A colleague tells you their mother has just gone into hospice, another tells you their wife may have a devasting neuro-degenerative condition, still another tells you they’re having such back pain that they must work lying down. How do you respond to all these cases? Most pertinent to the workplace, how do you respond with kindness while maintaining a focus on fulfilling your work group’s responsibilities?
I heard the story of a woman with long COVID who told her manager she was struggling to get back to her normal self. The manager’s response was to ask for an estimate of when she would be back to her normal energy level. I’m not sure if she showed empathy first.
Getting Comfortable with Empathy
Empathy is not easy to express for everyone. It makes some people uncomfortable. Like saying thanks, which I wrote about in a previous post, expressing empathy can make a person feel vulnerable. At the very least, it can make them feel uncomfortable because they are referencing another person’s vulnerability.
When a person becomes a manager, they almost certainly will confront situations requiring empathy. Those range from their employees’ loss of loved ones to the employees’ own sickness and injuries to even the deaths of beloved pets.
Effects of Empathy (or Lack Thereof)
When a manager does not respond with empathy, the employee who is struggling can become alienated and resentful. More than two years later, I still remember the colleagues and professional contacts who expressed empathy and offered their sympathies when my father died—and those who did not. I even remember the demonstrations of empathy when my mother was sick and dying nearly 12 years ago.
The way people treated me during that time framed how I saw them forevermore. If no empathy was evident, I wondered if they were simply insensitive or just didn’t know what to say.
Is There a Corporate Empathy Deficit?
Fast Company recently published a piece by Maria Ross noting the importance of empathy in the workplace, and how sorely it often is lacking. The article points out the 2024 Businessolver State of Workplace Empathy Study, in which 37 percent of CEOs revealed they still believe empathy has no place in the workplace.
“When we define empathy too narrowly, we overlook its power to build resilient, high-performing teams and boost engagement, collaboration, and innovation. Empathy means seeing, understanding, and, when appropriate, feeling another’s perspective—then using that insight to act with compassion,” Ross writes.
That means there should be a place to talk about empathy, and prime new managers to display it, in training programs. The question is how to do this. The larger question is whether to promote people who are, by nature, insensitive, to leadership positions. It’s hard to be empathetic if you are insensitive, isn’t it?
When considering a person for a promotion to manager, one of the dimensions they should be evaluated for is evidence of sensitivity toward others. Even better is if the person evaluating the employee for the promotion can point to specific examples of the employee acting with empathy toward a colleague.
Acting with empathy to another could take the form of proactively communicating with a struggling co-worker to help them manage their workload during a difficult time. It also could take the form of the employee alerting their manager that they noticed a colleague may be struggling, due to no fault or negligence of their own, and may need more support than usual to get over a hurdle in their lives.
Gauge Empathy in 360-Degree Performance Reviews
Another way to evaluate whether a new manager will be empathetic is to use 360-degree feedback during performance reviews. One of the questions to ask colleagues: Can you share a memory from the past year of a time this employee showed empathy or sensitivity to you, or a colleague in your department? On the other hand, can you share a memory of an episode where this employee should have shown more sensitivity and empathy in how they handled a situation?
You’d be surprised at how honest people can be when asked.
When my mother was dying, I would go nearly every day after work to her apartment to spend a few hours with her. That was years before the pandemic, when most of us were in a physical office all day, five days a week. A few months after my mother died, my former boss’ dog was dying. He took a half day off from work for about a month to spend time with the dog. I wondered why he didn’t offer the same thing to me when my mother was dying. You have no idea how much I would have loved to share this anecdote in a 360-degree review of his performance!
The most important point about empathy is to make it part of your corporate culture. You could even make empathy and acting with sensitivity toward others a part of your official mission statement.
When employees are first hired, the importance of being sensitive to both the personal and professional struggles of workplace peers could be emphasized. It’s easier to act with empathy when you know your company’s leaders would want you to do exactly that.
Is being empathetic a part of your corporate culture? Do you talk to employees and new managers about it?