Page 9 - Demo

Empathy has been reflected in my need to be a learner every day: to be sensing, coaching, relating, and dealing with a wide range of people whose realities may be enormously different than mine. At the beginning of the pandemic, my dear friend and well-known author Marshall Goldsmith and I started meeting with coaches, CEOs, and business leaders from around the world to talk about what was occurring with this emerging pandemic. To hear the CEO of a company in Italy talk about looking out his window and seeing deceased bodies being moved along because of the overwhelming medical crisis there, months before we saw the equivalent in New York state, was a moment of understanding and recognizing that the differences were also pointers to what might be personal lessons of the future. So, it’s been a nonstop change in how I perceive the world, interact with the world, and try to relate to the world in the pandemic.
: When we get past this intense time, do you think we’ll continue to see this kind of focus on empathy?
: I hope so. I don’t think we’re all going back to the office in the same way we were before the pandemic. I think there will be a hybrid level of working from home, working at the office, and working in appropriate clusters. I think we will increasingly learn how to use technology to leverage a more comfortable and agile way of connecting with colleagues, customers, family, and friends. I hope that we will also see the importance of empathy as a dimension of how we design and structure our collaboration with each other.
: In your experience, are there instances where empathy can be awkward?
: Empathy can be awkward because we are, in many ways, exposing ourselves and trying to accept the differences we have. Empathy can’t and shouldn’t be sympathy: it’s not feeling sorry for somebody. It’s not becoming their mental health counselor and it should not come from a perspective of superiority. Empathy is coming from
a point of view of acceptance and equality, but you will need to walk through those waves and waters of awkwardness.
In some cases, we need to use time to help make empathy less awkward. When asking questions of colleagues, let them know that you’ll ask them for their responses in a few moments rather than in real time. Let people catch up and incubate in their own time.
So, yes. I think empathy can be awkward, and I’m not sure we always have the right language for or comfort with empathy to address those moments of awkwardness.
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