Managers: Empathy or Compassion?
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about empathy for managers and leaders.
It’s died down a bit since the early days of the covid lockdown, but there does seem to be a wider awareness of the fact that - to be put it bluntly - we’re all human, we have feelings, feelings should be acknowledged.
The thing is: Empathy isn’t necessarily about acknowledging feelings. Empathy, by definition, is feeling others’ feelings. For instance, when someone says “I’m an empath,” what they mean is that, without any conscious effort, they feel the emotions of those around them.
That’s not really a great thing: It can be extremely stressful to be an empath! To suddenly feel something like anger, sadness, remorse, depression, etc - and it’s not actually coming from within your own soul - is distressing.
In CM&F trainings, we emphasize the ability all humans have to engage in cognitive empathy - the ability to feel what someone else is feeling not because we actually feel that feeling, but because we’re curious and we’re making an effort to understand what that person might be feeling.
And, we explain to our training participants that the point of empathy for managers is that empathy is a gateway to compassion.
Compassion is what’s truly revolutionary in the American workplace - not empathy.
Remember when a tech CEO posted a selfie while crying back in 2022? Because he had to lay off employees? But he wound up panned - the post was tone-deaf.
People didn’t need to see his pain - they needed a compassionate lay-off experience. Yes, that sounds completely weird and borderline impossible - yet it IS possible.
Even in the most dire of circumstances, compassion is possible. When it comes to laying off employees, the pain of leaders is beside the point. The people suffering in this instance are the ones losing their jobs. What benefits are they given? What assistance, financial or otherwise, is provided? How is THEIR experience being centered?
A brief historical note…
For decades, workers were considered to be cogs in a machine - numbers, widgets, etc. The idea was that we should ignore feelings at work. This idea was, of course, all tied up in ideas about masculinity, since more men than women worked outside of the home.
As women entered the workforce in larger numbers, we were expected to just go along with the prevailing culture - but for whatever complicated variety of reasons, women tend to work differently, and it wasn’t until the covid pandemic that there was wide acceptance of the idea that empathy & compassion at work could be good.
The way forward
You don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling, or even understand what they might be feeling, to help them. All people really need is an acknowledgement of distress. That’s compassion, not empathy.
Yes, empathy is an entrance to compassion. But it’s not the only entrance. People can feel and act compassionately just because we understand that someone is experiencing something unpleasant. And, we do this all the time - often in ways we don’t bother to even articulate to ourselves. It’s a natural instinct (and I don’t use those words lightly!).
What does this have to do with conflict?
When people are locked in a conflict, they each feel wronged - and that doesn’t feel good. They need to have that feeling, whatever it may be, acknowledged before they can move forward.
Managers or peers who try to help those in conflict may or may not empathize or sympathize. And that’s ok! The truth is that, in a conflict situation, empathy can be distracting. Imagine feeling angry - in a lot of professional interpersonal conflict situations, active anger is counterproductive.
Like any emotion, anger needs to be felt - we each have to experience the feelings in order to move through them.
For someone attempting to small-m-mediate a conflict between others, understanding what people feel is important - and the ability to keep it separate from one’s own feelings so you can focus on compassionate responses is what’s best.