Today’s leaders deal with a challenge the previous generation never faced: how do you get the best from the people you’re working with online as well as face-to-face?
Do you interact with colleagues differently depending on whether you’re talking in person or trading messages or emails?
Are you able to understand people, engage them, and persuade them to do what needs to be done on whatever channel is used and wherever you meet?
The essential management attribute that bridges the divide between work in the “real world” and digital world is empathy.
Don’t just take my word for it; look at the findings of an epic study by the University of Southern California (USC) who travelled the globe looking for the answer to the following question, ‘what’s the most valuable management skill in the digitally-powered workplaces of the 21st century?’
The researchers spent three years interviewing hundreds of executives in businesses from Beijing and Shanghai, Rome and Paris, New York and Los Angeles.
They found that empathy was the management skill in the highest demand.
Marketers strive to do this every day with their customers and clients!
But the USC researchers also found that if managers with empathy are in high demand, they are rare in supply.
Describing the research team’s findings, Professor Ernest J. Wilson said that “though empathy is almost universally seen as desirable … [it] is most lacking among middle managers and senior executives: the very people who need it most because their actions affect such large numbers of people.”
The USC finding is echoed in separate research by the consultancy group Korn Ferry which found that “executives with high empathy are among the most successful and engaged.”
So, in practice, how do you apply the professional instinct of a marketer to be empathetic to the task of managing colleagues, whether online or in-person?
1. Listening at scale
I’ve written here before about the idea of “listening to understand rather than reply”.
It’s the advice of Brian Carroll, founder of Markempa and author of the best-seller, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, who says that most managers tune-in for about 18 seconds to what someone is saying to them … before replying with whatever they were always going to say.
Brian advocates a change of mindset: listen and make sure you’ve understood, rather than listen to immediately reply.
That’s great advice for one-to-one conversations, but how do you keep regular track of sentiment across a team – particularly if your team is spread across different locations or are working remotely?
There’s a great answer from the marketer Lee Odden: monthly polls.
Lee asks his team at TopRank Marketing a series of questions:
- Did you reach your goal last month?
- Did you get support to reach your goal?
- What were you most excited about in the past month?
- What were the biggest opportunities or challenges?
- What are you most excited about in your work in the coming month?
- What do you need help with?
- How likely are you to refer us as a potential employer to a friend?
- How likely are you to refer someone to hire us as an agency?
Lee’s final two questions – “would you refer us” – are a classic digital marketing tactic, just applied to empathetic management.
It’s a simple way to keep track over time of the mood of the team, and how individuals within the team are feeling. You can, of course, automate the answers to some of Lee’s questions; a work management tool will show progress towards goals.
2. Neutral language is a faster route to problem-solving than emotion
Being concerned with how colleagues feel doesn’t mean that the best management approach is to react emotionally.
Quite the opposite.
Often, neutral, unemotional language works best … particularly when you’re giving feedback or searching for the solution to a problem. For example, a client in the US has made a virtue of asking questions that focus attention on tasks and actions rather than the people doing them:
- Where do you think we are now?
- Is that where you think we should be?
- What do you think the next steps ought to be to get us to where you think we should be?
- What do you think we should do next?
- What do you think we can achieve in the next week or two?
This type of neutral questioning is a far cry from “why haven’t you done this? It’s also a way of inviting colleagues to say what they think solutions or options might be. So, be curious and questioning rather than defaulting to criticism if you want to move things forward quickly.
3. You set the tone
Let’s be honest, we all have bad days.
But bringing a bad mood into the office can have a disproportionate effect on others. All that hard work you’ve done to be a better listener, and to use more neutral language, goes to waste if you bring a grey cloud with you into the room.
Annie McKee of the University of Pennsylvania and author of How to be Happy at Work explains that empathy for others needs to be aligned with emotional self-management. She says: “In the end, it’s your job to make sure people leave your meeting feeling pretty good about what’s happened, their contributions, and you as the leader.
“Empathy allows you to read what’s going on, and self-management helps you move the group to a mood that supports getting things done — and happiness.”
In other words, you need to keep the grey clouds at bay or risk a storm spreading across the office.
