Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  Having a sense of the ecosystem within which our business operates is sure to broaden our perspective and ultimately help its leaders create solutions that stand up to the shifting tides, building more resilient and empathic solutions that meet the needs of those we are trying to connect with more fully.

  PASSIVE VERSUS PROACTIVE LEADERSHIP

  Gathering information to help make better and more empathic decisions is critical, but there are times when too much is too much. As mentioned earlier, the pursuit of empathy can sometimes lead to analysis paralysis. We can find ourselves in a situation where we have loads of data, sometimes conflicting, and then we cannot act. We’re stuck. When that happens, we face the tension of passive versus proactive leadership.

  In our work with clients, we take into account diverse forms of feedback: How do they solicit and evaluate the information from differentiated audiences, such as employees, customers, shareholders, and what do they do with the information?

  In some organizations, this information-gathering process is done as a matter of process and habit. They capture information, and it goes into a digital repository, never to be analyzed or considered again. It’s a strange behavior and more common than you would think.

  Now that technology has enabled us to scrape, gather, accumulate, and otherwise parse information from so many sources, many organizations effectively create virtual catacombs housing the specters of consumers past. This happens for many reasons. The most common occurs when an organization’s management team knows they need the data or believes they should collect it as a “best practice,” but often, the company is not equipped with the right team to analyze it and make it truly useful. So the questions become:

  • How much is too much?

  • How can companies determine the right level of information to consider before making a decision?

  • What is the data informing, and how does that influence leadership decisions?

  Some leaders are great at knowing what to do. Decisions come swiftly and often. Deadline-driven businesses seem to excel at it. Go inside any major news organization, and you’ll see decisions made swiftly about what to report and how much emphasis to put on a specific topic or story. The Internet turned journalism into a minute-to-minute, twenty-four-hour business, and editors have to make quick choices to stay in front of the competition. The most empathic ones understand their audiences and know what stories will get the most engagement. And engagement grows readership, which draws advertisers and increases revenue. It’s a fast-paced, high-intensity business category that must rely heavily on empathy for its audience to make the right choices and drive growth.

  Whenever we work with a client to help its team improve their approach to empathy, we first want to understand how they make decisions. We want to know if decisions are being made with adequate, empathic inputs (i.e., inputs beyond those of the decision makers themselves) or in a (relative) vacuum. Equally important, we determine if company or departmental decisions are readily adopted or met with resistance and tension. We want to understand if decisions are made uniformly across the company or if certain groups are better or worse at making decisions that stick. The answers to all these questions help us develop an understanding of the culture at the present moment.

  Looking at “Consideration”

  Before we can help companies improve their decision-making, we must understand what data and insights they receive in advance of a decision and how they evaluate it. This is the nature of “consideration.” Ask yourself: How often do you consider multiple forms of information when making a decision? Leaders must understand this about themselves. We don’t all operate the same way, and some people like to take in lots of inputs—customer data, anecdotal insights, conversations with key team members—before making a decision. If that’s your leadership style and it works for you and your organization, that’s great. But some people get stuck in a loop of too much conflicting information, and it prevents them from taking any real action.

  We try to help those people understand and focus on what’s most important to consider. Often, they don’t need all the feedback, just some of it—and delivered in the right format. If a person is a visual thinker, perhaps a word cloud or a chart of some kind will help show the themes or trends more effectively. More verbal leaders prefer to hear or read sound bites from interviews or quotes from key stakeholders to acquire the information they need to make a decision. Every leader needs to have an understanding of his or her unique makeup and how he or she processes feedback.

  I’m a visual thinker. I elicit feedback from my team via brief notes or visual references, depending on the kind of decision we are making. All of these inputs are laid out on a table, and I do what’s often referred to as a “silent sort.” I move things around the table, seeing connections or similarities. I start to notice themes emerge. New perspectives or gaps in the thinking start to become clear. This creates a foundation from which I can make a decision that is informed by collaboration but not overwhelmed by input.

  Once you determine the right format, purpose, and depth of feedback that works for you, you’ll be in a much better position to make choices.

  Proactive Leadership

  One thing we tell leaders of organizations is that all of their choices have consequences. Every decision a person in power makes will have an impact on the company. It’s hard to believe that something seemingly as small as changing the snacks in your break room or the gender identification policies for your restrooms can cause a massive reaction, but that’s often the case. Equally, inaction and a lack of decision-making on certain topics can have just as strong an effect.

  An organization I’ve gotten to know over the years is Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s biggest and most respected hedge funds. It is led by a brilliant and enigmatic CEO, Ray Dalio. Ray’s vision for Bridgewater is built on the idea of radical transparency—and radical it certainly is.

  Ray believes that companies operate most effectively when everything the company does—from its weekly meetings to the amount of time spent emailing—is made visible to managers and employees. To him, this enables information to be gathered and considered more quickly, leading to more effective and sounder decisions. The results of his hedge fund are hard to argue with, but there aren’t too many companies trying to replicate the systems he has in place. I was in the audience at his 2017 TED Talk in Vancouver, where he went into detail about one piece of his radical transparency. It definitely divided the audience.

  The controversy was around what Ray described as a custom-designed rating system that runs all day on the computer of every Bridgewater employee. Every interaction, from conference calls to in-person meetings, is graded by everyone who participates. For instance, every employee ranks colleagues in real time, stating whether or not he or she felt the colleague communicated clearly and whether or not he or she seemed effective. These and a slew of other ratings are shared with everyone else, making the transparency immediate and unfiltered.

  These data points are fed into one of Bridgewater’s proprietary algorithms, which are designed to cross-reference the data with the employee’s track record of success, ultimately creating a sort of weighted average of “believability” for each person who works there. When the company is faced with a decision, those ratings can play a key role.

  For example, ten Bridgewater colleagues might be discussing a potential stock investment opportunity. They might be at various levels of seniority, but each person’s opinion is valued or they wouldn’t be in the room. Seven of them are adamantly against investing in the stock; they think the market is too volatile and hard to predict. But three others think Bridgewater should make a big bet on the stock.

  If all of their opinions are valued, the decision should be a no-brainer: seven out of ten experts vote against investing, and that’s that. But this is where Bridgewater’s algorithm comes into play. The algorithm has analyzed a lot of data on the ten employees making the decision—how th
eir investments have performed over time, their effectiveness as communicators, their performance in group decisions versus autonomous decisions—and crunched together a rating for each of them. Of the ten employees, the seven who are against investing were right 36 percent of the time when voting as a group, but the three who want to invest were right 82 percent of the time. As a result, the group will make the investment. Bridgewater uses this sort of data every day to help its teams make more efficient and better-informed decisions about nearly everything.

  Some people at TED found Bridgewater’s approach to transparency scary and uncomfortable, while others thought it was progressive and refreshing. It would certainly be hard to imagine implementing this type of transparency in all companies.

  We can’t all rely on Ray Dalio’s algorithm (though you can read more in his book Principles), but what is this if not empathy? It allows Bridgewater to evaluate decisions from a variety of perspectives. It takes a diverse set of inputs broader than itself and calculates a right decision based on the highest number of knowable details. As we consider situations, we have to account for as many sources as possible, without overwhelming our ability to make informed and meaningful decisions.

  Sometimes careful planning can keep us from making bad decisions that would cascade throughout the organization. But sometimes the wrong decision is still made, and when that occurs, it’s important to keep feedback channels (verbal and nonverbal) open so that decision makers have the best possible information. It’s not likely that all decisions will be 100 percent correct for everyone, but with a meaningful consideration of inputs into a decision, the best, most empathic solutions can be discovered and acted upon.

  THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

  As you apply empathy to your own business practices and teams, you may discover that tensions other than these four will emerge. Inevitably, your success or failure in taking an empathic approach to leadership will rely heavily on your ability to shift the people, processes, and principles of the company to align more fully with the newfound perspective that empathy has given you.

  The world’s longest-lasting institutions are not businesses but religions, governments, and military forces. They generally succeed because they have the benefit of autocratically dictating the environment in which they operate. Businesses, on the other hand, have to operate within the context of the rapidly changing world around them. If a company cannot continually evolve at the pace of the world around it, it will surely fail.

  CHAPTER FOUR EXERCISES

  Exploring the Four Tensions

  These exercises, in the form of questions to answer, will help you calibrate where your company or organization fits on the spectrum of the four common tensions that arise as we begin to apply empathy in our lives and workplaces.

  Objective Versus Subjective Decision-Making

  • What is your organization’s comfort with ambiguity?

  • How often are facts and data used to inform decisions?

  • Is creativity a central part of your company’s DNA?

  • How is personal and company-wide success measured?

  • How much is experimentation tolerated or encouraged?

  Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Cultures

  • Is your company’s culture democratic or dictatorial?

  • Do you have existing structures or policies in place to solicit teamwide feedback?

  • How clearly is the company’s organizational and reporting structure articulated?

  • Do you interact with a relatively narrow or diverse set of employees?

  • How quickly are decisions made and put into action?

  Human-Centered Versus Ecosystemic Thinking

  • How important is the end consumer to your company’s planning?

  • Do conversations about industry trends occur regularly?

  • Does your company have a clear understanding of its customer(s)?

  • Does an awareness of greater societal, economic, or political issues figure into the company’s thought process?

  • What is the most important external factor considered when developing your company’s products or services?

  Passive Versus Proactive Leadership

  • What sort of leadership do you bring to the table with your colleagues? Your department? Your organization?

  • How is feedback used as part of personal development at your company?

  • When and why do company employees receive communication from senior leadership?

  • Does the overall organization consider individual employee growth to be important?

  • In your organization, is leadership assigned, earned, or both?

  Each of these questions provides only a small window into a company. But evaluated collectively, they will help you uncover the tendencies, deficiencies, and proclivities that have defined the current nature of your business.

  Companies seeking to bring more empathy into their culture will need to understand where they stand on the spectrum of these tensions and how that position may accommodate or hinder their ability to include empathic methods.

  An acute awareness of these tensions and how to work with them will help make your leadership increasingly more effective.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Timeless Empathy

  “We’ve lost our way.”

  I’ve heard this from clients countless times. And it’s no wonder people are saying this: today’s businesses have to evolve very quickly because employees rarely stay in one job for their whole careers and technology is growing so fast that it’s a constant battle to keep up with the next new thing.

  The stress can be overwhelming. I went through it myself at a time before Sub Rosa was what it is today. That was in 2009, and we were still discovering ourselves and figuring out who we were. It was a brutal time for me. I was twenty-nine years old, recently married, recently split from my business partners, and recently acquainting myself with some negative coping mechanisms in the form of drugs and alcohol. I was mismanaging the tension of running a business, and I was spreading myself too thin.

  I’d wake up in the morning hungover from the night before and instantly feeling overwhelmed by everything coming at me at work. I’d drink a lot of coffee to quell the hangover and then amble into the studio and start tackling the problems of the day. My time was split among finding new clients, directing our design team, reviewing the business’s financials, motivating a bunch of colleagues who were also at various stages of burnout, and generally keeping myself from drowning.

  At the end of the day, I’d head out to get a drink—or many, as was often the case—followed by whatever else might numb me enough to fall asleep. Then I’d wake up and start all over again.

  As mentioned earlier in chapter 1, one day it all caught up to me. I was in the studio, and the jug on the water cooler was empty. I bent down to pick up a new one and swung it onto the top of the cooler. In an instant, I saw a white flash of light, and my back crumbled. I fell to the floor, dropping the jug, and gallons of water glugged onto me.

  People came running over to see what had happened. They picked up the bottle, which had already soaked me, and they tried to help me up. I was writhing in pain but managed with assistance to hobble to my desk, where I was able to catch my breath and get my wits about me. What had just happened?

  Once I calmed down a little, my first thought wasn’t to see a doctor but to get back to work. I actually asked for someone to go out to get a cane so I could just keep plodding on. Eventually, someone convinced me to try to take care of my back.

  I didn’t want to go to the hospital because I was convinced that all would be better in the morning after some rest. Walking slowly with my new cane, I made it home (an eight-block walk) in just under an hour.

  The next morning the pain was worse, and I finally gave in and went to the hospital, which led to visits from a group of doctors specializing in back issues. It turned out that I had herniated three discs in my lumbar spine. I was given muscle
relaxants and a prescription for physical therapy. I got the full Monty. I took everything Western medicine would give me in the hope of fixing my problem. And each week as I returned to the doctor, the talk turned increasingly to surgery. The docs were convinced that degenerated discs were the cause of my pain, and surgery was their solution.

  I had returned to work a few days after the accident, and the stress of that compounded by the constant back pain was destroying me. I was awake all night, unless I combined a couple of drinks too many with pain pills that would dull me enough that I’d fall asleep and flail through nightmares and stress dreams until the morning.

  I still put on a positive face and went through each day with as much commitment, leadership, and dedication as I could muster. But the company was rudderless, due in large part to my strained physical and emotional state. I had lost my way, and I was desperate to get the company back on track.

  For years, I had heard murmurings about the benefits of Eastern medicine but had never pursued it myself. Now seemed as good a time as any to do so, and I took the advice of a friend and went to see his acupuncturist. Dr. Tsoi Nam Chan’s office was near the United Nations and a decent hike from my downtown life. But I had been told he was one of the best, so I made the effort. I walked into his office and was immediately struck by how different it was from the other medical offices I’d visited lately. Not only was incense burning, but the room was filled with beautiful Asian antiques, jade statues, crystals, and meditation fountains. Where the hell was I, and what was about to happen?

  My immediate impression of Dr. Chan was that he had X-ray vision. He first took a long look at me while holding on to my wrists (which I later found out is a key aspect of Chinese medicine’s patient assessment). He made me stick out my tongue (another diagnostic technique of Chinese medicine). He could tell I was majorly exhausted, which had caused a ton of wires to become crossed in my system. He said my back had given out because I had been unable to process the metaphorical weight that I had put on my shoulders. I knew that what he was telling me was exactly right.