An Empath’s Guide to Creating Healthy Teams
Do you carry others’ feelings around like a mother possum carries her babies, all piled up on your back? Does it often feel inconvenient and burdensome? Are you worried it separates you from other “business” people? Have you tried to lower your compassion dial, but it doesn’t work, because it’s just part of who you are?
As an empath, I worry about others’ happiness all the damn time. It wasn’t until recently that I learned how to harness that emotional sensitivity and use it for business and for creating healthier teams and happy customers. I’m here to tell you my story, to give other empaths a framework, and to (hopefully) make you laugh.
- Let your empathy guide you
I joined a new product team at HubSpot in January as a full time remote product designer. Right off the bat, something didn’t quite feel right. There were many long meetings but they were all very quiet. I sensed a feeling of detachment but I didn’t know why. I also found myself feeling depressed after I met with my team. Was it me? Was I the odd woman out? While my logical brain said maybe I joined a team of shy folks who hate talking, my empathic spidey sense told me it was something deeper. It was time to let my empathy guide me. Here is an illustrative dramatization of what it felt like.
2. Assume good intent
When I was in sixth grade, my Dad told me that everyone, no matter what background or what age, just wants to be loved and appreciated. Since then, I’ve added on to that theory. I think all humans want purpose too. And I think we like to win. When we aren’t clear on purpose and how we can win, we feel lost, sad, and deflated. Did my team know their purpose? I assumed good intent. These weren’t apathetic, checked out people, they were passionate, smart folks in search of meaning.
3. Ask why
I started hunting for our purpose by asking why over and over again. I sometimes had a hard time understanding people’s answers and occasionally there were no answers at all. Either I was missing something (entirely possible) or my team just wasn’t clear in their purpose. I hypothesized that our confusion was leading to customer confusion as well.
4. Gather behavioral and qualitative customer data
So I dug into the data to get insight into how our customers actually felt. I was primarily looking for three kinds of data.
- User interviews: How are customers feeling when you talk to them in person or over video? Are they happy? Sad? Confused? Angry? Apathetic?
- Behavioral data: Are customers even using your product? How? How often? Where do they come from and where do they go afterwards?
- Market data: Do your customers use other products? How do those products compare to your product? How do your customer behaviors change across product tiers?
After gathering these three types of data, I learned that of all our customers, only a very small fraction were even using the tool my team owned. Our customer interviews were quiet and unemotional. Most customers didn’t even remember using our tool.
5. Highlight opportunities for purpose
How could I help us all gain clarity and purpose? I went back to the literal and theoretical drawing board and ran user interviews to understand how we should think about the function our tool served for them. What language did they use? What was their process inside and outside of HubSpot? Where did they experience the most pain? In about a week, I threw together a deck that laid out my findings and shared it with the team. My goal was to aggregate data to tell a more human, emotional story we could all empathize with.
While it wasn’t perfect or even 100% thorough, it did contain all the key parts of data-driven design thinking. I defined who we’re solving for, the key problems they have, and described a scenario that illustrated how these problems played out in our users’ lives. Luckily for me, my teammates also turned out to be pretty empathetic people. They saw the customer pain right away and felt their pain, too. They found their purpose and started taking concrete action.
6. Organize and communicate the why
As a product leader, one of my greatest joys is helping other team members: developers, product managers, product designers, product experts, researchers, and content designers grow their problem-focused, data-focused, human-focused product strategy and then make impactful decisions. The satisfaction I derive from this is right up there with the time my child Mischa took his first steps.
At this point in the story, my teammates were asking why much more often and pulling more useful data on their own. Now it was time to help us organize and communicate our work, using workshops and documentation.
That way we could get more stakeholder buy-in, stay aligned as a team, and onboard new team members. As a team, we delegated and agreed on a persona document, high level problem documents, a problem prioritization and solutions workshop, a team communications workshop, and a team release process workshop. Each artifact and workshop received multiple rounds of feedback from the whole team to ensure they were designed to be valuable and clear.
7. Enjoy the fruits of your empathetic labor
By this time, there was a lot of laughter, excitement, and trust on the team. Teammates exuded confidence and curiosity. We had all gone on this investigative journey together and built out a cohesive strategy. Now we had a clear, shared understanding of purpose and knew how we might score a win for the customer. At the same time, our customers were feeling more energized and clearer in their purpose, too. They were seeing the value in the tool we were building and the value it could bring to their lives.
Whether it’s empathy or some other defining characteristic, we all have innate skills that can either hurt us or help us. Some skills might seem more difficult to channel because they aren’t as celebrated or as measurable in a business setting. I thought my extreme empathy was a hindrance to my career growth and that my sensitivity made me “not good for business.” Now I realize it’s actually more of a superpower.
If my team isn’t happy, I’m miserable. If my customers aren’t happy, we’re all miserable. I can detect tension across teams and departments like Superman sees through walls. It’s a lot of responsibility but I’ve come to realize it’s all worth it.
The HubSpot UX team is hiring. We’d love to meet you.
