Overall success is driven by the so-called “people skills”. Employees and business leaders alike reach good positions in large part thanks to their abilities to listen, understand, and interact with other people, from peers to competitors.
This is where empathy comes in.
Simply put, empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk a mile in them. And more often than not, empathy is mistaken for sympathy. When you sympathize, you share a common feeling with someone, have an affinity towards someone or something, and are compassionate towards someone’s sorrows.
Being empathetic means that you are taking on a different perspective and reality, being able to see beyond your own viewpoint and even get an objective sense of the bigger picture in a given situation. It goes beyond sympathizing with someone’s sorrows. Empathy doesn’t only mean to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”, it also means to “fake it until you make it”—especially in business.
Of course, just testing a different reality without the technical skills to manifest it is not enough, but this is roughly how empathy is used in product management and customer service to improve the customer experience (CX), for example. But before we delve deeper into how empathy can enhance CX, let’s look at how it can enhance teamwork.
Empathy in Teamwork
There are three kinds of empathy:
- Cognitive empathy, which is the capacity to understand how and what others think and perceive things
- Affective empathy, which is the capacity to feel someone else’s emotions or respond with an appropriate emotion to someone’s emotional and mental states
- Somatic empathy, which is based on mirror neuron responses and it results in a physical reaction or experience
So in order to improve teamwork, you should develop these three types of empathy. If the last type seems confusing, think of yawning contagion, how one person starts yawning and it immediately spreads and people around the room are yawning before you know it.
Empathy training games can work on all three fronts since the objectives are cognitive and affective, but the performances sometimes demand physical acts or even peer imitation. Doing empathy training periodically and even setting small empathy objectives on a daily will not only help the individuals involved to develop their ability to empathize, but it will also help your team to:
- Develop closer relationships and build trust
- Open up more, listen more actively, and deepen their understanding
- Expand perspectives, possibilities, and creativity
- Minimize conflict and reduce stress
- Become mission-focused
- Fuel collaboration not only inside the team but with other departments as well
- Improve cultural competence
- Elevate customer satisfaction
To help you get started on building a culture of empathy, here are three exercises you can do with your team:
1. The Listening Game
This game’s objective is to develop active listening skills and the ability to perceive and understand someone and the message they are communicating:
- Pair up team members
- The first partner speaks honestly for 30 seconds while the other listens
- The second partner must restate what the first speaker said
- The process continues until the second partner can restate the first speaker’s main point so that the first speaker is satisfied
- Switch roles and repeat
2. Empathy Cards
This is a great activity to address personal issues or business concerns your team may have. It is also done in a way that it doesn’t make members feel uncomfortable or unwilling to participate, because of the anonymity factor. But having other peers back-up an anonymous statement is reinforcing and shows a sense of solidarity and mutual purpose.
- Everyone receives a blank card on which they anonymously write their deepest fear, vulnerability, business concern, what causes them anxiety, etc.
- The cards are gathered and shuffled and then spread among the participants—ideally, everyone gets a different card
- Each person must read it loud
- Discuss if it’s true for them and others in the room as well
3. Community Circle
This is more popular with children, but let’s face it—often times adults forget how to be civil and interrupt people mid-conversation. So this is perfect not only for cultivating a little civility among your peers but also for having a moment at the end of the week or month to sit down with everyone and hear their thoughts on different matters at the workplace or even other events outside of work that might affect them:
- Everyone stands in a circle
- An object is passed along to symbolize the holder’s right to speak uninterrupted
- When someone is holding the object, they share their thoughts and everyone else keeps quiet
- No judging is allowed
Empathy in Product Management & CX
A product manager’s key to success is empathy. This is not just a bold statement, but it’s a very true one because your understanding of the customer is what enables you to produce value for the company. Basically, a company that doesn’t understand who they are selling their services and products to, is bound to fail.
According to Sinead Cochrane, the Senior Product Researcher at Intercom:
“For product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered ‘real work’. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won’t negatively impact the user experience.”
So, when a customer tells you that something is broken or doesn’t work—listen. And imagine the impact your product has on their life or the job they are trying to do while using it. This goes beyond realizing the emotional aspect of it. It will get you thinking about how you can work on your product’s design, upgrades, expansion, and usage to engage your customers through positive emotions.
To achieve this, you should pay attention to your customers’ language, ask the right questions and let them answer—don’t prompt them with suggested answers. So here are a few tips for the empathetic product manager:
- Listen to your customers actively to discover underlying needs and emotional motivations
- Test and use your own product to understand what they are experiencing
- Share their relevant verbatim comments with the rest of the product team
- Mine your qualitative data and quantify customer sentiment
- Try out being a customer support agent for an afternoon and get to the bottom of your customer’s problems
In Conclusion—Empathy Works
Empathy can be developed by practicing mindfulness. See the bigger picture, shift your perspective, and ask yourself how and what your customers feel, how and what your peers understand from your statements and behavior, and if it affects their emotions or perception of you in a way that does not serve the company.
At the end of the day, empathy—in almost any given context, but especially in business—is a competitive advantage. As more and more industries are taken over by artificial intelligence and process automation, remember that the human element is irreplaceable.
And because AI and automation are taking over repetitive and cumbersome tasks, you have new opportunities to save time and resources that you can spend better by enhancing human connection, humanity, and kindness—because these virtuous aspects can make all the difference on the market and help you stand out from the crowd of competitors.
