Is Empathy at work ever helpful?

Is Empathy ever enough? Does it go far enough? Is it as helpful and kind as we first thought?

So what if you ‘think’ you can feel your employee’s pain or frustration with a recent restructure. How does that actually help? Feeling their pain only makes you miserable, whist offering no practical support to your employees.

Unless you’re in their shoes, I would argue that you can’t and don’t have empathy. What you have is sympathy – the closest you can get to understanding their situation. That’s absolutely fine, but of no practical use.

So instead of ‘perceived’ empathy, and offering your employees a ‘there there’, it could be argued that “Rational Compassion” and “Action” are of more use to them.

To quote an article in The Guardian;

“fine feelings, like fine words, butter no parsnips”

This ethos is also the basis of Paul Bloom’s new book “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion”. Paul, amongst other things, is a psychology professor. He makes the point that the mirroring of anothers’ anguish is not the principle source of kindness. That in fact it is not empathy that leads a person to spring to action to rescue a drowning child, but Rational Compassion.

You can’t help someone move on if you’re wallowing in their misery with them. Sympathy, kindness, compassion and action are of far more use. How would a surgeon cut out a patient’s tumour successfully, if they were experiencing every emotion of their patient? And eventually, how could they avoid empathy apathy to survive?

How does a police officer deal with a murder scene effectively, if they are trying to re-live the victim’s experience to demonstrate empathy. No – empathy is not helpful here. Respect, sympathy and acceptance coupled with action and compassion are far more helpful.

I found myself watching a drug cartel film last night, with extreme violence. The police were clearly affected by what they saw, but had to ‘suck it up’ to be able to try and get the bad guys. Falling apart would have been useless to the victims.

These are obviously extreme examples, but chosen to illustrate the point.

There is nothing wrong with empathy – but I would argue that it is extremely hard to acquire in its truest sense, as no one has ever walked in the shoes of someone else – similar maybe, but never the same – from childhood shaping our views, to relationships which mould us – we all experience things differently.

But – to say you are without empathy, triggers a negative response. I’ve always considered myself to be empathetic to people’s situations and would be upset if people thought otherwise. However – the more I look into it, I realise I am sympathetic and compassionate. I can never truly know what it’s like to be a refugee child, so I can’t have empathy. I can however feel extreme emotions to the situation and hopefully channel these into action to help affect the situation positively.

With so much bad news in the press, I do think we are all ‘guilty’ (if that’s the appropriate word), of self-preservation. How could I possibly be a positive human being, let alone parent, if I spent my entire time trying to empathise with every bad news story. Instead, I try to give my children perspective and to show them positive ways they can help, but to always let them know that they are not responsible and cannot own all of these problems. That is far too heavier weight to put on their shoulders.

Bringing it back to the workplace and going back to Bloom. He focusses much of his arguments on utilitarian principles – where the effective allocation of resources wins over the “warm fuzzy” of a more focussed attempt at empathy on a singular concern.

Bloom claims “we should be cultivating our ability to stand back in order to provide a more rationally effective programme of care.”

I can’t argue with that. I think it leads nicely into the concept of perception too, which I’ve already mentioned in relation to my children. The importance of standing back and readjusting our view to regain perspective when something unexpected happens. If we only focus on the singular negative event it becomes all-encompassing and a bar bigger mountain to climb. If we look at that one event amongst the many other facets of our life, we can begin to get balance and improve our perspective.

So where am I going with all of this?

When restructures are announced at work, they often become a source of great unrest, anguish, misinformation, disengagement and so on. An approach of “Action not Empathy” or in Bloom’s words “Rational Compassion” would lead to a much smoother ride with less bumps in the road. Of course - you still need to allow some time for adjustment/ wallowing/ anger or whatever emotion your news throws up. To completely ignore these emotions, builds walls between you and your employees. It is also counter productive to employees being able to respond positively to your compassionate action which follows - they are likely to view your actions as hollow, self serving or empty promises, if you have been unable to 'empathise' or should I say "sympathise" with them first.

Done correctly, there is a strong argument that it is this “Rational Compassion” and not empathy, that will offer your employees the most effective support at a challenging time.

So, should we consider carefully ditching Empathy for Action?

#Employeeengagement