Empathy Check, Please!
Companies periodically need an empathy check. - Tom Kelly, The Art of Innovation
One of my personal commandments for this year is to "extend kindness in all directions." Sometimes I find the hardest place to extend kindness first is, you guessed it, to myself. But without practicing self-kindness, how can we express empathy?
Could your company use an empathy check? What would that look like? Would that mean checking in personally rather than sending a survey? Could that mean asking a question rather than presuming your customer wants the next version of your product? What about asking if they want you on social media in the first place? Maybe they want a more simplified experience on your website more than a Twitter page?
Also. Could you start by extending more kindness to yourself?
Would you need to slow down first? Are you willing to do that?
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Tomorrow, I fly again. Cultivating empathy tonight - for those who work in the travel industry and will help shuttle a whole lot of us from point A to point B tomorrow. This time, for me, to Hawaii. To watch my best friend marry his beloved.
First trip to Hawaii, unbelievably. Plan to write a book while down there.
[If I don't have a book by the end of the trip, promise you'll cut me no slack, okay?]
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Reader Comments (2)
"Would you need to slow down first? Are you willing to do that?"
This question incorporates an idea so contrary to the way companies think about execution that I think most would really struggle with it. Slowing down is difficult enough on an individual basis; I would guess that it's more difficult yet to slow down an organization that almost certainly spends most of its time thinking about moving and acting quickly.
I also wonder what extending empathy to oneself would look like for a company. A company doesn't have empathy in its own right; its people do or don't, and the organization's leaders can try to cultivate a culture of empathy or not. I also don't know whether individuals within a company might not necessarily have empathy for the company as such, but perhaps they can extend empathy to others within the company and themselves as a foundation to extending it further beyond the company walls.
This is related to a social media issue you've mentioned before. Companies seem to use social media most effectively when they allow their employees to give the company a human face. But traditional public relations efforts seem designed more to erect a wall between the public and any one individual. That leaves a big conceptual gap between traditional "PR and branding" ways of thinking and the ways that stand to deliver the most impact from a social media perspective.
It may be obvious that I'm no expert in branding nor in all the ways a company might use social media. I'm new here! But in any case, I offer these perhaps half-baked thoughts for whatever they're worth.
Have a good trip, Gwen -- I'm looking forward to reading the book!
I personally don't think you need to practice self-kindness in order to actually share in another's suffering, even if only briefly.
EMPATHY IS A COMMUNICATION SKILL. Empathy can allow great communicators to inherently sense the emotions of an audience and is the mutual understanding and inspiration communicated to that audience. A lack of empathy involves a poor sense of communication that fails to understand the perspective of the audience. An audience may feel a positive or negative sympathy to both the communicator and the message as it is transmitted in communication.