Brainwaves For Leaders

Business Leaders Agree: Empathy is the Single-Most Important Skill in Business Today

Posted on October 17, 2012. Filed under: Our Leaders Say | Tags: Adair Jones, Akio Moita, Blockbuster v Netflix, Center for Creative Leadership, collaboration, Daniel Goleman, Diploma of Neuroscience of Leadership, empathy, Harvard Business Review, James Allworth, John Marshall Roberts, Linda Ray, mirror neurons, NeuroCapability, perspective-taking, Steve Jobs, systems theory |

In a recent workshop on The Neuroscience of Collaboration, undertaken as part of the Diploma of Neuroscience of Leadership, Adair Jones was inspired by the significant role empathy plays in human relations and how it can be effectively utilised in the business realm.

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.John Marshall Roberts is a bestselling author, a social scientist, and the CEO of Worldview Learning. He has crafted his career around converting corporations and communicating with cynics. In his opinion, empathy is the single-most important skill in business today.  Through strategic communications and values-based messaging, Roberts has made it his mission to help leaders develop the empathy skills required to inspire common vision.  For the last several years, he has used his knowledge of systems theory and developmental psychology to enable socially conscious marketers, business leaders, and activists to win over objectors and inspire radical collaboration.  More and more, savvy business leaders are following his example.

In simple terms, empathy is the ability to recognise and understand the situation, feelings, and motives of another.  Conveying empathic emotion is defined as the ability to understand what others are feeling, the ability to actively share emotions with others, and passively experiencing the feelings of others in order to be effective.

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Empathy creates brain-friendly workplaces

Empathy is the oil that keeps relationships running smoothly.

We need to think of it as valued currency. Empathy allows us to create bonds of trust. It gives us insights into what others may be feeling or thinking. It helps us understand how and why others are reacting to situations. It sharpens our “people acumen”.  And it informs our decisions.  All of this is too important to ignore.

The increasing use of teams—”cauldrons of bubbling emotions”, according to the psychologist Daniel Goleman—means that empathy in the workplace is increasingly important.  It means that you’re more aware of the feelings of others and how these feelings impact their perception. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with how they see things; rather, being empathetic means that you’re willing and able to appreciate what the other person is going through.

When teams are motivated by reward rather than threat, they share more, feel more engaged, think and perform better.
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Empathy makes better leaders

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, the nature of leadership is shifting, placing a greater emphasis on building and maintaining relationships.  They claim that “leaders today need to be more person-focused and be able to work with those not just in the next cubicle, but those in other buildings and other countries.”

A leader who develops empathy has several advantages:

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In a Harvard Business Review article entitled “What Makes a Leader?“,  Goleman states:

Leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle, but important ways, by thoughtfully considering employees’ feelings – along with other factors – in the process of making intelligent decisions.

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Empathy drives strategy

Goleman also identifies the rapid pace of globalization as an important reason for building empathy into business. Cross-cultural communication easily leads to misunderstandings.  Mistaking priorities, being unaware of cultural, group, and personal biases can hamper success.  The capacity to identify what is important to colleagues, clients, and customers is informed by the capacity for empathy.

This means developing the skill of perspective-taking.  Anecdotes abound about how Steve Jobs of Apple and Akio Moita of Sony eschewed market research. Instead, they traveled around the world in order to watch what people were doing. They put themselves in the shoes of their customers. This ability led to the innovations that brought both men and their organisations success.

Without a capacity for perspective-taking, not only is an organisation less able to innovate, but it  risks ‘disruption’. James Allworth of the Harvard Business Review Blog Network offers the case of Blockbuster v Netflix as a prime example:

Blockbuster saw the rise of Netflix in the very early 2000s, and chose not to do anything about it. Why? Well, its management couldn’t see the world from any perspective other than from the vantage point from which they sat: atop a $6 billion business with 60% margins, tens of thousands of employees and stores all across the country. Blockbuster’s management couldn’t bring itself to see Netflix’s perspective: that while Netflix was only achieving 30% margins, Netflix wasn’t comparing its 30% to Blockbuster’s 60%. Netflix was comparing it to no profit at all. And Blockbuster’s management certainly couldn’t see the world from their customers’ perspective: that late fees were driving folks up the wall, and that their range of movies eschewed anything that wasn’t a new release. While Blockbuster knew it could invest to create a Netflix competitor, that would be an expensive proposition, it might not work, and even if it did, it would probably cannibalize its existing business. With that being their perspective, they saw two choices: creating a disruptive entrant with all the pitfalls of cost and risk or just continuing with the existing business. Thinking those were their options, continuing with the existing business looked like a pretty obvious choice. The mildest application of a different perspective — stopping and considering what the world looked like to Netflix, or even what the world looked like to Blockbuster’s customers — would have revealed that this was not the choice they faced at all. Their options, in reality, were to start the disruptive competitor — or go bankrupt.

This case illustrates just how important perspective-taking can be in business.  The best way for a leader to develop an ability to view a situation from competing perspectives is to build empathy into practices and processes, which in turn fosters the skill of perspective-taking.

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Empathy can be learned

Fortunately, empathy is not a fixed trait—it can be learned.  Recent research into mirror neurons has proven that we’re wired for sociability and attachment to others; in other words, we’re driven to connect and highly motivated to understand those we interact with.

Since this is  hardwired, the brain is organised to pay attention not only to what is being said but also to the universe of information that is conveyed non-verbally.  Only a few leaders understand just how valuable this is. It’s a resource free for the taking, a seam of gold waiting to be mined.

Given time and the right support, leaders can develop and enhance their empathy skills through coaching, training, and other developmental opportunities, thereby enhancing productivity and helping true innovation to flourish in their businesses.

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Adair Jones is a writer and editor with a fascination for the human brain in all its manifold aspects.

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