Tag: change

The practice of empathy

Fabrizio7 Comments

A while back, I have written about empathy and about how it is not something that comes natural to most people (me included).

But what does empathy look like in practice?

It is certainly not to feel sorrow for someone’s issues. When we do, we tend to approach the relationship from a position of strength, it is kind of a top-down feeling. We do not really empathize with the other person, as we are not in the same “frame of reference”. Feeling sorry is more sympathy or compassion, and as Brené Brown brilliantly puts it, it is not something someone who is in trouble wants to receive.

Empathy is also not giving people a free pass for their problems. Again, this is an approach that assumes a position of power, and it is not fundamentally different from sympathy: we feel sorry for our colleague, and therefore we close an eye to the fact they are making a poor job.

Empathy is acknowledging the other person’s situation from a neutral, non judgemental position. In Ed Batista’s words, “we comprehend their perspective and emotions, and we are able to envision ourselves experiencing that perspective and those emotions under similar circumstances”.

And then, it is suspending our natural inclination to suggest a course of action, or give an advice to “fix” the situation based on our own experience. We stay there in their world, and we acknowledge it as it is. And if the time comes when it is expected of us to say something, paraphrasing a beautiful thought by Seth Godin, we do that from their own place.

When you have to do with somebody, you have no idea how many times this person has been kicked in the teeth. All you know is that they act in ways you would not. If you care about the outcome, the question is not ‘What would I do?’. The question is ‘If I had been exposed to what you have been exposed to, what story would resonate with me?’

It is possible to get better at empathy, and by doing that you will find you can establish more meaningful and stable connections. It is an investment worth doing.

 

 

 

Time

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Time is limited and it is one of the most critical resources.

Contrary to money, that can be spent on multiple different things (when you have it), time is a trade-off matter. And for this reason, how it is invested is extremely important.

I do not have time to develop my team members. I am overworked and overwhelmed, there’s absolutely no chance I can dedicate time to that.

This is a perfectly possible and understable scenario. In the short-term, there might be more important things than a meaningful conversation, a career development discussion, a training to organise or a coaching session.

Or might they?

Consider the following:

  • Do you have time to answer all the questions?
  • Do you have time to take all the decisions?

If your people is not empowered and developed, most likely they will continue to come to you every time they have a doubt, a concern, a request. Every time there is a decision to make, important or not.

Of course, this is the best case scenario. The alternative would be that they’d simply ignore their questions and the needs for new decisions, and carry on with whatever it is that they are doing. Good or bad. Until they’ll leave, that will be rather sooner than later. And then:

  • Do you have time to keep hiring continuosly?

An apparently intelligible decision (I am now focusing on everything but developing my team) can lead to a counter-intuitive consequence (I only have time to answer to my team’s short-term needs).

What we spend time on, not only determines our priorities today, but will also determine our priorities tomorrow. To take control of both, it is worth spending some more time figuring out how our decisions are going to play out in the long-term. This is something worth making some space in your calendar for.

100 days of blogging

Fabrizio1 Comment

Today marks my 100th day of blogging. 100 consecutive days.

It’s just been a bit more than three months, and already I can identify some pretty good benefits from my practice.

First of all, I am getting better at fighting resistance. Resistance is with me basically every day I open the WordPress app on my PC, it is with me even before that. I have stopped listening to it. Even though a post is not the best possible I could write, even when I have no idea what I will blog about, even when I am tired and drained. I go on.

Then, I am less and less critical of what I write. This is, and will probably always be, a difficult balance to strike for me. I do not want to write shit, I want to make sure my thoughts are clear and digestible, and at the same time I need to not over worry about the content I am putting out here (if I’ll do, I’ll get stuck). So far, it worked.

And finally, my opinions and ideas are crystallizing. I have started writing things down few years back to make sure I could be more comfortable when speaking, for example before important conversations or meetings. Yet blogging every day allows me to clarify my thoughts on a wider range of topics, and this is something that I feel will continue to add up as I keep at it.

Very happy to have made it this far. Now, let’s go on.

 

Trust can be given

Fabrizio1 Comment

When we say that trust needs to be earned, what we are really saying is that we are afraid and we want to maintain control over the situation. We are afraid because we do not know the other person, we have no history with them, we are unsure they can deliver as good a job as we expect, we cannot pretend them to be as committed as we are.

The problem is, when we approach a new relationship with this mindset, it is highly unlikely the other is ever going to earn our trust. And even if they will, it will be so because they have complied, they have gone along with our requests, they have checked all the boxes and eventually become a sort of clone.

This is not how progress happens.

Trust can be given, upfront. It requires a leap of faith, opening up and believing that someone else can achieve things that are not part of our current immagination, and yet are good. It means we can lose control, accept they might be better, and perhaps even step aside and let them on at some point. Trust is forward motion, and if we are solid enought to gift it to others, we can establish meaningful relationships that add up to much more than their individual parts.

Labelling

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Labels stick.

This is why we get defensive when we are assigned one we do not like, as well as why we should be careful when assigning one to others.

It happens a lot when we deliver feedback. Things like “it does not seem you are committed enough” (label = “indifferent”), or “you could do so much more if only..” (label = “underperformer”), or “you are very aggressive in meetings”, trigger defensiveness in others. And they tend to be profoundly ineffective. After all, would you be motivated in changing your behaviour if somebody would tell you that, or would you rather assume a defensive stance?

And unfortunately it is a tendency permeating much of the public discussion nowadays, both online and offline. More and more, we see people attacking each others on a personal level, labelling each others for life, defining each others’ set of values, beliefs, needs and motives based on a single action or word. In most circumstances, this is gratuitous.

It’s worth remembering that when we interact with somebody, all we see is what they do, all we hear is what they say and, in the case of the internet, all we know is what they write. We have no way to know their intentions. If we want to create some type of change, it might be more effective to approach the issue from our perspective, and elaborate on what we actually feel. This is the only other thing that we know.

When I hear that, I feel like my heritage and history is not being respected.
If I come across that type of comments, I feel sadness as we might never find a common way.
When I see a behaviour that does not respect others’ boundaries, I feel as if mine have been violated as well.

P.S.: today’s thought was sparked by this post of Ed Batista on feedback, and by the work of David Bradford and Mary Ann Huckabay on the metaphor of “the net”.