I was reading this moving article on the BBC website a couple of weeks ago and reflecting on what it begins to show us about the role of empathy in the workforce.
There are two things that jump out to me. Empathy has an impact on:
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Motivation – stepping into the shoes of others can move people to do things both small and large.
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Quality of responses to customers – get to an appropriate solution sooner by addressing challenges or issues from the perspective of the customer first.
That’s obvious you may say, and you would be right – but if you are honest with yourself how often do you and your people actively step into a customer’s shoes when addressing a need or problem?
Perhaps more notable in the article is that while acting with empathy is good (it can enable us to meet a need or solve an issue), better still is acting with empathy and evidencing how well we actually empathised from the other’s perspective.
Take the example in the article. Peter Byrne, a gamer from New Jersey, was facing a serious but not particularly common challenge, and Alex Nawabi, the Sony employee who was moved to do something about it:
“It killed me to hear how something you used to enjoy thoroughly was being ruined because of our new controller design”.
Alex takes it upon himself to learn and experiment with how best to adapt the controller to remedy the situation. In order to do this he has to step into the shoes of Peter, who has cerebral palsy, in order to craft a solution. When he thinks he has generated a suitable solution he sends it to Peter, who is blown away and shares the story via his Facebook page.
Most of us we would stop there and pat ourselves on the back.
However, Alex goes a step further asking for feedback from Peter before he creates another controller as a back-up (these are definitely not two a penny and have to be custom built). In short he is looking to calibrate how well attuned his empathy for Peter and his situation was – if it was not quite right he will get information to improve and if it is spot on he knows he was well attuned.
So how well calibrated is your empathy? What is your evidence for that? Are your people delivering for your customers in this area?
Want to do some more thinking about empathy? Grab a copy of our Q. Guide for free here
