Page 6 - Demo

The Empathy Concerts that I have had the amazing honor of hosting with my good friend, my colleague, and my “brother from another mother”, Telly Leung, have really become a powerful outreach over the last year to touch and interact with tens of thousands of old colleagues, new colleagues, and strangers. We’ve done that in over 30 one-hour combinations of Broadway performers sharing moving songs and perceptions of empathy as storytellers and empaths, plus learning leaders sharing the importance of empathy in dealing with the challenges of this year, including the pandemic disruption of our workplaces, working from home, racial injustice, and the uncertainties of a very difficult and divisive election process.
: How might you think of empathy differently now than in the past?
: Empathy has always been there. It’s always been part of being a good human being or an open colleague or a good facilitator. But there’s another dimension of empathy that has become clear to me now. I don’t know if it was as crisp and clear for me, or even for the business world, before the pandemic: empathy is part of our design process. It is part of structuring our interactions with each other. A perfect example is the literally millions of Zoom meetings that have occurred since the pandemic began for teams of people that are working from home.
Many would say that we get fatigued from all those meetings, but the reason they are so pervasive is that they aren’t just about connecting us as colleagues who are collaborating. They’re also connecting us to each other on an empathetic level. We’ve gotten to know the names of each other’s children, the names of each other’s pets, and there is a set of traditions that has been created that combines our business process of whatever task we are doing digitally with empathy, with understanding that our colleagues have whole lives, and to approach them in a more “360” perspective about their lives and their realities.
We need to understand the diverse challenges of these times. Someone might be working from home but sharing that space with two children who are in very different distance learning programs, plus other members of their household. They may be juggling two people working on limited bandwidth and dealing with the fact that they have been in the same house with the same people for an extended period of time.
The other takeaway that I have about empathy is that it was a word we were rarely using. You know, many people say that the “e” in eLearning was something I helped popularize, and I was one of several people to begin the investigation and exploration of eLearning in the early 1990s. But that “e” might initially have stood for “electronic”, and over the years it’s evolved to “engagement”, and it’s evolved to
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