Listening is like driving.  Everyone thinks they are good at it.  But probably less than half of people really are.  That’s why I was interested by the research of Kate Muir.

Research into how emotions change over time has revealed that negative emotions tend to fade to a greater extent over time compared to positive emotions, an effect known as the fading affect bias.

Talking to others is an important way in which this process can be enhanced: frequent social disclosure of past emotional events can help dissipate negative emotions and maintain positive emotions.  The question is, how and why does talking help?

Kate described experimental research which demonstrates that the degree of responsiveness of the listener during social disclosure is pivotal in how the speaker feels afterwards. Further, merely responding to the speaker is not enough.  This research provides preliminary evidence that there are particular types of listener responses which are associated with the speaker feeling less negative about unpleasant events, and more positive about pleasant events.

She listed three factors that were key for good listening.  Here they are and what they mean:

Alignment

• Participants take turns at talk allowing speaker to tell story
• Smooth conversational flow
• Mutual understanding of story meaning

Emotional Support

• Listener takes role as troubles’ recipient
• Display understanding of speaker’s emotional state
• Express sympathetic concern

Encouraging Positive Focus

• Encourage speaker to build on positive aspects of negative events
• Develop positive interpretation of events
• And you need to demonstrate understanding when someone shares negative events:
• Anticipatory response uses same evaluative term as speaker
• Continuer is in the form of expression of sympathy, i.e. emotional support
• Listener tells related story (self-disclosure)
• More sympathy expressed as part of story assessment
• Story agrees with speaker’s assessment demonstrating understanding of meaning
• Acknowledgement of speaker’s negative feelings as valid emotional reaction
• Self disclosure engenders rapport and intimacy

The suggestions for sharing positive events mimics the research by Gable on Active Constructive Responding.  Fascinating…next time you talk to someone, you know what to do.

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Speaker Bio: Kate Muir is a Research Fellow in linguistics and social behaviour at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Kate’s current research focuses on the factors that influence linguistic accommodation, including differences in power roles and personality traits, and the social consequences of accommodation.

Kate’s other research interests include the influence of social interaction and individual differences upon subjective and objective aspects of autobiographical memories, including reported emotional intensity and memory narratives. In her spare time Kate teaches on the Psychology undergraduate degree for the Open University.

Kate completed her BSc (Hons) and PhD in Psychology at the University of Leeds in the UK. Her doctoral research concentrated on the roles of social disclosure and listener behaviour in the fading affect bias. This work demonstrated that listener behaviour is an important factor in emotional regulation processes which encourage negative emotions to fade and positive emotions to be retained in autobiographical memory, and has been recently published in the journal Memory. Kate lives near Bristol with her husband and young son.

Please don’t label me a crackpot just yet. The science shows that people in leadership positions who demonstrate high degrees of empathy have a greater propensity to lead rather than manage. In the startup environment, leading with empathy qualifies as a critical success factor that influences the level of trust that can form across the team, which then affects quality and speed of decision-making, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and ultimately product quality and time to market.

The “Squishy” Side of Leadership

For those of you who think empathy is an emotion that’s too squishy to have much influence over business outcomes, think again. A few months ago we reported on Empathy in Business, an event sponsored by Arlington Economic Development’s Business Investment Group. Some of the area’s (and world’s) heaviest hitters gave personal insight about the role empathy plays in their business lives. This is what Ángel Cabrera, President of George Mason University, Carly Fiorina, CEO of Carly Fiorina Enterprises (and former CEO of HP), and Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka Innovators for the Public had to say on the subject:

“What if we didn’t try to be the best university in the world but the best university FOR the world?” — Ángel Cabrera

“We need to understand that the quality of our lives is directly related to the quality of other people’s lives.” — Carly Fiorina

“2/3 of people’s motivation is wanting to help. Why do we focus on the 1/3?” — Bill Drayton

For a quick recap, research shows people can experience and exhibit three kinds of empathy:

1. Cognitive
2. Emotional
3. Compassionate

Cognitive empathy involves the ability to sense how other people feel and what they might be thinking. This ability plays an integral role in effective leadership because it helps you understand motivation from other people’s perspectives. Great leaders rely on cognitive empathy to build high performing organizations. But… they need more.

To respond appropriately to crises, the person at an organization’s helm also needs to exhibit emotional empathy. Our brains are wired to respond to the emotions of others on a very personal level. Connecting emotionally draws people in and creates trust.

Compassionate empathy causes people to reach out and help those around them—an element of problem solving if you will.

Despite the degree of empathy you personally feel and demonstrate, all healthy people experience it. (To read the entire article, please click here.)

Empathy’s Gender Bias

Management Today reports that there does appear to be a gender bias when it comes to empathy. Research conducted in the UK indicates that female managers demonstrated greater degrees of empathy, and therefore, developed deeper levels of trust with others in the organization—including the men who reported to them. I’m not convinced that the results are based solely on biology. Rather, I suspect that there may be general tendencies for women to more freely express empathy while concurrently cultural norms inhibit most men from showing empathy as deeply as they feel it.

If this is really the case, then can we teach empathy to both genders and make it acceptable to show in the workplace? After all, we’ve been taught to leave our personal lives (aka emotions) at the door. The Canadians seem to think so. They’ve begun an experiment to deliberately deprogram our empathy-hostile cultural bias. So far, the results look quite interesting.

Experiment: Roots of Empathy

Roots of Empathy program

A public school in Toronto has launched a program to teach empathy to 8- and 9-year-olds. The program, called Roots of Empathy (ROE), brings a loving mother and baby into the classroom once a month. The kids observe the mother’s and baby’s behaviors and then discuss what they see. In addition, the school has developed a curriculum to round out the ROE program.

Teaching the dynamics of interpersonal relationships through observation will enable these kids to read between the lines when they interact with others throughout their lives. When you think about it, the teachers in Toronto are actually changing the way their students’ brains are wired. We all notice what’s going on in other people to one degree or another. Whether or not we pay attention is another thing. The emphasis and acceptance of empathy deliberately sets the critical building blocks for developing a heightened degree of emotional intelligence.

If you’re interested in the article, you can find it in a special edition of Time entitled The Science of You: The Factors that Shape Your Personality. The article has not made its way to an online version… yet.

What critical success factors will you look in the CEOs who present at Capital Connection 2013? Please comment below.

Originally published by Modern DC Business Magazine on May 29, 2013.

If you can find the discipline and energy to listen, you may learn why things failed and then make better decisions. — Ángel Cabrera

It appears as if there are two camps when it comes to empathy as it relates to leadership: 1) those who think it’s a “squishy” emotion that makes a leader weak; or 2) those who think it’s a quality required to lead people effectively. For the record, each of the panelists fell into the strengths camp. Whichever perspective you have, there’s another squishy element to empathy in business—our ability to define it. And that’s a critical element to understanding how this particular quality fits in the business world.

Like many other common words, people define empathy through personal filters, which gives the term a vastly different interpretation depending upon experience. As a result, we wind up talking about different concepts even when discussing seemingly simple ideas.

Case and point: Jonathan Aberman wrote a piece earlier this week. His take: “[Empathy] is not a value; it is a tool, like reading, writing or computer literacy.” He goes on to talk about the relationship between empathy and morality and the role they play in economics and politics.

This is where it gets squishy.

As a long-time fan of Daniel Goleman, co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University and author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, I had a completely different take away from Thursday’s event. In my mind, empathy is not a tool. Empathy is an element of emotional intelligence.

Empathy’s Role in Emotional Intelligence

Research shows people can experience and exhibit three kinds of empathy:

1.  Cognitive
2.  Emotional
3.  Compassionate

Cognitive empathy involves the ability to sense how other people feel and what they might be thinking. This ability plays an integral role in effective leadership because it helps you understand motivation from other people’s perspectives. Great leaders rely on cognitive empathy to build high performing organizations. But… they need more

To respond appropriately to crises, the person at the helm of an organization also needs to exhibit emotional empathy. Our brains are wired to respond to the emotions of others on a very personal level. Connecting emotionally draws people in and creates trust.

Compassionate empathy causes people to reach out and help those around them—an element of problem solving if you will.

Despite the degree of empathy you personally feel and demonstrate, all healthy people experience it. So, the question is, how well do you incorporate empathy in your leadership style?

Empathy’s Role As A Strength

As noted above, one reason people feel uncomfortable with empathy as a leadership characteristic is because they think it signifies weakness. And yet, the Gallup Organization classifies empathy as one of 34 strengths. Much in line with Goleman’s findings, Gallup looks at empathy as a way to tap into the emotions of others.

Having empathy doesn’t mean you’re a pushover.

According to Tom Rath, author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, having empathy doesn’t mean you “. . . share their perspective. You do not necessarily feel pity for each person’s predicament—that would be sympathy, not Empathy. You do not necessarily condone the choices each person makes, but you do understand.”

Rath studies the role of human behavior in health, business, and economics. His research provides a foundation for understanding team and organizational dynamics. Understanding others lies at the heart of creating a safe environment for people to play to their strengths and perform at their best.

Corporate America is particularly ineffective in strengths-based leadership and hiring practices. That’s why Gallup consistently finds that approximately 70% of people disengage or actively disengage from their jobs. And we wonder why we’re not competitive in a global marketplace.

Simply having empathy is not enough. How you interact with people and deliver your message is as important as the quality itself.

Best Sound Bites

Thank you to Economic Development’s Business Investment Group, Ángel Cabrera, Bill Drayton, Carly Fiorina, Julie Rogers, and Jonathan Aberman for an enlightening evening. If you’re interested, you can find the Twitter stream from Thursday’s event at #EmpathyInBiz. In the interim, here are some of my favorite sound bites:

“What if we didn’t try to be the best university in the world but the best university FOR the world?”
— Ángel Cabrera

“We need to understand that the quality of our lives is directly related to the quality of other people’s lives.”
— Carly Fiorina

“2/3 of people’s motivation is wanting to help. Why do we focus on the 1/3?”
— Bill Drayton

“We don’t reward empathy in the games we create.”
— Julie Rogers

What ideas about empathy have changed your worldview? Please share below.

Note: Article concurrently published in Modern DC Business. Photo courtesy of Natural Artistry Photography.