March 11, 2010
The Levels in Action
It’s the Empathy, Stupid
A few years ago, I was given the large and challenging assignment of explaining a major shift in business strategy. The corporate division I worked for had been on a losing streak in terms of new product development, so the leadership had appointed a task force to figure out what we were doing wrong. The group came back with a thoughtful analysis of the core problem and a new strategy to overcome it. My job was to rally the troops behind the new effort.
In one sense, it wasn’t a difficult task. The new strategy made sense, and much of the work had been done for me. I had reams of leadership briefing books to work from. My job was to streamline the data and translate the messages from technical-speak into English. But since the presentation would be delivered to thousands of people, I thought it best to test it first in front of a much smaller group.
I recruited 20 frontline employees – the group that would need to execute the strategy – and I gave them the same talk a senior VP was scheduled to give two days later. When I finished my practice run, an uneasy silence filled the room. No one seemed eager to throw the first stone.
Eventually, one participant cleared his throat and everyone turned to him. “I don’t think most of my colleagues will respond very well to this,” he said. “In fact, I think they’ll hate it.”
Much to my horror, heads throughout the room began to nod, and the floodgates opened. The complaints weren’t about the actual planks of the strategy. They reflected a message I didn’t speak but my listeners heard nonetheless:
You guys haven’t been doing so hot lately, so we called in the real brain power to give you a lesson in how to do your job. Yes, these are the same geniuses who gave you your last set of marching orders, but their new plan is guaranteed to “double your productivity,” so long as you knuckleheads do precisely what we’re telling you to do.
I didn’t actually say any of these things, but this message was inferred from what I didn’t say. What I failed to recognize going into the talk was just how anxious employees were feeling. They were afraid that management was blaming them for the organization’s problems. They were worried the solution would be to pile more work onto already stressed-out employees. The strategy’s goal of “doubling productivity” only seemed to confirm that fear. They interpreted it to mean, “Work harder, you dogs.” My talk didn’t even acknowledge these concerns, much less allay them. It was purely technical.
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Five Level 3 Commitments
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No Empathy, No Trust
Looking back, I can see I ignored one of the five commitments described in the Journey to Excellence program (see box). If you want to be a Level 3 leader (or a Level 3 person for that matter), you need to look at the who before the what. You need to treat people as people and not reduce them to functions or skill sets. In short, you need empathy. As Fr. Robert Spitzer writes
Empathy literally means “single feeling,” and it’s the key to dealing with anyone as a “who,” not a “what.” It’s the key to connecting with people. Normal human relationships in the workplace can’t occur in the absence of empathy. When empathy is missing, you don’t have trust, you don’t have esprit de corps, you don’t have teamwork geared toward a noble vision, and you don’t have a culture worth speaking of.
The empathy started to flow that day when participants saw how distressed their feedback had left me. “We’re not trying to put you down, we’re trying to help you,” one person said. “You need to know that employees won’t trust the leadership unless they show they trust us. This talk didn’t do that.”
But the version delivered two days later did. The leader who gave the presentation began it quite differently from how I had first prepared it. Before he flashed a single PowerPoint slide, he acknowledged the stress and anxiety people were feeling.
He said he wasn’t asking people to work harder, because they were already working as hard as they could. He wasn’t asking them to work smarter, because that was a cliché, not a strategy. He was asking them to work on projects more likely to prove successful than the sorts of projects their leaders had assigned to them in the past.
As mea culpas go, it was rather subtle, but the people who heard the first version told me the revisions made a big difference.
For years, I thought the moral of this experience was, “Use focus groups to ensure that your talks won’t bomb.” After taking the Journey, it struck me that the real lesson went deeper than that. It was well-expressed in a saying about empathy that you might already have heard: “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
By John Keenan, Editor
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Last changed: Sep 24 2009 at 11:05 AM