Page 45 - Demo

Mark Wagner
VP of Learning, Quality and Leadership The Hartford
: Can you define what empathy means to you in a sentence or two?
: A single sentence would be, “Making an emotional connection with someone else.” That’s really the essence of it. Referring back to the concerts, I think that through music we are connecting a bunch of people emotionally, and we don’t have to verbalize it. If you’re using music, the music in and of itself makes that emotional connection. It’s not a bunch of people demonstrating they care about each other. It’s just happening in
the music.
: How might you be thinking about empathy differently now than you did in the past?
: There are three interesting elements here:
I’ve been in insurance all of my life, so empathy comes up a lot because it is needed when bad things happen to people. We need to be ready to show that empathic response, but then also make an empathic connection.
Fast forward to 2020 where we have a global pandemic and people are getting sick in unimaginable ways. We have been forced into a world that’s virtually connected and, in the insurance world, we’re dealing with people that are getting sick with COVID. We are having to make that empathic connection with them.
But empathy is really more pronounced even with our staff and our employees. We are all virtual and everyone’s working from their homes. You now have that internal need to make the empathic connection with your employees, and that almost doubles the effort that everybody has to put out. It just really brought empathy to the forefront. You are coming into people’s homes and that’s an emotional thing for a lot of people. When I connect with somebody in their home, that’s a different kind of connection that I’ve got to take into consideration.
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