The Business Case for Empathy
A colleague recently shared her secret to success as a long-time nonprofit leader: She errs on the side of kindness with her staff. On many occasions, she hired women who were several months pregnant after they’d been passed over by other employers.
She talked about another staffer who came to her anxious about how his cancer treatments were affecting his attendance and work. When she reassured him it was fine, he wasn’t going to be punished, he found it a bit surprising. As a result of her generous and empathetic leadership, her staff is productive, loyal and the organization enjoys low turnover.
This leader exemplifies the saying, “It’s good to be kind.” A lot of research shows that empathy is key to a people-centered workplace culture that promotes employee engagement and well-being and supports the bottom line. The really good news is that empathy can be taught.
Last post, I talked about Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman’s pioneering work on “Emotional Intelligence” and his taxonomy of EI’s four domains and 12 competencies. Empathy is arguably the most important competency under the third domain -- Social Awareness.
As reported by Goleman, an Ernst & Young survey of more than 1000 working women and men found over 80% of employees said empathy from their boss boosts their morale, efficiency, creativity and innovation, job satisfaction, collaboration and productivity. These findings were linked to higher company revenue and lower turnover. An important nuance in the research was that, while a leader’s empathy was crucial, most workers also said they distrusted a boss who seemed to empathize but didn’t act like they cared – for example, by following through on promises.
A recent McKinsey Talks Talent podcast featured Jamil Zaki, Stanford research psychologist and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Crown, June 2019).
“When I train leaders in empathy, one of the first hurdles I need to get over is this stereotype that empathy is too soft and squishy for the work environment,” he said. However, “it’s easy to debunk that [with the] decades of evidence showing that empathy is a workplace superpower.”
Zaki’s research resonates with the Ernst & Young study. It shows that workers who see their managers as empathic report less burnout, better mental health and morale, take fewer sick days and indicate they are more likely to stay at their organizations. “People who feel empathized with also tend to innovate more and take creative risks,” he adds.
(Lest you fear showing empathy will lead to no accountability, check out Rita Sever’s strategies to kindly and effectively hold workers accountable for their work in her excellent book Leading for Justice.)
Is There a Dark Side of Empathy?
Ask any front-line health care worker, EMT, social worker or animal welfare worker if having too much empathy at work can cause compassion fatigue or burnout. They'll likely say "yes." But it turns out that only one type of empathy is a threat. Another type helps prevent burnout.
To understand when empathy can be a risk for burnout and when it can be protective against it, Zaki distinguishes three types of empathy:
Emotional empathy or emotional contagion – when you “catch” or take on the emotion a friend or co-worker is experiencing. This kind of empathy is the one linked most closely to compassion fatigue and burnout among people who regularly interact with others in distress.
Cognitive empathy – when you try to understand what and why another is experiencing an emotion.
Empathetic concern or compassion – when you care about the other’s experience and desire to alleviate their suffering, without taking on their feelings. Having this type of empathy has been shown to protect against burnout.
Kindness, he says, is behavior that can be sparked by any of these kinds of empathy – or not.
How Can We Boost Empathy at Work?
Zaki says empathy, like other skills, improves with practice. When he trains leaders, he provides prompts to bring more empathy into regular conversations. Asking better questions is a good way to do this.
Looking at the ways people are rewarded at work is another strategy. Instead of focusing only on individual performance, Zaki says, “it’s also important when we see somebody acting compassionately or empathically to call that out in a positive way, emphasizing empathic behavior and helping it to become normal behavior.”
I love the idea of a supervisor praising an employee for demonstrating compassion to a co-worker. More, please!