Empathy

Last time I wrote about the importance of onboarding in creating the most useful kind of psychological safety: the safety to share your drafts with your colleagues.

Since onboarding is a person’s first experience of your organisation¹ you have the opportunity to be deliberate about the first impression you make. If you put your mission front and centre, model transparency, and are proactively welcoming, you are more likely to get the best out of people.

What can you do to sustain this useful sense of being “back stage” with your team-mates where you can be honest, and a bit less polished than with customers?

There are two things I think it’s useful to think about here. One is relational, the other structural. I’ll cover the relational side in this article, and the structural next time.

The strongest tool we have available to us to maintain trust is empathy.

I think of it like this:

Empathy = good faith + thoughtfulness

Assuming good faith involves crediting others with the same motivations you would ascribe to yourself. The challenge of maintaining this point of view is a theme that’s come up often on this Substack. We are all prone to getting caught up in “he said, she said” dramas - to seeing other people as fundamentally unreasonable, and ourselves as the hero of the situation. Adopting this attitude is somewhat automatic and simply part of human psychology. We are not “wrong” for having these defensive feelings - but they are the enemy of good collaboration, and we must learn to loosen their hold on us if we want to part of a great team.

A good working relationship has plenty of bandwidth for the free flow of ideas, but a breakdown in good faith can reduce that capacity drastically. Little resentments can build up into mistrust, which eventually catastrophically clogs the pipes (like some kind of relationship fatberg - yuck!).² Since perception works top-down as well as bottom-up, there is a feedback loop here: when we feel a relationship is going badly, we look for instances of it not working, and when we find them it reinforce our negative attitude.

So if we want to be part of a high-performing team, we have to be able to get out of this reactive cycle - and we have to teach people in our organisations to get out of this cycle too. That means running good quality training sessions. (Remember in post one of this series I talked about developing people’s leadership? This is that!³) It also means that line managers both support and challenge their managees to maintain good quality relationships with their team-mates. Challenge means: when a relationship is getting gunked up, making sure the difficult conversations happen. Support means: being there to help prepare, and as a neutral facilitator.⁴

It takes constant, deliberate effort to maintain this position of mutual good faith, which keeps the relationship bandwidth free for valuable, creative conversation.

I mentioned earlier a second dimension to empathy: thoughtfulness.

Thoughtfulness is going out of your way to make others feel comfortable. This is what your grandmother would have called “just good manners”.⁵

Here is a great example of thoughtfulness in action: planning a company outing in a way that allows people to drop in to different aspects of the day. Have a more outdoors-y bit in the morning for people who like that, then a lunch for everyone, then an afternoon in the pub for people who like that. This way you do not have to drink alcohol to participate, you can still come to the lunch and do the school run, and so on. There is space for everyone to participate. Of course, as in any group activity, it requires some willingness to compromise - but that’s OK. Thoughtfulness does not give iron cladding to every individual’s needs. Instead it is about making a reasonable effort to accommodate others.⁶

Thoughtfulness ought not to be complicated - but unfortunately it is.⁷ Sometimes we can alienate others by our desire to help. Sometimes our different cultural backgrounds (and hence different sense of what’s “normal”) clash. For instance: sharing an office space is like sharing a house. What is the “definition of done” for leaving a kitchen or WC ready for the next user? Can you leave a dirty mug in the sink if the dishwasher is full? Do you leave the toilet lid up or down (never mind the seat!)? Different people have subtly different standards. Co-habiting takes effort.⁸

The thing is, to quote Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Some Like It Hot: Nobody’s perfect.

We all make mistakes. We all tread on other people’s toes sometimes, literally and metaphorically. But if we make an effort, and assume that others are doing so too, we can get into a virtuous relationship cycle. We see other people making an effort, and so we assume their faux pas are inadvertent, and so we act more kindly towards them - and they then do the same thing on their side.

If they keep doing something we don’t like, we don’t let it block up our co-creation bandwidth - we tell them about it. We don’t expect them to know everything about us, and anticipate all our needs - again, we see they are making a reasonable effort, and so we give them credit.

So: maintaining empathy by assuming good faith and practicing thoughtfulness. This is what I would recommend to any organisation that wants to be a place where people can have a positive experience of doing great work!

Next time I will look at how the useful bits of psychological safety are affected by your tools, systems and processes.

1. Actually their first experience in many cases will be your recruitment process. I think it is worth thinking about whether that sets the right tone too, and shows you as you really are. There is no point making a good impression on a first date that’s based on a fake version of yourself…

2. A CEO that I know still talks about the time a breakdown in communication took £1M off the value of their business, a breakdown that built up in exactly this way, from moments of feeling slighted that went unaddressed for too long.

3. Don’t just send your senior people on courses in how to communicate. Teach everyone! And make that affordable by building the capacity to do it in-house. There should be someone in your organisation who leads on relationships.

4. I love Lyssa Adkins’ advice for what to do when someone brings you a complaint about someone else, a sequence of three questions that functions somewhat like a flow chart:

1. Have you shared your concerns and feelings with [X]?

2. [X] should know of your concerns. Would it help if I go with you?

3. May I tell [X] that you have these concerns?

Never carry anonymous complaints.

5. Yes, this is a coded signal to other G&Divas - although I am really more Team Jordan.

6. “Reasonable endeavours” is in the “I know it when we see it” category. I think it’s good to be up front about this rather than pretending we can specify a perfect set of rules.

7. Speaking from personal experience: you do not have to be a man to be accidentally thoughtless - but it definitely helps!

8. It can be helpful to set some ground rules in your staff handbook, on a “for the avoidance of doubt” basis. There is an unavoidable risk of seeming patronising, but in the long run I think people appreciate the clarity.