Rebecca Bridges takes time out her busy schedule to talk.

Meet Rebecca Bridges. Wife. Mother. Management consultant at FMP Consulting. Rebecca has also been blind from birth. Knowing the unemployment rate is 70% for people who are blind, how could she grow up with the hope of finding a job that she would enjoy? Is it luck or is it something else?

We have all heard the statistics. According to Simon Sinek, author of Leaders Eat Last, 1 in 3 employees seriously consider leaving their jobs. Of that number, only 1.5% of employees actually leave voluntarily. They feel safer with the job they hate then the unknown. With these types of statistics, I wondered how Rebecca found the courage to fulfill her dream.

You Have to Be Better than Anyone Else

Rebecca remembers her Dad giving her advice as a little girl when she complained that being blind wasn’t fair. “Too bad. You just have to be better than everyone else,” he said. That piece of advice stuck. When talking with Rebecca, she comes prepared for everything.

She didn’t have any inkling that she would go to grad school. Then one day, as she browsed around the Web looking for something that her husband might like, she found a program that changed her life: Organization Development and Knowledge Management from George Mason University. It piqued her interest.

“The program description talked about organizational change and transformation, process consultation, and really meeting people where they are and taking them where they need to go,” expressed Rebecca. “I went to the information session and applied the next day. I was so excited because I had found my calling!”

As she went through the program, Rebecca learned a lot about herself. How she dealt with situations both good and bad. How she dealt with conflict. What kind of leadership style made her unique.

“I really enjoyed the courses that I took as part of the program,” Rebecca said. “I wanted to work with organizations and clients to help them achieve results that were even greater than they anticipated. At the end of my program, consulting seemed like a logical step. I started looking and I found FMP Consulting. It seemed like a good match.”

Did I Get the Job?

When Rebecca went to the interview with FMP, she paid close attention to what she wore. She also thought about their perceptions as she crossed the room. It seems as if her Dad’s voice whispered in her ear. “You just have to be better than everyone else.”

“We have to be more prepared than any other person interviewing. We have to show up with our technology and be prepared to answer any of their questions whether we want to or not,” says Rebecca. “It’s a balance because you don’t want to be too defensive, but you also want to show that you are competent and capable because there are questions that they are not supposed to ask you in the interview process.”

When a week-and-a-half went by after her second interview, Rebecca summed up her courage and called the Human Resources Manager. Her heart dropped when he said there were a couple more things they wanted to know.

“The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I thought, Oh no, this is it. They are looking for something to weed me out today,” said Rebecca.

He started asking me about my technology and how I work with applications such as Excel and PowerPoint. She had two ways to go. Rebecca thought about not answering the questions, but took a deep breath and answered them honestly. She needed to elevate the game because, although it might have seemed unfair or felt uncomfortable, it was important that she provide every assurance within reason that she would be a good fit.

“Whether you think it is fair or not, being blind makes it harder because you need to be more skilled than other people in certain areas. You have to demonstrate your competence and ensure to the hiring manager that you are capable of doing the job. Once you have the job, the other challenge is keeping it. There are a lot of things that are still not accessible to us,” commented Rebecca.

Her husband, Eric Bridges, has put accessibility squarely in his sights. Although relatively new to the Executive Director role, he has been working with the American Council of the Blind since 2007, and he had made some significant progress.

Rebecca thinks of her landing a job with FMP as skill and luck. As a consulting firm, they appeared more accessible to her than a Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte, who have thousands of employees. With less than 100 on staff, FMP seemed like they could make a difference in their client’s lives. In fact, Rebecca feels like their organization works really hard to do the things they tell their clients to do. The amazing thing? FMP was the only place she interviewed post grad school.

The Most Important Thing In Her Life? Family

When asked about her biggest achievement, Rebecca laughed and said it was her child. She remembered bringing the baby home, holding him in the rocking chair and thinking, “What in the hell am I going to do now.” She says that little Tyler has been the world to her and Eric since he’s entered their lives. Rebecca proudly says that they have full-time jobs, keep a clean house, and have a child who is fully sighted, fully functioning, and just plain awesome. And they’re both blind.

With respect to her work, Rebecca would like to be there for a long time. It’s important to be gainfully employed doing something you love to do. “No one likes to pay taxes,” Rebecca laughs. But it’s clear that she’d gladly pay them than be a burden on society. She is now looking at getting her PMP certification.

“At the end of it all, I want to look back and say that I had jobs doing what I enjoyed and I contributed to the well-being of individuals and organizations,” remarked Rebecca.

So… now I’m wondering. How many more people who are blind are out there looking for work and not finding what they want. Is it because they aren’t as prepared as Rebecca is at being better than her competitors? Or, was she just one of the lucky ones?

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.