How to Have Empathy
Start and end with common sense.
(P.S. Read part 1 and part 2.)
Have you heard of “empathy for the user”? It’s a popular phrase in the design industry. It means considering a user’s needs and preferences instead of only making what the designer thinks is good. For our knowledge management journey, empathy will be our north star.
It’s important not to feel intimidated by this language, because if you’ve heard it once, you’ve probably heard it ad nauseam. “Empathy” has become a favorite buzzword of corporate middlemen too. Along with other redundant terms like “servant leadership” or “flexible work,” it refers to basic human decency that everyone can do, and that should be expected, but is now something special to claim credit for. In fact, ordinary words are often commandeered in this way. They’re used subjectively, given arbitrary definitions, or repeated to the point of losing meaning altogether. That is why we can’t forget our common sense for even a second. Gosh, empathy for the user? How are we supposed to know? A PhD in psychology seems underqualified for the task if you overthink it enough.
Don’t overthink it. Empathy is understanding and caring about other people. We learned it in kindergarten and do it every day.
Have you ever known what someone was thinking, even though they didn’t say anything directly? Have you ever known how someone felt just based on their body language, facial expression, and tone? If you explained how you knew, it would sound crazy. That’s because empathy comes naturally; it’s not something learned out of a book. This is wonderful news: If you have a sincere desire to understand others, you already have “empathy for ______” (you can skip the two-day online training and fill in the blank here).
To be more specific, in knowledge management, empathy is asking other people for help in the right way. Even with people who technically “work for” us, when asking for help, how should we behave? That’s empathy. Whether it’s easy paperwork or difficult research, we all want to feel respected and appreciated as skilled adults. In other words, most people want to help; it’s just a matter of asking nicely.
1. What is the work product we’re delivering?
Since most people want to help, that’s a great starting point. No one wakes up in the morning hoping to be actively unhelpful today. However, things can go wrong quickly when there isn’t a clear work product to deliver.
A work product is something like a written email or document, spreadsheet, or powerpoint. It can also be something less tangible, like a verbal presentation or a set of data, but it must be a discrete deliverable.
A work product is not just asking someone to join a project, or to review or handle something. Unless we’re a mob boss, or we’ve paid top dollar for some genius fixer like on TV, we can’t just tell someone to “take care of it.” That’s not enough information, which is our job to provide as the one who’s asking.
There must be a finish line because no one wants to run a race with no finish line - would you? No. We all want a clear goal to work towards and some objective way to get there. Providing this clarity can be scary. We may not feel prepared to make the judgment call for where the final target should be, but that is the price of asking for help. A good project manager must set the vision so that others have something to rely on.
2. What is the question we’re asking?
In the same way of setting expectations, a clearly stated question is essential to asking others for help. If the question doesn’t even exist, how can we ask people to go find the answer? We don’t want to end up like the proverbial “solution in search of a problem,” which will lead nowhere and frustrate everyone with wasted effort.
Here are some example questions: What is the most confusing and difficult task for people? Are there any redundant or useless activities we can eliminate? What are the most frequently asked questions? This is the type of research people will want to do because it will make everyone’s lives easier.
What the question can’t be is a laundry list of complaints and headaches followed by a question mark at the end. It’s very difficult to know how to improve a situation generally, unless there is a distinct task someone has performed for a long time and they notice a problem organically. But instead of hoping and wishing, it’s more efficient to design good research questions upfront.
What is the question you’re asking? What is the problem you’re trying to solve? If a reasonably intelligent person can’t understand what you’re doing, then it probably won’t end up helping anyone. Whether it’s changing the world or the most pencil-pushing bureaucracy, everything and everyone answers to the ultimate judge that is common sense.
3. How do we know when we’re done?
People are smart. We want to know that we did a good job, and not just from the discretionary pat on the head. To feel satisfied with a job well done, we need to be able to check our work. It’s like in math class, where we can plug x back into the equation to make it add up. If the answer gets marked wrong, we can check the teacher too. Smart people trust the process, but verify the outcome.
Establishing a measurement of success is stressful and scary too. There’s the possibility that everyone scrambles to meet some metric decided by us that later turns out to be meaningless or counterproductive. But once again, providing the wrong guidelines is better than no guidelines at all. Failure is disappointing, but passiveness is disheartening. Between the two, it’s a lot easier to overturn one discrete failure than a total failure to launch.
Here’s a rule of thumb to keep you on track: Your metrics for success should be proportional to the time and manpower you spend on the work.
For an important large-scale project, there should be simultaneous long-term and short-term targets, as well as periodic reevaluations of their usefulness. But on a rapid deadline or where the result has little impact, the truth is that we might not, and should not, do a good job. Pretending to do a good job on an unimportant task is just admitting to being bad at allocating resources. Let other people perform; as for us, let’s just say what we think is right and do that. Whether something matters a lot or not at all, we’ll budget ruthlessly and make it clean.
Help Others
The saying goes, “Help others help you.” But maybe it should be, “You must help others before they can help you.” Notice how, just to set up a task for someone else to do, we’ve needed to give so much. We’ve needed to understand what other people think, feel, want, and need. And even though it’s common sense, it’s emotionally and mentally taxing. We don’t need to be perfect; we should give ourselves grace too.
Empathy is like a compass pointing us towards human connection; it may be a winding journey, but if people can sense that our direction is true, then they’ll trust us to get there.