The Importance of Empathy in Today's Volatile Culture

I’ve been on Doug Wojcieszak’ email list for a few years now. Doug is the Founder and President of Sorry Works!

Their mission is laser focused:

“To advance the disclosure and apology movement to benefit patients, families, doctors, and nurses in both acute and long-term care as well as the healthcare, insurance, and legal professionals who support them.”

In his essay about the importance of empathy in today’s volatile Culture, Doug references an article written by Richard Levick called Amazing Grace. It’s probably best to let Doug take it from here:

 “Over the last several years I have had the opportunity to get to know a true gentleman, Mr. Richard Levick, Esq. Richard is a leading figure in the crisis communication world and his firm has the tagline, "Fixing the Impossible." 

We live in tumultuous, even crazy times where a slip of a tongue can leave a person branded or ruined by the social media mob. Recently, Richard and I were featured in a story about public figures, beseeched by social media commandos for alleged current or past sins, being too quick to issue public mea culpas.  We were asked to offer up our expertise; a punch line from the article was don't apologize if you haven't done anything wrong. How many times has Sorry Works! offered the same advice to physicians and nurses dealing with angry patients or families?  Don't fall on your sword to appease an angry family unless you really screwed up?  Be quick to empathize, but slow to apologize; wait for the review before owning a situation.  

A couple weeks ago Richard authored an essay on empathy entitled "Amazing Grace" in which he wondered aloud if historical figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor Roosevelt would have survived in today's social media environment. He could have included JFK along with many others into that mix. Richard argued that these luminaries were loaded with sins but were afforded the opportunity to evolve and continue serving. The title of his essay -- Amazing Grace -- is taken from the beloved hymn, which was written by John Newton, a slave trader turned abolitionist. Indeed, so many historical figures are imperfect, messy souls who did some extraordinary acts that continue to evolve and shape our lives today. 
 
For Richard, empathy is not being quick to judge, looking at the entire body of work that constitutes a person, and providing space and time for the good to outweigh the bad present in each of us. Consider his words: "There is an inner peace that comes with being around people who accept, do not judge, listen and work to make the world a better place. It is always quite something to be around them."
 
For years at Sorry Works! we have talked about the need to empathize, including saying "sorry" after something goes wrong along with staying connected with patients/families, honestly reviewing a situation, and proactively fixing problems. Richard Levick reminds us empathy is much more. It's how we look at people, feel about them, and treat them. Do you empathize with your patients and families?  They are not perfect, but God put a heart beat in their chest.  How do we look at physicians and nurses, especially those who have made a mistake?  God put a heart beat in their chest too. 

I will close this essay with a lesson taught to me by the owner of a large nursing home chain.  This gentleman told me he is slow to fire or doing anything punitive to a front-line staff member who made an honest mistake and is contrite. "I would never fire a nurse who made a medical error and felt terrible about it. To fire that person would be throwing away my investment. Not just the investment I made in hiring and training that person, but also the investment that the nurse will likely never make the same mistake again. I have a great employee who is going to be extremely careful going forward...why would I fire that person?" exclaimed the nursing home owner. 

That's empathy, and it's what Richard was talking about in his essay with giving individuals the chance to evolve and become the people God intended them to be.”

Thanks Doug!

Empathy is more than just sensing the other emotionally and understanding their point of view cognitively: there is an expectation that we will act on that sensing and understanding, and treat them with compassion. At times that means we are more accepting and less judgmental of one another’s imperfect past.

Source: Doug Wojcieszak, www.sorryworks.net

The Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness

In 1996 Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet and Andrew S. Tulumello wrote an article for the esteemed Negotiation Journal that explored the tension between empathy and assertiveness as two key indicators of how we approach our negotiations strategically.

Very basically there are five widely accepted negotiation strategies available: avoidance, accommodating, competition, compromise and collaboration. An important topic I agree, but not the focus here.

What I wanted to share, was their definition of empathy and it’s practical benefits to the world of negotiation.

***

“Empathy

For purposes of negotiation, we define empathy as the process of demonstrating an accurate, nonjudgmental understanding of the other side’s needs, interests, and positions.

(As is common in legal journals, there are a lot of footnotes. Here’s what the author’s added in theirs in relation to this first sentence:

The notion of empathy is and always has been a broad, someone slippery concept — one that has provoked considerable speculation, excitement and confusion. The term ‘empathy’ is of comparatively recent origin. It was coined by an American experimental psychologist in 1909 as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, defined as .to feel ones way into. Over the last 80 years, many subdisciplines in psychology adopted and modified the term, giving it a range of definitions and connotations.

Contemporary scholars debate such issues as whether the content of empathy is cognitive or affective — whether we understand the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of others or contemporaneously experience them. Similarly, scholars question whether the empathic process is primarily cognitive ‘thinking it through’ or affective ‘feeling it through’ )

There are two components to this definition.

The first involves a skill psychologists call perspective-taking  trying to see the world through the other negotiator’s eyes.

The second is the nonjudgmental expression of the other person’s viewpoint in a way that is open to correction.

In crafting this definition, we have found useful the work of Carl Rogers. Rogers described empathy as:

“Entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive . . . to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person. . . . It means temporarily living in their life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, sensing meanings of which they are actually aware. . . . It includes communicating your sensings of their world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful. It means frequently  checking with them as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive. . . . To be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter into another world without prejudice.”

For Rogers, empathy involved the process of nonjudgmentally entering another’s perceptual world.

For us, it also involves the active expression of this understanding of the other side.

Defined in this way, empathy requires neither sympathy nor agreement.

Sympathy is ‘feeling for’ someone — it refers to an affective response to the other persons predicament.

For us, empathy does not require people to have sympathy for others plight.

Instead, we see empathy as ‘a value-neutral mode of observation’, a journey in which we explore and describe another’s perceptual world without commitment.

Empathizing with someone, therefore, does not mean sympathizing with, agreeing with, or even necessarily liking the other side.

Instead, it simply requires the expression of how the world looks to that person.

The benefits of empathy relate to the integrative and distributive aspects of bargaining.

Consider first the potential benefits of understanding (but not yet demonstrating) the other sides viewpoint. Skilled negotiators often can "see through" another person’s statements to find hidden interests or feelings, even when they are inchoate in the others mind.

Perspective-taking thus facilitates value-creation by enabling a negotiator to craft arguments, proposals, or trade-offs that reflect another’s interests and that may create the basis for trade.

Perspective-taking also facilitates distributive moves. To the extent we understand another negotiator, we will better predict their goals, expectations, and strategic choices.

This enables good perspective-takers to gain a strategic advantage  analogous, perhaps, to playing a game of chess with advance knowledge of the other sides moves.

It may also mean that good perspective-takers will more easily see through bluffing or other gambits based on artifice. Research confirms that negotiators with higher perspective-taking ability negotiate agreements of higher value than those with lower perspective-taking ability.

The capacity to demonstrate our understanding of the other sides viewpoint to reflect back how they see the world  confers additional benefits.

Negotiators in both personal and business disputes typically have a deep need to tell their story and to feel that it has been understood. Meeting this need, therefore, can dramatically shift the tone of a relationship.

The burgeoning literature on interpersonal communication celebrates this possibility. As Nichols writes, “. . . when . . . feelings take shape in words that are shared and come back clarified, the result is a reassuring sense of being understood and a grateful feeling of shared humanness with the one who understands.”

The subtext to good empathy is concern and respect, which diffuses hostility, anger and mistrust, especially where these emotions stem from feeling unappreciated or exploited.

Another important benefit of expressing our understanding is that this process may help correct interpersonal misperceptions.

Many scholars have documented the how perception mistakes beset most negotiations; such mistakes are perhaps the foremost contributors to negotiation and relationship breakdown.

Negotiators, for example, often make various attributional errors  that is, they attribute to their counterparts incorrect or exaggerated intentions or characteristics based on limited information.

If for example. our counterpart is late to a meeting, we tend to assume that they either intended to make us wait or that they are chronically tardy, even though we may be meeting them for the first time.

In either case, we have formed an attribution or judgment that may prove unnecessarily counterproductive.

By expressing our understanding, we can correct  or at least test  our attributions about others. By journeying into their shoes, we collect new information and new clues as to their motivation that may help us to revise our earlier assessments.

In a sense, empathy requires us to roll back our judgments into questions or tentatively-held assumptions until we have more complete information.”

***

That’s the extract from the article that I wanted to share.

So, when through perspective taking we are able to demonstrate an understanding of another’s needs, interests and positions we are being empathic. However, it is when we feel understood, as when feelings are reflected back through words that clarify that understanding that we “can dramatically shift the tone of a relationship.”

Which is probably why I so appreciate Marshall Rosenberg defining empathy as demonstrating an understanding of another person’s feelings and needs, not just their needs, interests and positions.

Extract from: The Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness, Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet and Andrew S. Tulumello, Negotiation Journal, July 1996.

Empathy is the skill of the future

Why you should use empathy in business: Is there a place for empathy in the workplace? Google recently identified empathy as THE difference maker. Why is empathy important in business and what does these new statement from Google and Adobe mean for business? In this video Joshua Freedman, Six Seconds' CEO, talks about why you should use empathy in business, and explores 3 obstacles leader face that will help you understand how you can use empathy to get better results for yourself for your team and for your organization.

Six Seconds, The Emotional Intelligence Network