the previous actor and, despite never having heard them before, build on them to continue the narrative. Improvisers call it the “Yes, and” rule. ...

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By practicing “creative listening,” he was able to
step out of his expertise and identify value
in an idea that came from
a complete outsider,

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Tim Brown CEO at IDEO

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In this post, the author reveals how

empathy is the key foundation

of Design Thinking.

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This summer I completed my first “MOOC” (Massive Open Online Course) through Stanford University's “Design Thinking Action Lab." The course description caught my interest: “Stanford d.school lecturer and Epicenter Associate Director Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and her team will take you on a journey to learn the Design Thinking process.

This methodology for human-centered creative problem solving is used by companies and organizations to drive a culture of innovation. The Design Thinking Action Lab will provide the inspiration, tools and support you need to discover the joy of learning by doing as you tackle an innovation challenge in the real world.” My sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Cavagnaro for an excellent and dynamic MOOC experience!

By Lesa Walker

Empathy, not technology, is the mother of innovation: that was the surprising lesson learnt by a group of MBA students and entrepreneurs at a workshop led by IDEO and Google Labs at Silicon Valley 

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“Having been through the empathy exercise

we had a very different view of what was

really important to our customer compared

with what I probably would have

imagined before.” 

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By Jackie Acho, Eva Basilion, and Monica Tanase-Coles

We know you worry about cost.  It’s your job and something you instill in everyone throughout your organization.  It’s good and right that you do, because you can’t be financially sustainable otherwise. 

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So, when we talk about empathy,

we hear you asking,
“But what does it cost? 

I’m tapped out. 

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My budget it set, and there is no room for additional spending.”  And we know that you are also wary of people selling you the next big thing to help you lead your company – a technology tool, a team of outsiders, advice that never seems to end.  You must protect your organization from investments that don’t have a return.

So, let’s talk about cost.

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