Activist Empathy
Part II
More than two years ago, I posted a short article on this topic. As a promoter of a more universal approach to humanity, I revisit and attempt to develop the themes a bit more here for those who would lead organizations or political groups.
I’m an advocate of healthy relationships. Healthy relationships are driven by the primacy of empathy over the transactions that sometime define modern social events. Leadership is a form of relationship involved with many engaged in a common purpose requiring descriptors such as direction, governance, control, ascendancy, supremacy, rule, command, power, and influence. Healthy leadership requires empathy. Consequently, empathy is required to create healthy and humane change. Leadership sets the values into motion that change the nature of personal and social movement. Parents do this. Leaders of cultural institutions do this. If you wish to lead a healthy organization, you must be active with your empathy. You must be an empathetic activist – not just pushing an agenda, but feeling the cause of it and the response to it.
Empathic activists often model health during social change. Healthy social change in your business or community organization requires empathy, and also, sympathy and compassion. Together, they form successful change - with empathy serving as the glue holding the other two together. Empathy is a must for the other two to evolve into healthy outcomes. Left to their own purposes, compassion and sympathy can lead your organization down a path to nowhere special, or nowhere good. As team leaders, supervisors, managers and executives, finding your sea legs among these three confusing terms will sustain you in sailing through everything from the most mundane tasks to major strategic decisions. This article provides a brief review of how these three human elements blend together to create your activist empathy leadership health.
Everyone, with the exclusion of true sociopaths (with irreparably damaged psyches), has empathy. However, not everyone knows how to actively access their empathy for the good of self and other. This is compounded by the fact that many confuse the terms empathy, sympathy and compassion, and the best ways to respond to those feelings. In intentional settings, grasping the differences enables a leader to go the distance in developing and sustaining healthy and productive collegial environments.
Let’s start with empathy, a word rooted in ancient Greek. Empathy contains two words: Pathos: an emotional process, and em- means growing into. Therefore, if you empathize, you find yourself feeling as you are growing into another’s place, or fitting “inside the other person’s shoes,” as many like to say. Empathy requires imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. You don’t have to be there, but somehow you get it. Having an empathetic boss or coworker is beneficial for growth and development. Being one is empowering.
In graduate school, we counseling psychology students were trained to focus our empathetic skills by using active listening, mirroring of postures, and rephrasing client statements in our own words. Superficially (and from a sociopathic viewpoint), that may seem like a gimmick, but sincere behavioral modeling is not mockery or deceit. It is a way to feel. Empathetic behaviors lead you on the path of becoming attuned to the connections between another person’s feelings and behaviors. You build rapport which allows for better communication. Never knock empathy. If you practice it regularly, you become sensitive to others in a way in which you can take action based in mutual benefit. This is the first step to becoming a good actor in both classical and modern ways.
Sympathy is different from empathy. Sym derives from a Greek root implying togetherness. Sympathy infers a community of feelings, not a getting inside an other’s feelings. It is less of a connection and more of a stampede. Whereas empathy leverages higher cognitive capacities to understand another’s feelings, sympathy is more about being roughly affected by the same emotions. Sympathy is why someone unrelated to your loved-one laying in the casket or pair standing at the altar taking vows also cries; and why you accept their tears as authentic. Sympathy can be like a cascading wave of emotion moving through a crowd. You see the wave coming and you sympathetically also throw up your hands in harmony, like birds or sheep in a flock. Institutionally, sympathy is not unlike affinity – like rooting for the same national football team. It is about belonging more than seeking to understand. Affinity groups look inward in plural. There is a certainly a time for that, but when empathy is needed, sympathy falls short.
Likewise, compassion is something we all can learn to have, but it does not help change the world without empathy. We’ve heard the terms like “compassionate conservatism”, “compassionate management” or compassionate leadership” used frequently without clear definition. They are used in the same way as some use the term “soft skills”. These labels are used as alternatives to authoritarian styles, which I suppose are “hard” in some ways, but certainly not as difficult as doing what the “soft” in soft skills means. Actually, this use of compassionate is a weak modifier that allows for a perceived or promoted gentler authoritarianism that misses the point of the meaning of compassion. Webster defines compassion as, sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it. The word is rooted in the Latin for suffering with. If you are a compassionate person, you suffer or endure something socially with others. You don’t try to make the blows seem softer. In my observation, as a political modifier, compassionate has been used more as a deflecting term than a modifier, in the same manner one would speak of a bloodless coup.
In a work example, you may have sympathy for a laid-off colleague and find concurrent rage against the offending management through the ranks. The management team may steel themselves against the reactive emotions with their own in-group affinity. Sympathy is the less premeditative response. The reactionary nature of sympathies tends toward tribal. We may distinguish this from empathy, which might have prevented the bad feelings created by layoffs. With thoughtful preparation, communication of an understanding of the predicted hardships, and open attempts at mitigating actions, such an action might avoid adding insult to injury. Compassion may come into play when owners and managers share in the pain by giving up some of their benefits to alleviate the suffering of the workers. Some think of an alleged act of compassion as an offering of thoughts and prayers, a pat on the back, an apology, or an early remission of their due severance pay as compassionate. No. That would confuse compassion with paternalism or shrewd business actions.
The importance of the Me Too movement provides a developing and broad social lesson about the complex interactions of sympathy, empathy and compassion. Me Too, has become an affinity group built in sympathy with the common distress of misogyny in the workplace and the greater political and economic community. Supportive men have compassion for the movement, and we certainly should exercise empathy, but sympathy is improbable. Here is why: Many mass movements are built upon sympathies for common plights within specific affinity groups. Sympathy is also something most of us can have for those with common experiences. For this reason, it is easier to evoke sympathy rather than empathy. Men may feel uncomfortable, even threatened by such an affinity movement in the same way management may react to employee rage concerning layoffs. But men, in our society, are not members of an oppressed group – no matter the argument for sympathies may persist. Compassion may emerge as a feeling for members of similar affinity groups. Communication becomes corralled into transactional negotiations. Essentially, though the topics differ, the process is very similar. We need to find empathy for oppression experienced by women to truly support Me Too. That means we must embrace their stories.
Let’s take that last thought a bit more down the rabbit hole. What happens when widespread sympathy is left divorced from the companion processes of empathy and compassion? What happens when it becomes and remains insular in nature. You may get identity movements such as the Tea Party movement of displaced middle-class workers, devolving into the pro-Trump MAGA movement. You get various forms of xenophobic nationalism. You get specific labor movements, also, and now, Me Too. These sympathetic movements may fizzle or morph into destructive causes when they cannot open up into reciprocating, inclusive empathy and compassion among individuals in other affinity groups outside of their own. The healing that they originally sought is compromised by a process that stereotypes, monetizes, or somehow otherwise dehumanizes the movement.
In other words, failed sympathetic groups do not develop beyond an association of common feelings. They remain wedged into limited ranges of activities revolving around the sympathies alone. At some point they lose the empathy required to lead healthy social change. Can you think of workplace, local community or national organizations that have failed in this way? What may have begun as a genuine heart-felt communal reaction against an identifiable ill might have dissolved into morass unless generative inclusion - empathy - occurred at the right time. Development of sympathetic movements into larger, more universal organizational or societal health requires both of the two other elements - empathy and compassion, imbued with activism among in-group and external allies or partners. Empathy is an outgoing growth process.
I once had a superior at work who, in the context of a management performance appraisal, rather cynically characterized me as always thinking outside of the box. My response to him was that I did not. I simply strove to make the box bigger. And here’s the thing - those who oppose universal change fight to keep emerging affinity movements isolated and inwardly focused. It is easier to divide and manage groups into grieving silos. But, merging the needs of many into a universally beneficial culture - that calls for leadership.
To develop and sustain healthy and productive collegial workplaces consider:
Making the target community one where, institutionally, everyone is encouraged to walk in each other’s shoes. Build empathic social development as part of the organizational culture. If silos must exist, open windows and encourage visitations in as many ways as possible. Encourage an evolving community where everyone gets a realistic view of everyone’s joys and sorrows.
Cultivating an environment for diversity beyond tokenism so that affinity groups may emerge naturally and develop sympathetic issues. Yes. Being uptight is not healthy. As your organizational gene pool becomes more complex, hidden diversity and therefore a potential for creativity and growth is generated.
When groups coalesce around emotional issues, encourage universal empathy and compassionate activities so that isolation does not become a negative feature of the community. Don’t bite the bait of “divide and conquer” – even in the form of “low-hanging-fruit”. Your consequential next failure will be to label of the sideways movement “progress”.
Avoiding the paternalism of putting a leader or management brand on pain mitigation. Make it a community effort championed by leadership. Use empathy and compassion to act together around a group’s plight in the context of the good of the greater community.
When negative events occur that hurt the bottom line, consider that “sharing the pain” or putting “skin in the game” means different things from different affinity groups within the community. Use empathy to healthily develop the sympathetic and compassionate responses that develop benefits across the community despite adversity.
My suggestions are components of what I call activist empathy. As indicated by the phrase, this use of empathy is forward-looking, political, and requires confronting various status quo assumptions that limit healthy growth. We are all capable of doing this. Authoritarian leadership models limit healthy growth by keeping parts of the community isolated from each other and inwardly focused – except in a survival response to an oppressive force.
Tangentially, one might not wonder why so-called successful authoritarian leaders have been also labeled as sociopaths. A community that lacks empathy will value and promote a certain culture sustaining affinity groups with competing tribal powers. Within those tribal powers, non-empathic activities can be boiled down to transactions that maintain a system of winners and losers in a hierarchy. This is why sociopathic leadership styles are noted for bullying and inability to maintain empathetic allies. Western institutions of masculinity often are subservient to such a system. The box in which they operate shrinks rather than expands.
Empathy is a gift that everyone can give each other if a culture sustains its development. The role of an activist empathy leader is to bridges disparate community divisions into a working awareness of the things that divide and responsively include for the purpose of universal betterment. Activist empathy leaders model and encourage individuals to develop broader views of their actions and sympathies. Activist empathy is the foundation of cooperation and the ecology of healthy group social action. Activist empathy unchains the powerful forces of mindful communication as we seek to parse the various emotions, passions and concerns that drive the actual work of leading and managing organizations.
