empathy(7/0)
Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity are crucial sales skills
Those who sell must be emotionally aware, able to rebound, and clear in their goals, presentation, and next steps. If you’re in sales–Pink would argue almost everyone–you’ll need to develop three skills: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity (Pink, pg. 66). Attunement simply means awareness. A salesman must be ‘in tune’ with those he sells to; to see the world from the customer’s perspective. The better a salesman is able to understand the customer in front of him, the better he can find their problems and, if he has a solution, offer them what they didn’t know they were looking for.…
Emotional intelligence defines the organization
When a CEO needs to change their organization, they must direct their attention to transforming management. Those few who manage the company, both the C-suite and the general managers, set the mood and either help or hinder change. And it is the top leader, the CEO, who helps them change. Joan’s story capitalizes the effect a top manager can have on her direct reports. Joan didn’t begin an inspection of the business to identify what was wrong, she spent time with her leaders.…
Emotional presence affects followers
The emotional presence of a leader has a wide-ranging impact on all business functions. All functions of a business are relational. The salesperson and the customer relate in the sale. The engineer collaborates with his co-workers and his manager to build a product. We live and work in a web of relationships, and the emotional states of others effects us. This is because our emotional wiring, called the limbic system, is created as an ‘open-loop’ ((Goleman, pg.…
Empathy exposes cultural bias
Understanding one’s own cultural values from the perspective of an outsider helps to accept differences in other cultures. So often exposure to other cultures is immediately followed by judgment. Differences are strange at best, and evil at worst. For example, when an Anglo, who values personal space, is exposed to an Arab, who values close proximity, there’s a tendency to condemn their practice as barbarian, or to pity them (Livermore).…
Customer contact builds empathy
To be efficient, company’s specialize the work their employees accomplish. Customer Service Representatives speak to clients all day long, they don’t organize financial reports or manage people. Likewise, those who manage Service Representatives aren’t likely to interact with a customer unless a problem arises. One step above them and customer interaction has been removed entirely - they are entirely isolated from the customers they serve. The same happens on the product side of business.…
Simplicity is empathetic
If you reduce communication to its barest forms, does it mean you’ve simplified it? In the groundbreaking book 1984, the main character, Winston, converses with a friend who is drafting a new dictionary. His friend’s response describes a style of simplicity: 💬 You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words-scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.…
Empathetic leadership follows the golden rule
Leaders select their style by the rule, “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them (ESV, Matthew 7:12)”. No one wants to be treated the same forever. A child is closely monitored and given explicit direction for almost every task, but a teenager balks whenever their independence is threatened. Onlookers pity the adult who is treated as though they are a six-year-old, and question the parents who allow their ten-year-old privileges typically reserved for adults.…