Empathy Really Is About Walking In Someone’s Shoes
Why Empathy Is Important and Possible
Empathy is more than just social awareness, although it requires picking up on what people are feeling. It builds on self-awareness. The more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading the emotions of others. The step further, however, from recognizing what people may be feeling is considering that who they are and what they feel matters.
Lack of empathy has consequences that range from misjudging social cues and so communicating inappropriately, damaging relationships, and losing opportunities, to as extreme as bullying, violence and cruelty.
Empathy is however, not foreign to human experience. People are naturally connected to each other. We are aware of this connection when we experience our mood being affected by another person, even if they haven’t said anything to us. We also have a sense of whether we like another person or whether we don’t trust them. Our instinct can be very powerful and can be a warning system for us. However, it is also informed by our prejudices and stereotypes and so we have to be careful of prejudging!
Learning Empathy
Annie McKee is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and has co-authored Harvard Business Review books on leadership including Primal Leadership, with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis. In one of her Harvard Business Review articles she tells the story of an executive she coached to develop greater empathy.
In her words, “talented though he was, he was in danger of being fired for his distinct lack of caring about the people around him. He wanted what he wanted, and watch out if you were in his way. He couldn’t seem to change until it finally dawned on him that his bulldozer style was playing out at home too, with his children. That didn’t fit at all with his dream of a happy, close-knit family, living close to one another throughout their lives.”
With compelling reasons to change he decided to make the effort. McKee states, “The capacity for emotional and cognitive empathy is laid down early in life, and then reinforced over many years. This gentleman had a good foundation for empathy in childhood, but intense schooling and a stint at an up-or-out management consulting firm drove it out of him. He needed to relearn how to read people and care about them. He was able to succeed. Yes, it took a good while, but he did it.”
When we refer to empathy we often use the phrase ‘knowing what it means to walk in someone else’s shoes.’ As it turns out this cliché is one of the very ways we learn greater empathy.
Walk in their shoes
There are a number of ways you can walk in someone’s shoes. First prize is that you experience directly what someone else is doing or experiencing. But even second prize, which is a trusted person telling you about their experience, or third prize which is identifying with a character through a TV or radio drama, can also prompt people to gain deeper insight into someone and their journey.
Paul Davies, a communications and employee engagement consultant, wrote an article entitled, When Words Fail, Try Experiences. The following is quoted from his article:
“Insights come in strange places. For me last summer, it was while trying to steer a narrowboat on the Avon & Kennet canal. We’d gone on holiday with another family and our children (six in total) couldn’t be persuaded that larking about on the roof wasn’t safe, even if the boat was only cruising at 3 mph. All the usual threats to switch off the Wi-Fi or unplug the TV somehow lacked credibility in the heart of the countryside, when even the adults were complaining about lack of phone signal. Tempers became frayed.
Then my wife wryly suggested I use my ‘professional expertise’ as a communicator. And so, from the edge of breakdown came a breakthrough. We invited each child to take a turn at steering the boat, under close adult supervision. With their own sweaty mitts on the tiller, they finally realized how stressful it is to navigate around trees and bridges when someone is blocking your vision and you’re worried they’re going to end up overboard.
The insight, of course, is blindingly obvious: sometimes you can’t tell people, they have to experience it for themselves.”
In their excellent book, Influencer — The Power To Change Anything the authors, Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, Switzler, tell the story of a US manufacturing company under threat from Japanese competitors, whose productivity levels were 40% higher. To stay in business, they had to make some urgent changes. If their employees wanted to keep their jobs, they were going to have to work a lot harder.
But somehow, the management couldn’t get their message across, because the workforce mistrusted their motives. Then they hit on the idea of sending a team of employees on a fact-finding tour to Japan. It did the trick. When they returned home and told their co-workers how much harder and faster their Japanese counterparts were working, they accepted that change had to happen. Seeing and experiencing for themselves changed the perspective of these employees. As trusted colleagues their word carried more weight than the bosses.
Empathy is more than simply understanding someone. It is seeing things from their perspective. When we literally walk in their shoes — putting ourselves in their context, physically or imaginatively, our preconceived ideas are challenged. When our minds are opened in this way something changes in us that we can’t change back. This is your empathy muscle flexing.
