“I love that brand’s products.”
“That organization is far and away the best in the industry.”
“That company is praised for how it treats its employees.”
There they are: brand, organization, and company. They spill from our lips regularly when we talk about businesses and their products. But we’re missing something—or overlooking it—when we talk in this way. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we are forgetting that a “company” isn’t doing any of those things—it’s the people inside the company who make everything happen.
We know that companies are made up of people, which might seem like an overly simplistic observation. But the language most people use to talk about the business world often leaves out the people at the heart of companies. The more empathic versions are these:
“I’ve loved every product its designers create.”
“That team is far and away the best in the industry.”
“The leaders of that company are praised for how they treat their employees.”
Notice a difference? When we speak about the people within the business, not just the business itself, we add a layer of recognition and understanding of exactly whom or what we are talking about. And that’s a critical element to bear in mind as we start to think about building more effective, more empathic companies. It starts with the people inside.
When we recognize that people are at the core of every business, it becomes necessary that we show up in a different way. If we simply “phone it in,” our behavior has an impact on the company. But when we bring our best selves to the companies we serve, we can often create some pretty spectacular results.
This isn’t just something that comes from the top down. Yes, a CEO certainly has a major role to play in establishing an organization’s culture and environment, but he or she is not the only one responsible. Working with companies as small as ours and others with nearly a million employees worldwide, I’ve noted one important element that always plays a role in building a strong internal culture: alignment.
When a company’s purpose is understood—truly understood at a strategic and emotional level—it permeates everything the organization does.
The leaders of a global retail bank asked us to help them raise awareness of the CEO’s new mission among all their employees. They had hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who were going into work less engaged than they might have been because they didn’t have a sense of why they were going to work. Sure, they may have been clear about what job function they performed, but they didn’t know what that work meant to the company’s greater purpose, the larger goal they were all working toward. Employees of companies with great alignment are able to answer those questions quickly and easily.
One of my favorite examples of this happened eighteen years before I was born, in 1962, at NASA’s Launch Operations Center on Merritt Island, Florida. The story goes that President John F. Kennedy, who the year before had established an ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, was touring the center. At one point he saw a janitor carrying a broom past the tour group. Kennedy stopped the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What do you do here?” The man responded, “Well, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
That is alignment. Whether this anecdote is true or apocryphal, the point is still clear: this is what it feels like when a company’s mission permeates into every corner of a business. People aren’t simply coming to work to perform a specific function; they are showing up, in the broadest sense of the term, bringing their full self to the entirety of the business and its mission.
The best companies do this so well that it becomes infectious. A great culture supports and encourages its team members to “show up” every day because having their full, talented selves present will make everyone better. I’ve had the good fortune of seeing this in action with some of the companies we work with, and it has also been true with my own business as we’ve evolved our own purpose and practice. It’s powerful stuff.
We began our relationship with Nike well before our work on Hyperfeel. It was a damp springtime afternoon when I drove onto the Nike campus for the first time. As I turned into the main gate, I was greeted warmly by the security guard at his station. He seemed like a character you’d encounter on the grounds of Disney World, not the gatekeeper at a corporate office. He smiled and asked if I’d been to the campus before. I told him it was my first time, and he gave me a knowing look, the way someone does when he knows you’re in for a treat. I pulled into a massive parking lot and noticed a series of signs at the front. One of them read, “Reserved for Michael Jordan.” I was starstruck before I’d even made it out of the parking lot.
I parked my car humbly, a few rows away from Michael Jordan’s spot, and went to meet my clients.
Right away I noticed memorabilia from many of Nike’s athletes on display, but I also saw that Nike employees were being celebrated in the same way. I wasn’t just looking at a framed jersey from an Olympic gold medal soccer team; I was seeing the cleats designed on this campus for the athlete who had worn the jersey. The athlete and the people who had created the product were on the same pedestal. There were photos from the innovation sessions alongside photos of the athlete on the playing field. The way it was presented, sharing both sides of the story, made it clear that the medal had been won because everyone had shown up.
Over the years that we’ve worked with the Nike brand, I’ve always been impressed by the company’s knack for demonstrating that everyone’s role is important. Everyone is part of the team. And everyone is expected to show up and give his or her best. The company culture has a definite athleticism, and it extends way beyond physically playing sports. Employees do play sports and work out together, and the campus is beautifully designed with soccer fields, putting greens, gyms, tracks and more, but the sense of teamwork comes through in the way they speak to one another and engage in work. It’s spirited, and I’ve been in conference room meetings with them that felt like a locker room before a big game. The teams I’ve worked with at Nike were aligned to the greater mission established by the company’s founders.
Nike’s mission is “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” When Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman was asked to define “athlete,” he said, “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” That is why Nike’s culture is so powerful. Bowerman democratized athleticism. You might not be the next LeBron James or Serena Williams, but you’re still important to the brand. Your ability to perform better and more comfortably, to have empathy for your inner athlete no matter your skill level, is meaningful. And the fact that the company’s employees understand that importance, and come to work every day, whether it’s in marketing, design, or accounting, is what makes its culture so powerful.
But doing what Nike does is not easy. There are challenges to building an empathic culture in an environment as demanding and high intensity as Nike’s. After all, it is an athletic wear company. The teams work hard, and they expect the best from their colleagues. It’s not for everyone. In our time working for clients that have strong alignment, I’ve seen people leave because they weren’t the right fit. And that’s okay. Not every organization is a perfect fit for every employee. This sort of tension often arises when a company’s culture starts to become more clearly defined, felt, and lived by its people.
Empathic company cultures help teams understand their external audiences—groups such as shareholders, the media, consumers, and more—but they can influence the internal audience as well. Such companies, and the teams within them, know how to connect their mission with all of their different audiences in a meaningful way.
Imagine that your company is a cube, with its six sides each representing a part that contributes to the whole. The sides might be things such as your product, the company’s financial health, its internal culture, and so on. Together they make your company whole.
Empathic employees in an organization know that all sides are important, but they also know which side connects best and most crucially with each particular audience. If a reporter from the Financial Times sits down with a CEO, it makes sense that he or she is looking for sound bites about the company’s financials. But if the same CEO was being interviewed by a reporter from Fast Company or Harvard Business Review, it wouldn’t be appropriate to focus only on financials, as those sorts of publications often report on a variety of topics related to business. Thus the reporter might be looking for a more nuanced picture of the CEO or a better sense of the company’s culture. That’s an empathic behavior I’ve often seen lacking in the leaders of companies. Too often, people have been overly trained to cover the points they want to talk about with the media and what they think is most important, with little consideration for what the interviewer might want to discuss. Empathically meeting a reporter’s needs early in the conversation increases the chances that he or she will feel understood. It also builds trust, as the reporter will likely sense that you understand the publication and its objective. That, in turn, can often create empathy in the other direction—piquing the curiosity of the reporter and giving the interviewee room to discuss other aspects of the business that he or she deems important. This isn’t complicated, but it is a muscle many leaders don’t train often enough.
I host a monthly podcast at Sub Rosa called Applied Empathy, which we record in front of a live audience. Every month, we bring in two to four people who have a specific point of view, and we dig into it with them, looking to reveal different perspectives, different “sides of the cube” of topics such as beauty, creativity, or wellness. Moderating is something I’ve come to enjoy, but I found it difficult in the beginning because I was coming up against the same tension I described in the example of the reporter. Some panelists can’t help but try to steer the conversation toward a talking point they want to get across.
As a moderator, my job is to keep us on topic while also empathically trying to bring out new and different views of a story that our listeners want to hear. Our most successful podcasts have been the ones that give listeners the fullest picture of a topic. The more diverse the panelists, the more conflicting their views, the better the audience responds. Our listeners gain a more all-encompassing sense of empathy for a topic or an industry when they can hear about it from all of its different sides.
The same is true within companies. The best leaders act empathically toward all sides of their business, and they do the same toward the company’s key audiences. Your company might be as simple as a cube or as complex as a dodecahedron. It doesn’t matter; the work is still the same. It takes time to understand each audience—to get outside of your own perspective and see the company from the point of view of investors, media, employees, potential employees, and more. Once you do, you can more deftly uncover gaps in the company’s messaging, misalignments in its operations, or dysfunctions in its culture. All sides of the business need to work in harmony, aligned toward the same mission and goals.
Sometimes at Sub Rosa we do this work overtly. We talk to different audiences about the product or service being offered. It’s important to focus on their perspective as a way of figuring out why they feel the way they do. This kind of investigative work, which involves letting go of preconceptions, can be difficult for people inside the company because their closeness to the intricacies of the business can create blind spots. But with practice it is doable, and a good tool for this is the Empathic Archetypes, which help people assume different perspectives and behaviors as a way of shaking them out of any overly defined point of view they may have.
The Cultivator, for example, whose behavior is to “commit” and see the long game, can be a helpful perspective to assume when important near-term decisions need to be made. At moments like this, we often focus on what the immediate ramifications will be. How will this decision change my business today? Tomorrow? In the next quarter? People rarely zoom out several years ahead to consider how a decision today will be felt then. But doing so can provide helpful insights. Big thinkers such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have often acted as Cultivators. Their bets have always been big, far-reaching, and based on where they see the world going in five, ten, maybe even twenty-plus years’ time. It’s a perspective that doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but with training and repetition, it can help you see your desired future state more clearly.
Leaders must also act as Seekers, daring and unafraid to take risks or pivot. Not bringing this sort of behavior into a business will leave it struggling to keep up in the rapidly changing world around it.
There are times, however, when empathic insights can be gathered more covertly. Direct conversation isn’t always a feasible way to get the information needed to gain new perspective and plan your business or team’s next move. Sometimes people are reluctant to share their experiences or thoughts. When this occurs, you may have to try “undercover” techniques (such as being a secret shopper at a rival’s store) in order to get the information you need. Edward de Bono is a well-known proponent of parallel thinking, in which a participant supports his or her point of view on the subject while others present their own perspective. De Bono is the creator of the “Six Thinking Hats” method for carrying out this parallel thinking through role play.
Unlike the more common dialectic approach, in which two people debate a point from opposing positions (e.g., the prosecutor and defense attorney in a courtroom), in parallel thinking participants inhabit assigned roles and they analyze the topic from various sides. De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” method uses six colored “hats” we can wear when we need to think about problems. The blue hat, for example, focuses on managerial questions, such as “What is the goal of this?” The black hat is more focused on logic, using caution and realism to determine flaws and evaluate ideas. Each “hat” presents us with a way of looking at a particular situation in isolation from our own perspective. The challenge in this work comes in playing a role that may be contrary to your own instincts, but it can be essential to making sure you’re not just “getting high on your own supply” and falling in love with ideas based on your cognitive biases.
The same is true for the Empathic Archetypes. Though we all have the capacity to think from all seven different archetypes’ perspectives, changing from one to another comfortably takes practice. But the exercise will give you a more holistic understanding of a topic, a problem, or your business, which lets you see it in its entirety and, just as important, shows you what it is not.
Any attempts to create alignment within your business are essentially a clarification of what you are and what you are not. During this process, a period of integration can occur, during which some people step up and fly the new mission’s banner while others reject it, disagree with it, disengage from the work or their team, or simply resign. You have to expect and accept uncomfortable moments during a time of change or transformation, yet still know the work is essential to any company’s success. To function empathically and effectively, the leaders of a company must have a clear understanding of its mission and goals, its audiences, and their needs—and the company culture must be in alignment.
Many of the companies we work with are large, complex multinationals, but we also get to work with the leaders of new, progressive companies seeking to disrupt an industry and create new models for success. One of those is General Assembly.
General Assembly (GA) started as a coworking space in New York City. It was a beautifully designed, 10,000-square-foot full floor located in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, a bustling neighborhood sometimes dubbed “Silicon Alley” because of its concentration of high-tech companies, similar to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. The neighborhood has been a home to hot-to-trot start-ups for years, and GA was located right in the center of it.
The company built up a good business leasing desk space to many start-ups that weren’t ready for their own office or whose owners found the camaraderie of a shared space more to their liking. GA provided the snack stations, coffee machines, and common areas appointed with eccentrically shaped and colored seating that have become the norm in most start-up offices, making the space a thriving community.
But the 10,000 square feet filled up fast, and GA didn’t have room for more tenants. At the same time, it opened a few similar spaces in other cities and the same thing happened. The company could have taken more space on other floors or in other buildings, but its founders knew they would no longer be a community but a real estate business, which wasn’t their goal. They needed to take on the Seeker archetype and think about a pivot.
That caused them to stumble upon a perk they’d been offering their tenants: weekly programs that included lecturers, teachers, workshop organizers, and skills trainers. Some classes were even taught by the start-up tenants. There was great demand for the programs, which people loved, so the founders began a hard pivot toward a new business model centered around skills development and training.
GA slowly let its leases with existing tenants expire, and as square footage became available, it expanded its educational programming to include technology development, data, design, and business training. Demand continued to be high, and soon the classes were oversubscribed. The feedback from students was great, but still the brand needed help articulating its new mission.
That was when we were brought aboard.
In applying empathy, our work started with conversations among the leadership team, the staff, instructors, and students as well as several of the company’s investors. As we’d seen before, things can become challenging for a company’s culture in such moments of change. While GA’s leaders were redefining what the company was, they couldn’t help but define what it was not. Some of the GA staff had signed on to work at a coworking space, and now that the company was in the education business, they saw that their skills didn’t match with what the new business required.
Our conversations with GA students told us that even though they got a lot out of the programs, they felt a lack of community. Interestingly, the center of the company’s coworking business had somehow been stripped out of the education business. Students told us that when they were in a class, they had a sense of community, but once it finished, there was no way to stay tethered to GA or the people they’d met. GA (and its competitors) needed to realize something that colleges and universities have known for years: that your alumni are your strongest allies.
Our goal was to help the company develop a new mission that would broaden its focus from ad hoc course work and education to a mission we called “lifelong learning.” Anyone who works in the start-up and technology world knows how important it is to update one’s skills regularly—at least as often as new programming languages crop up (which is pretty often these days). The same is true with design software and user experience and even business modeling. We guided GA to stand up and commit to all of its students, past, present, and future, promising to be their lifelong learning partner. GA would dedicate itself to maintaining relationships with its alums and ensure that it would be there for them anytime they needed to level up their career, take a step toward a new skill, or even connect with other people who have the skills needed for a particular business.
This was a new way of thinking about the company. GA’s brand and marketing team now had to expand beyond the new-student acquisition market to maintaining contact with alumni, building a network of students from campuses around the world, and designing a physical space so that no matter what GA space a person was in, from New York to Melbourne, he or she would have the feeling of being part of the same family.
Our team worked side by side with GA to develop a new brand system, evolving the logo and other elements from its coworking days in ways that aligned to the new mission we’d created. The internal culture galvanized as the language became more and more real. People began to speak differently about what GA did in a way that was aligned to a mission that felt real and connected to the community it served.
This alignment showed up in the words the leadership team used when communicating with their alumni and current students, and, most important, it was part of the services GA was delivering. The GA team understood what parts of the company’s story would appeal to the media and its investor community, and the company quickly became a press darling as a leader in the field of continuing education. They also discovered that this work helped them recruit new talent into the organization with skills that were aligned to the brand as well as a dedication to service, education, and community.
In six short months, as the alignment was realized, the GA brand evolved into something new while still retaining important parts from its past. The company’s spaces around the world felt united visually and evoked the sense of community we all envisioned. And most important, GA’s students and alumni were being engaged in a deeper, more meaningful way. They knew that GA was committed to being a partner to them as they grew in their career. It was a beautiful thing to watch, and it showed us that when we work with empathy—getting a comprehensive picture of the business from all sides—great things are bound to happen.
The work we did to help General Assembly change its business had powerful results, but not every company is ready to accept change, and even the ones that say they are often discover that it’s not as easy as they’d hoped. That’s because one of the hardest things to change is entrenched behavior, especially if your organization is not set up for it.
In my years working with companies and organizations, I have observed four key tensions that consistently emerge as stumbling blocks and can slow down the change process. The only way to get past them is to approach them with empathy for where the business is today and where it wants to go. This will ultimately give you powerful insights into how your organization is presently organized and what shifts might be necessary in order to bring about the right changes. These four tensions are:
• Objective versus subjective decision-making
• Top-down versus bottom-up culture
• Human-centered versus ecosystemic thinking
• Passive versus proactive leadership
These are not binary choices. No company can be wholly one or the other. Instead, think of them as a spectrum. As you read the next section, consider the distinctions between each and where your company currently sits on the spectrum. It’s useful to understand this so you can identify where improvements can be made to help make your culture and your company accept empathy more readily.
It’s important to remember that no organization can effectively practice empathy in a vacuum. Empathy reveals big, complex, and nuanced topics that draw in the larger world. As leaders throughout a company make decisions, they need to keep in mind “close to home” things such as the company’s culture and team dynamics while also considering the outside social, political, and economic climates, which can be hard to measure, making it sometimes difficult to determine how much they directly relate to the business. But balancing them strategically allows empathy to be built into the organization, often with profound results.
Objective decision-making is relatively simple to get a handle on. When a problem is approached objectively, facts are considered without feelings or bias to confuse them. Either things happen, or they don’t. A light switch works, or it doesn’t. A train is on schedule, or it isn’t. If the solution is clear and factual, objectivity is easy to come by.
The problem is that today’s businesses, and our roles within them, need to operate more and more on subjectivity. And subjective decision-making takes some getting used to. When things are subjective, there can be multiple right answers, which can be influenced by a person’s feelings and biases, which can lead to confusion and indecision. Perspective, personal taste, intuition, and a host of other individualized attributes play a role in making subjective decisions.
Take, for example, the hiring of a new team member. You’ve objectively narrowed the candidates through your requirements for a university degree, industry experience, and specific hard skills. Two finalists come in for interviews, and now everything will depend on subjective decision-making. This is likely something you already do instinctively: you evaluate prospective employees’ cultural fit and presentation style, even how they make you feel when you talk with them (whether you consciously recognize that or not). Even knowing what you want to see in the candidates, it can still be hard to make a subjective decision. For example, let’s say the first of the two candidates walks in with confidence, looks you straight in the eyes, and answers questions directly but doesn’t offer anything exactly memorable, while the second candidate is a little meek, fumbles with their résumé holder, and makes little eye contact but does answer your questions with depth and passion.
It’s not an easy choice. You must know the type of person who will thrive in the company culture as well as what skills are needed versus those that are nice to have. An insecure candidate might not thrive in an aggressive culture. Ultimately, a hiring decision comes down to having an empathic read on the candidates relative to the organization. It’s a subjective call to make but one that will have real consequences.
One way to approach subjective decision-making is to consider what factors are important to the decision and put them into a hierarchy. Taking the example above, we might say that cultural fit within the company is highly important, along with other considerations such as writing style, creativity, and demeanor. The interviewer will evaluate each of those factors through his or her own perspective. Perhaps they shouldn’t all be weighted equally. For example, it is best to know from the outset if the interviewer’s opinion of the candidate’s creativity is more important than that of his or her ability to fit into the company culture.
The same could be said when evaluating ideas presented by your team for a new marketing campaign. What’s most important to you? How an ad looks? How it reads? What you think your consumers will think of it? What your boss will think of it? Giving all of those considerations equal weight can be overwhelming and prevent you from making a decision. Well-informed decisions are best made after you determine what subjective criteria matter the most (and what don’t) so that your empathic intuition can be directed at the right things.
In 2015, I was invited to visit Princeton University as a guest speaker to talk about empathy and how it can be used to solve problems. The students’ feedback was so positive that the university approached Sub Rosa about creating a class on the topic. We had never created a curriculum centered around empathy, but we jumped at the chance to immerse ourselves deeper in the topic than we’d ever been.
We called the class Empathic Design because we wanted students to understand that “design” is much broader than what people typically think when they hear the word. We design everything—products, cultures, services, and so on. We knew we wanted to give the students a perspective that would open the aperture on design. The more design thinkers we have out in the world making things work better and behaving more empathically, the better off we’ll all be.
We based our curriculum on our experiences developing brand and business solutions for clients so the students would be able to see empathy being applied practically in the real world. The class was offered through Princeton’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, and the majority of the students were studying mechanical engineering, computer science, and entrepreneurship. The students came with a wide range of disciplines and approaches to problem-solving, which led to an interesting tension in the class of comfort and discomfort with objective versus subjective decision-making.
Through a mix of readings, case-based learning, and participatory labs, our budding young empaths would work through a series of challenges, not unlike the exercises in this book, that taught them how to apply empathy in order to become more and more comfortable with subjective work—which for many of them was foreign territory.
Mechanical engineering, for instance, though at times dependent on subjective choices, is most often evaluated objectively. Either a machine works, or it doesn’t. Either it performs its desired task, or it fails. The way it performs its task could be described in subjective terms, but most of our students majoring in mechanical engineering were comfortable with mechanically engineered solutions that could be judged objectively by the results they achieved.
Straightforward computational and analysis-based code, from our computer science majors, is also evaluated objectively by whether or not the task was performed, but app development, on which so many of today’s computer science students are focused, depends on a programmer’s ability to make a variety of both objective and subjective choices. The best apps are solidly engineered (meaning that they don’t crash and they run efficiently), but they also offer alluring interfaces and an appealing user experience. This sort of app design is in high demand and represents the confluence of great objective and subjective skills manifesting in a single product.
Students in the entrepreneurial program especially needed to hone their proficiency in subjective decision-making. No doubt about it, entrepreneurs must know when to remain objective, but great entrepreneurs rely on their subjective skills to push their ideas, teams, and businesses to greater heights. Our entrepreneurial students knew how valuable this skill was for them, and many of them took our class to try to improve this part of their thinking.
Even though our class was taught at the Keller school, it was open to enrollment campuswide, so it was also peppered with budding philosophers, architects, political scientists, and economists. No matter where the students came from at the university, we saw that the ones who could step outside of their own shoes and see problems from varied perspectives were the ones who could most readily recognize opportunities for improvement. They were also able to grapple gracefully with the paradox of choice among multiple right answers better than their peers who could not.
Early on, we got the students involved in a real-world experiment that called on subjective decision-making. We sent them to a part of Princeton’s main street and asked them to report back on the specific design flaws they saw there. We also wanted them to suggest improvements that could be made. Typically they went out in small groups and observed traffic patterns, how pedestrians moved around the neighborhood, the types of stores that lined the street, and other key elements. With few exceptions, each student returned to class convinced that he or she had discovered the most important and flawed aspects of the town’s design. To their surprise, they found that many of their peers had identified the same issues and had reached similar if not exactly the same solutions.
This was often our first step in teaching Applied Empathy: helping students see that they were looking at problems from only their own perspective. Their inability to step outside themselves prevented them from going further than scratching the surface of the underlying design challenges and caused them to miss the chance to be more creative with their solutions. After all, there are only so many ways you can address a lack of late-night dining options or a shortage of available bike racks (two common complaints of any college-age student).
We then sent them back to look more deeply and see what they could discover when they peered beyond the obvious. We asked them to take on different personas, to consider life in Princeton from a perspective greater than their own. Some went out and looked at the town from the perspective of a mom with kids and found opportunities for better stroller parking outside stores. Others looked at the town through the eyes of the elderly, noticing that much of the town center was designed for the young academic community but lacked certain accommodations for older residents. Some students even interviewed the subjects they were observing. The deeper they went, the stronger their insights became, and this sort of immersive research quickly demonstrated the array of solutions they could reach by utilizing empathy.
Our goal in the class (and in this book) was to teach the tools needed to process information differently and more diversely. The students learned to gather insights and important information from potential users, audiences, and customers, and also how to develop more complete, well-rounded solutions—as I hope you will. The class ended with the presentation of a semester-long group project that challenged teams to take on a real-life campus issue and suggest an empathically designed solution. We saw students make hard choices about what problem to tackle, what data and insights to trust, and ultimately what solution to put forward.
Becoming comfortable with subjectivity is one of the most important first steps in harnessing the power of empathy. It’s as true as it was for the students at Princeton as it is for the managers and leaders of every company we work with. Empathy for the people around you—be they customers, clients, employees, teammates, or family members—provides critical levels of understanding that will help you make subjective choices from a more informed place, ultimately making them more effective.
Leaders wanting to build a more empathic company must grapple with how information and decisions flow within their organization and how that process may need to change so that empathy can play a bigger role. The two classic examples of misalignment in this area are top-down and bottom-up cultures. The first comes from a rigid command-and-control structure, with directives flowing from above and being implemented unquestioningly throughout the organization. Top-down organizations often benefit from the efficiencies of having only a few decision makers. But they can also struggle with low employee engagement and morale if individuals feel they have no real influence or sense of agency.
We have also worked with bottom-up companies that seek feedback from teams in both formal and informal ways. These organizations sometimes cultivate stronger, more inclusive cultures, but they can also struggle with too much information coming into the system, putting senior leaders into a state of “analysis paralysis”—unsure of what to do and where to go based on mixed or divergent feedback. This sort of culture often exists in start-ups that have grown quickly and expanded their teams by sometimes as much as ten or a hundred times in only a few years. They began as most start-ups do—leanly. In the beginning they had a small, nimble group of people, and decisions were often made by consensus. The team talked out every major decision because all of its members were invested in getting the company off the ground. As a company grows and head count swells, the old culture of decision by committee may still be seen as democratic and “millennial-minded,” but too much of it can destroy a team’s ability to make any real decisions.
A top-down business, which often focuses on efficiency and clarity, has the advantage of providing its teams with clear, direct marching orders they can understand and adopt easily. However, we often hear employees in these companies say they don’t feel their “voice is being heard,” and intuitively, one would think that a rigid, top-down organization squashes the spirit of those who work there and creates a “cog” mentality. But many companies operate successfully with this structure—and some employees even tell us they sought out a culture like this because they could do their job more efficiently and would have clarity about their place in the company and how it operates.
The bottom-up company picks up empathy points for elevating the voices of the whole organization and for taking employees’ perspectives into account when decisions are made. But it can be challenging to run a business, particularly a large one, from the bottom up.
Some companies have used technology to add a layer of input into the company. A tech start-up that we worked with, which had more than a thousand employees, installed a series of buttons at the office exit. Each button was a response to the question “How was your day?” Each day the “pulse” of the company was delivered to senior leaders so they had a sense of employees’ morale and how recent decisions were affecting the company’s culture.
Do I think this tactic on its own is a particularly effective way to run a company from the bottom up? Not really. Will this feature have a major impact on decision-making throughout the organization? Perhaps. But it is an example of the effort some companies are making to stay connected and to create some sort of feedback loop that puts bottom-up information on leadership’s radar.
In reality, few organizations are strictly one or the other, and most operate with elements of both.
It’s important that a company’s leaders consider where they are in the life cycle of their business and where their company is in its growth and trajectory. As empathy is applied during growth periods, it can create information overload for decision makers, making it even more important that they have a clear perspective on how much top down versus bottom up they want for their business.
An effective corporate culture, if designed and communicated effectively, should behave like a magnet, attracting behaviors and talent that are aligned to the culture and repelling those that are not. And repelling is a good thing. It means you’re being clear about who you are and what you expect from people. Leaders looking for a one-size-fits-all company culture will find themselves disappointed time and again. Culture is an evolutionary element of a business, and over time it will change to accommodate the organization and its needs.
I saw this at Sub Rosa during one of our most pivotal growth spurts. We were doubling our head count from twenty-five to fifty employees pretty rapidly and moving our studio to a new, larger space to accommodate the expansion. It was an exciting time, and it was encouraging to see the company grow at such a pace. But we were also losing some of our top talent.
Many of the people who had been with us the longest wanted to move up into positions that earned more money, most of them managerial. That presented us with a challenge because some were more talented as “makers” than as managers. We were looking for creative solutions to help them find their right place in the company. In some instances we proposed giving them an increase in compensation without changing their responsibilities. We were effectively giving them an opportunity to make more money by continuing to do what they did best.
It felt like a good idea that could give us room to evolve our culture—to empower legacy team members while also bringing in new leaders. To me, it also seemed like a pretty empathic approach, and I was convinced we were onto something.
It didn’t work.
Some members of our team were confident that they could manage as well as they made, and they insisted on pursuing new positions. The pressure, the various responsibilities, the company’s change from a smaller, scrappy entity to whatever we were becoming brought on some major challenges both culturally and operationally, and eventually we lost some of our early power players.
That was devastating to me and went against the familial spirit I had tried to develop for the company.
One day, I went out for a drink with Jeff Kempler, Sub Rosa’s chief operations officer, to talk through some things that were weighing on me. Jeff has seen the inner workings of a lot of different companies over the years. Before coming to Sub Rosa, he had held senior executive positions at music and entertainment multinationals and gaming companies, and he had been a practicing attorney for more than a decade. He had been particularly focused on working with creative individuals in the film and music industries, so his empathy for the type of talent in our business was pretty spot-on. He was around forty-eight years old at the time, going into his second year at Sub Rosa. He was a trusted confidant with a brain too big for his head and a heart to match. I was a young founder, and I was happy to have a thought partner like Jeff in moments like this.
I asked him why we were losing people whom we were wholly invested in trying to retain. I had hoped to see them grow and thrive with us. I couldn’t figure it out. What had we done wrong? Why were they resigning?
Jeff drew up a perfectly fitting analogy of the evolution of our company’s culture. He said that in a company’s early days, the founder is the sun. The founder provides light and warmth to help the company grow. He (in my case) is also a big force that holds the planets in orbit. Without the founder, all the planets would spin out, and the solar system would cease to exist.
But as a company grows, it is often impossible for one person to remain the sun. It is frequently too much responsibility. And that was happening for us.
Jeff recognized how disappointing it was to lose those team members, but he insisted that it was an inevitable part of growth and that, in the end, more and more leaders would emerge and contribute to playing the role of the “sun” in our solar system. In truth, that was already happening. Jeff was one of them, along with our CFO, Julie Puccio, who had earned my trust years earlier and had moved up the ranks from a midlevel position to one of my most trusted thought partners.
As we talked more about that analogy, it became our shared goal for the business. It seemed like the right thing to do, and it gave me permission to delegate some responsibility and let me focus on growing the business instead of running the company’s day-to-day operations. But in time it would also be unhealthy for our management team to be alone at the center. We wanted all the leaders in the company to feel that they had influence and to know that collectively, each of us had a meaningful place in the “solar system.”
Jeff was right. The company was changing, and as a result, we needed a new culture.
After a rocky year passed, we hit our stride, and things felt great again. There was a new sense of leadership emanating from new people we brought in with fresh thinking, as well as support from some of our leaders who were with us for the long haul. I was no longer the sun holding everything in orbit. Neither was Jeff or Julie. We were surrounded by passionate people who believed in the mission we had articulated, and we all wanted to share the responsibility for making that vision a reality.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen just once in growing companies; it happens often, and good leaders anticipate such changes and are undaunted by them. Change is inevitable. By being aware of it and embracing it with openness and empathy, we can calibrate our strategy quickly and effectively in order to meet the needs of the business.
Empathic companies train dexterity into the fabric of their culture. They have a true understanding of the dynamics at play on a variety of levels within the organization, and they know that great cultures are built by constantly calibrating the top-down aspects of their operations with the bottom-up feedback from the organization as a whole. Applying empathy to an organization or team is a constantly evolving process, but with careful attention, it can inspire and empower leaders to steward the company through change time and again. And again and again.
“Human-centered design” is a philosophy that creates solutions expressly designed for a specific audience. “Ecosystemic thinking” refers to a group of interrelated elements working together. They are ten-dollar marketing terms that have been bandied around so often that they have lost a lot of their power. But in working our way through the tension between them, we can learn a great deal about more fully harnessing the powers of empathy.
Human-centered design is a cornerstone of modern design theory. Popularized and refined by IDEO more than thirty years ago, this form of thinking incorporates a variety of human factors and usability studies into the design of any product or service. Look no further than the safety caps on your prescription medicines or the mouse you use to navigate your computer to see how important human-centered design thinking has been to problem-solving.
But the increased popularity of human-centered design has often caused it to be seen as the solution to all problems instead of being just one ingredient in a more elaborate recipe for good design. As its name implies, human-centered design is ultraempathic, but it also misses some important things that are key to wholly empathic design solutions.
An example is the rise and dramatic fall of General Motors’ Hummer business. In 2005, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Hummers all over the road. They were cruising down the freeway above the other cars, stretched versions ferrying prom dates and rappers to and from parties, and they were militarizing the suburban combat theater of supermarket parking lots and drive-through windows.
Why did the Hummer become so popular? In essence, it was because human-centered design was working well. General Motors capitalized on the demand of a specific audience who were clamoring for bigger, more visually powerful vehicles. The United States was coming out of two wars, and a segment of the population was looking to park some of its patriotic fervor in their own driveway.
GM capitalized on this desire with the Hummer. The Hummer driver wanted to sit high and see the road from a powerful, in-command vantage point, and the vehicle was designed to provide that.
But the company mistook its human-centered insights as static versus variable. General Motors assumed that what had been true at one time would be true forever, and it didn’t take into account other factors coming out of those two wars. First, the United States entered a recession, and gas prices soared to an all-time high. As the economy worsened, with massive job losses and the shuttering of many businesses from Main Street to Wall Street, many drivers turned against the gas-guzzling monsters.
That alone would probably have been survivable. The company could have taken a knock on the chin and managed through the recession. But it wasn’t being dealt a single blow; it was a one-two punch that ultimately knocked it out.
The second, and arguably more powerful, shot was something brewing in the national consciousness, and it had an unlikely hero: the Toyota Prius. That was the US auto industry’s first hybrid electric mass-market vehicle, and it brought about an immediate shift in the marketplace.
I don’t want to suggest that the Hummer and Prius were fighting for the same consumer. But the Prius brought about a shift in the cultural zeitgeist to a new era of eco-consciousness and consideration for the planet. Electric vehicle (EV) parking spaces started showing up, and owners of those vehicles were given special HOV-lane exceptions. All of a sudden, driving a Hummer became a sort of scarlet letter denoting environmental carelessness. And that—coupled with the downward-spiraling economy and high gas prices—ultimately led to the Hummer’s demise.
Hummer wasn’t changing to accommodate the new ecosystem, and, as a result, it couldn’t survive. If the company had introduced a hybrid model, could it have been saved? Maybe. It did invest briefly in a third-party company called Raser as an attempt to bring electric technology into the business, but ultimately it was too late, and in 2010 GM discontinued the brand.
This is an example of the importance of balancing the influences of ecosystemic versus solely human-centered perspectives in decision-making.
Empathy with the end user is important—and is perhaps the most important thing for meeting consumer demand. But it’s not the only thing. Empathy extends beyond the one-to-one interactions we have. We also must consider the one-to-many inputs that empathy helps us to capture.
Do we truly know what’s happening in the broader ecosystem? Do we know what our competitors are thinking or doing differently? Are we current with important trends and behaviors the world around us cares about? Staying with the auto industry for another example, the nimble, insight-led company Tesla has capitalized on its understanding of the whole ecosystem to become one of the highest-market-cap automotive brands in the world with only a fraction of the total sales of its next biggest competitors.
It didn’t make and sell more cars than the next guy. Tesla became a success by seeing a world that is bigger than car sales and leases. It sees itself as a mobility company that is helping to write the future of the industry. Everyone from consumers to financial analysts understands that that’s what it’s doing, and it has been rewarded commensurately.
Having a sense of the ecosystem within which our business operates is sure to broaden our perspective and ultimately help its leaders create solutions that stand up to the shifting tides, building more resilient and empathic solutions that meet the needs of those we are trying to connect with more fully.
Gathering information to help make better and more empathic decisions is critical, but there are times when too much is too much. As mentioned earlier, the pursuit of empathy can sometimes lead to analysis paralysis. We can find ourselves in a situation where we have loads of data, sometimes conflicting, and then we cannot act. We’re stuck. When that happens, we face the tension of passive versus proactive leadership.
In our work with clients, we take into account diverse forms of feedback: How do they solicit and evaluate the information from differentiated audiences, such as employees, customers, shareholders, and what do they do with the information?
In some organizations, this information-gathering process is done as a matter of process and habit. They capture information, and it goes into a digital repository, never to be analyzed or considered again. It’s a strange behavior and more common than you would think.
Now that technology has enabled us to scrape, gather, accumulate, and otherwise parse information from so many sources, many organizations effectively create virtual catacombs housing the specters of consumers past. This happens for many reasons. The most common occurs when an organization’s management team knows they need the data or believes they should collect it as a “best practice,” but often, the company is not equipped with the right team to analyze it and make it truly useful. So the questions become:
• How much is too much?
• How can companies determine the right level of information to consider before making a decision?
• What is the data informing, and how does that influence leadership decisions?
Some leaders are great at knowing what to do. Decisions come swiftly and often. Deadline-driven businesses seem to excel at it. Go inside any major news organization, and you’ll see decisions made swiftly about what to report and how much emphasis to put on a specific topic or story. The Internet turned journalism into a minute-to-minute, twenty-four-hour business, and editors have to make quick choices to stay in front of the competition. The most empathic ones understand their audiences and know what stories will get the most engagement. And engagement grows readership, which draws advertisers and increases revenue. It’s a fast-paced, high-intensity business category that must rely heavily on empathy for its audience to make the right choices and drive growth.
Whenever we work with a client to help its team improve their approach to empathy, we first want to understand how they make decisions. We want to know if decisions are being made with adequate, empathic inputs (i.e., inputs beyond those of the decision makers themselves) or in a (relative) vacuum. Equally important, we determine if company or departmental decisions are readily adopted or met with resistance and tension. We want to understand if decisions are made uniformly across the company or if certain groups are better or worse at making decisions that stick. The answers to all these questions help us develop an understanding of the culture at the present moment.
Before we can help companies improve their decision-making, we must understand what data and insights they receive in advance of a decision and how they evaluate it. This is the nature of “consideration.” Ask yourself: How often do you consider multiple forms of information when making a decision? Leaders must understand this about themselves. We don’t all operate the same way, and some people like to take in lots of inputs—customer data, anecdotal insights, conversations with key team members—before making a decision. If that’s your leadership style and it works for you and your organization, that’s great. But some people get stuck in a loop of too much conflicting information, and it prevents them from taking any real action.
We try to help those people understand and focus on what’s most important to consider. Often, they don’t need all the feedback, just some of it—and delivered in the right format. If a person is a visual thinker, perhaps a word cloud or a chart of some kind will help show the themes or trends more effectively. More verbal leaders prefer to hear or read sound bites from interviews or quotes from key stakeholders to acquire the information they need to make a decision. Every leader needs to have an understanding of his or her unique makeup and how he or she processes feedback.
I’m a visual thinker. I elicit feedback from my team via brief notes or visual references, depending on the kind of decision we are making. All of these inputs are laid out on a table, and I do what’s often referred to as a “silent sort.” I move things around the table, seeing connections or similarities. I start to notice themes emerge. New perspectives or gaps in the thinking start to become clear. This creates a foundation from which I can make a decision that is informed by collaboration but not overwhelmed by input.
Once you determine the right format, purpose, and depth of feedback that works for you, you’ll be in a much better position to make choices.
One thing we tell leaders of organizations is that all of their choices have consequences. Every decision a person in power makes will have an impact on the company. It’s hard to believe that something seemingly as small as changing the snacks in your break room or the gender identification policies for your restrooms can cause a massive reaction, but that’s often the case. Equally, inaction and a lack of decision-making on certain topics can have just as strong an effect.
An organization I’ve gotten to know over the years is Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s biggest and most respected hedge funds. It is led by a brilliant and enigmatic CEO, Ray Dalio. Ray’s vision for Bridgewater is built on the idea of radical transparency—and radical it certainly is.
Ray believes that companies operate most effectively when everything the company does—from its weekly meetings to the amount of time spent emailing—is made visible to managers and employees. To him, this enables information to be gathered and considered more quickly, leading to more effective and sounder decisions. The results of his hedge fund are hard to argue with, but there aren’t too many companies trying to replicate the systems he has in place. I was in the audience at his 2017 TED Talk in Vancouver, where he went into detail about one piece of his radical transparency. It definitely divided the audience.
The controversy was around what Ray described as a custom-designed rating system that runs all day on the computer of every Bridgewater employee. Every interaction, from conference calls to in-person meetings, is graded by everyone who participates. For instance, every employee ranks colleagues in real time, stating whether or not he or she felt the colleague communicated clearly and whether or not he or she seemed effective. These and a slew of other ratings are shared with everyone else, making the transparency immediate and unfiltered.
These data points are fed into one of Bridgewater’s proprietary algorithms, which are designed to cross-reference the data with the employee’s track record of success, ultimately creating a sort of weighted average of “believability” for each person who works there. When the company is faced with a decision, those ratings can play a key role.
For example, ten Bridgewater colleagues might be discussing a potential stock investment opportunity. They might be at various levels of seniority, but each person’s opinion is valued or they wouldn’t be in the room. Seven of them are adamantly against investing in the stock; they think the market is too volatile and hard to predict. But three others think Bridgewater should make a big bet on the stock.
If all of their opinions are valued, the decision should be a no-brainer: seven out of ten experts vote against investing, and that’s that. But this is where Bridgewater’s algorithm comes into play. The algorithm has analyzed a lot of data on the ten employees making the decision—how their investments have performed over time, their effectiveness as communicators, their performance in group decisions versus autonomous decisions—and crunched together a rating for each of them. Of the ten employees, the seven who are against investing were right 36 percent of the time when voting as a group, but the three who want to invest were right 82 percent of the time. As a result, the group will make the investment. Bridgewater uses this sort of data every day to help its teams make more efficient and better-informed decisions about nearly everything.
Some people at TED found Bridgewater’s approach to transparency scary and uncomfortable, while others thought it was progressive and refreshing. It would certainly be hard to imagine implementing this type of transparency in all companies.
We can’t all rely on Ray Dalio’s algorithm (though you can read more in his book Principles), but what is this if not empathy? It allows Bridgewater to evaluate decisions from a variety of perspectives. It takes a diverse set of inputs broader than itself and calculates a right decision based on the highest number of knowable details. As we consider situations, we have to account for as many sources as possible, without overwhelming our ability to make informed and meaningful decisions.
Sometimes careful planning can keep us from making bad decisions that would cascade throughout the organization. But sometimes the wrong decision is still made, and when that occurs, it’s important to keep feedback channels (verbal and nonverbal) open so that decision makers have the best possible information. It’s not likely that all decisions will be 100 percent correct for everyone, but with a meaningful consideration of inputs into a decision, the best, most empathic solutions can be discovered and acted upon.
As you apply empathy to your own business practices and teams, you may discover that tensions other than these four will emerge. Inevitably, your success or failure in taking an empathic approach to leadership will rely heavily on your ability to shift the people, processes, and principles of the company to align more fully with the newfound perspective that empathy has given you.
The world’s longest-lasting institutions are not businesses but religions, governments, and military forces. They generally succeed because they have the benefit of autocratically dictating the environment in which they operate. Businesses, on the other hand, have to operate within the context of the rapidly changing world around them. If a company cannot continually evolve at the pace of the world around it, it will surely fail.