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Empathy in the Workplace

Understanding someone else's position accurately enough to be useful, without drowning in it.

Empathy at work is understanding what a situation is actually like for someone else — what they're weighing, what it costs them, what they're worried about — and letting that inform what you do next. Researchers usually split it in two: the felt kind, where you catch some of what the other person is feeling, and the reasoned kind, where you work out their perspective deliberately. The second is the one that scales at work, because it doesn't require you to be moved and doesn't run out when you're tired. Neither kind obliges you to agree, and neither is the same as being nice. You can understand someone's position completely and still decide against it — you'll just do it in a way they can live with.

Mostly Harmless

The Sympathy Broadcaster

Responds to any colleague's difficulty with a large, visible, well-attended display of concern. Says "that must be so hard for you" in a voice pitched to carry, in an open-plan office, to a person who had not wanted the room to know. Follows up in the group channel. The concern is real and the performance of it is the point, which is why it reliably arrives where there is an audience and rather less often on a quiet Thursday when someone actually needs a hand with something.

The Projector

Determines what other people are feeling by consulting themselves and reporting the result. Assumes the colleague who went quiet is angry, because that is what their own silence means; concludes that the person passed over for the project is relieved, because they would have been. Acts with real consideration on each of these conclusions, occasionally hitting the mark, and never establishes by asking that the interior life of a second person might be organized on different principles from their own.

The Empathy Bottomless Pit

Takes on every distress in the building at full intensity and retains it. Carries four people's bad quarters simultaneously, sleeps poorly about a reorganization affecting a team they are not on, and reaches Thursday unable to make a decision about anything. Is genuinely, deeply, expensively affected by other people's circumstances, and has arrived at a state in which no capacity remains to actually help with any of them — which was, throughout, the ostensible objective.

The Conditional Empathizer

Extends generous and imaginative understanding to people they get on with, and to anyone whose situation resembles one of their own. Applies to everyone else a brisk standard of personal responsibility. The same missed deadline is a difficult month for one colleague and a reliability problem for another, and the Conditional Empathizer could not tell you which of the two was which without first checking who it was, which is the whole mechanism, invisibly.

Scenarios

A colleague tells you privately that they're struggling with workload. What would you do — express strong sympathy, or ask which part is the problem and then do one concrete thing about it?

Someone rejects a proposal you thought was obviously correct. What would you do — assume they've misunderstood it, or work out what the proposal costs them specifically before deciding they're wrong?

You notice you have a lot of patience for one team member's mistakes and very little for another's. What would you do — treat it as a fair read on their reliability, or check what's different about the two cases besides how much you like them?

Takeaway

  • Ask rather than infer. Your own reaction to a situation is a poor guide to someone else's.
  • Aim for accurate understanding, not visible feeling. The useful question is "what is this like for them," not "how much do I care."
  • Keep it private unless they've made it public. Concern with an audience serves the wrong person.
  • Notice who you extend it to. Empathy that tracks how much you like someone is just preference wearing better clothes.
  • Understanding a position doesn't commit you to it. Decide against people when you need to — having first understood what you're deciding against.

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