Originally, this was meant to be a summary post on the “Top 5 things I’ve learned at Chipper.” But each of these lessons go so deep that I’ve decided to split the content into five separate posts for now, so we can dive a little further into each topic. Here’s the first. Enjoy!
Getting past the buzzword
Empathy means “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
Over the past two months, I’ve had countless conversations with others in my network untangling the role of empathy in the workplace. And no matter what industry people worked in, it seems like there were all common patterns on what behavior breaks down, or builds up an empathetic culture. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the way we think about “empathy” doesn’t go deep enough. For the most part, it remains an annoyingly fluffy buzzword that startups love to toss around.
There is a lot of great discourse on empathy at an individual level (self, or relational) - which is great! But empathy in the workplace doesn't manifest in the same way as empathy on an individual level. The combination of team relations and focus on efficiency/output make workplace dynamics far more complex. We need to go farther than the golden rule. “Treat others as you treat yourself,” simply doesn’t work at a systems level.
Here are the three different levels in which I’ve started to think about empathy in team or workplace environments:
Individual Level: how we interact and make space for each other
Leadership Level: how we exhibit and understand empathy on a broader organizational level
Systemic Level: how we build processes that help sustain a healthy work culture
Scaling empathy
Individual Level
One of our People Team members once said to me cheekily “we don’t hire assholes.” And generally speaking, that was true. In retrospect, there are very few instances where I’ve worked in a setting where team members did not treat each other with mutual respect. Thanks to empathy champions such as Adam Grant and Brené Brown, we’ve collectively gotten better at making space for the unique experiences and emotions of each team member, and ourselves.
There’s already a lot of discourse on this, so I’ll skip to the juicer parts below ;)
Leadership Level
Something that we lack in workplace discussions on empathy is how to help leaders think through and identify the systemic implications of their behaviors or decision making. For example…
🚨 Do any of these situations sound familiar?
Prioritizing efficiency and metrics, a manager fails to push back against executives on unreasonable timelines. This forces their team into grinding at ridiculous hours on a seemingly pointless project, leading to burnout and deep dissatisfaction.
A director doesn’t trust his employees to fully own their roles, and hires a contractor instead to be the unspoken authority on a specific initiative, stripping the team of their value and opportunities for growth.
A department head doesn’t see much potential in an employee because they subconsciously see their questions or concerns as a challenge to their authority. Their relationship now becomes combative instead of supportive, especially when it comes to conversations about career progression.
Let’s assume that on a personal level, all of these leaders are fantastic friends, spouses, parents, and generally wonderful human beings. Obviously from an outsider’s perspective, there are better ways to approach these cases.
But for a leader handling them in the moment, the situation feels a lot more like grasping in the dark. It involves identifying and admitting that they may have unconsciously placed departmental metrics above the wellbeing of their employees, neglected to model open communication and mentorship, or overlooked their own issues with imposter syndrome. That’s hard.
Thinking about empathy from a systemic level is more difficult because it requires an ability to think through your behavior systematically. The higher the level of leadership, the deeper the self-awareness and humility required; coupled by an understanding that your flaws and weaknesses will be magnified in proportion to your authority.
Systemic Level
At scale, a true culture of empathy first needs to be modeled by it’s executive leadership team - and subsequently woven into the fabric of a company’s operations, communication, and reward system.
Top down empathy A company whose leadership exemplifies systemic empathy lays a social foundation for trust, and therefore innovation to grow. Leaders who model empathy drive operations with an innate understanding of how their decisions may affect team wellness and motivation. As much as they can, they prioritize transparency across company communication; because clarity enables ownership, better decision making, and builds trust. They create environments for employees to experiment and fail well. And when they make mistakes, they take complete responsibility and recognize the challenging impact it might have had on the team.
Structural empathy Defining guidelines for how a company operates, communicates, and rewards is key to enforcing an empathy-driven value system. Over time, these guidelines enable teams to hold space for each other individually, as well think through the broader team culture systematically.
For example, my job as department head was made much easier with clear pay bands and career leveling guides at Chipper. The leadership and people team invested heavily into conducting comprehensive market research on competitive pay bands across the globe, and implemented it. Employees and managers had a blueprint to understand what gaps they needed to cover to progress to the next level. And if they had questions regarding their salary or role, we had a structure that helped facilitate fairer discussions - provided that the manager is an empathetic leader.
Final thoughts
Work environments can suck, and not because of terrible people. No one intentionally creates a toxic work environment. More often than not, poor workplace culture is perpetuated or even spearheaded by well-meaning individuals.
This definitely won’t be my only post on empathy. Time and time again, some of the deepest workplace frustrations stem from nice people who do not understand the systemic effects of their behavior. We need more self-aware and humble teams, and empathetic systems to support them.
Finally, it’s easy to think of specific individuals in our workplace as perpetrators of these situations, but more uncomfortable to consider that we ourselves have most likely been guilty of similar behavior. The most effective leaders I have worked with are those who easily recognize, and take responsibility for instances when they acted on biased viewpoints or insecurities.
When we consider our own role in perpetuating poor work culture, we all take a step towards building more empathetic work spaces. I challenge us all to do so.
If you found this helpful, relatable, or have a differing opinion, feel free to drop me a comment! Thanks for reading, until next time 🙂