Empathetic Management

Teaching managers to listen to and support their teams improves productivity and profitability

Are your employees surviving or thriving?

Research published in August 2018 by Randstad found that 60% of workers “have left jobs, or are considering leaving, because they don't like their direct supervisors.” Similarly, 69% feel underutilized by their bosses. Gallup’s “2017 State of the American Workplace” found that 67% of employees are not engaged at work. And the American Psychological Association and Hogan Assessment Systems found 75% of Americans believe their boss to be the most stressful part of their jobs, costing companies $300 billion annually in lost productivity. (That’s in addition to the $15.5+ billion that companies spent on leadership development in 2013 alone.)

While some workplaces may have enthusiastic, engaged employees who are capable of going above and beyond what they’re asked to deliver, the majority do not. Employee engagement is low and managers are to blame. For over a decade, thanks to research by Gallup, we’ve known that 75% of the reasons people leave jobs can be influenced by managers. These include greater opportunities for development and advancement (32% of respondents), lack of fit with the culture (20%), poor experience with management (17%), and unjust compensation (22%). Marcel Schwantes had an interesting take on this in an Inc. editorial last year, noting that disengagement is driven by disrespect.

So, how do we address this? While various firms will tell you they have the solution, I believe the answer is much simpler: listen. Listen to what your employees are telling you. The apprenticeship model of learning to manage by example doesn’t work when employees aren’t happy with the example that is set. Managers need real training on skills like active listening, empathy and problem-solving to better match talent with the needs of the business.

Take the case of Alice, one of my former direct reports. When I met Alice, she was not on my team, but the firm was going to reorganize and she was one of 10 employees I could interview for a future role. We sat down together for a few hours so I could learn about her work at the time. I was building a data analytics team. She was doing manual quality control work, comparing inputs and outputs across screens. When I saw what she did, I realized: This is a job that could be replaced with a few simple data queries. She was clearly just surviving.

Alice’s answers to two of my questions let me know I wanted her on my team. The first was what does she like to do. Through that, I learned that she was bored with her job; she was not being challenged. She was going to school at night for a degree in business intelligence, hoping one day to find a job where she could use her brain. The second, and perhaps more telling response came when I asked her to tell me about a time when she talked to a friend or family member about work. What she said exactly didn’t matter. What I saw was her enthusiasm. She explained how she had solved a problem and loved doing so. The issue was, no one knew, so no one was giving her other problems to solve.

When Alice joined my team a few months later, her career took off. In months, she started to perform the job better than her superiors, who had been in their roles for years — in one case decades. Her colleagues started to treat her as a subject matter expert. Within six months, she was already being approached by others about new roles on their teams. She even took a higher-paying job with another firm; she came back to our team weeks later, because her manager at the new firm, she felt, was setting her up to fail. She’d rather make half as much money than stay there.

There isn’t really a secret to what happened with Alice. Using the MAGpie framework, I saw that Alice had issues across all three dimensions. From a mastery perspective, she wasn’t learning, let alone starting to master anything. So, she needed a new challenge. From an acceptance perspective, she was an outsider. If none of your colleagues knows who you are, how can you feel like you are accepted and belong? Lastly, her work wasn’t stimulating, so she sought gratification at night school, where she was getting to learn what she wanted to learn.

Putting her in a challenging role gratified her. Continuing to make her work harder and giving her more and more exposure to the people around her allowed her to begin to climb the ladder of mastery. Her stakeholders kept presenting her with new challenges, helping her learn quickly and efficiently. Finally, lifting her profile to help her interact with others in a positive way turned her from a warm body to a sought-out resource, helping her feel more accepted and valued by the people around her.

That is the goal of empathetic management. Empathetic management is actively listening to what your teams and your organization need (top, down and sideways) and figuring out how to deliver on it. That doesn’t mean command and control. Instead, it means being transparent about all of those needs and capabilities and collaborating with others to figure out what can and cannot be done, given the existing constraints. Empathetic management encourages unconditional positive regard for all stakeholders, especially those you work closest with. When empathetic managers actively listen to people at all levels, their colleagues feel heard and understood, not judged or criticized. When managers can reflect back what employees have told them, and share how they may be able to relate, they are making a connection. That goes a long way in building trust and happiness — not to mention the improvements in oxytocin, GABA and dopamine levels that “feeling heard” can have on our bodies. There is no better pain relief.

Active listening requires empathy in order for that connection — and feeling of being understood — to happen. Empathetic management goes beyond active listening and empathy, however. It’s about putting together the pieces of the puzzle without the top of the box. Every time a manager hears from employees about their needs and goals, they then have to figure out: Do I know where that piece goes yet? Or should I put it aside and communicate to the stakeholder that it’s an important piece, just not one that we can address right now? Once we get the edges filled out and we can figure out where that piece fits, we can start to work on it. Employees value that openness in communication, and it can help managers figure out how best to prioritize the pieces when putting the puzzle together.

So, the next time you have an initiative that fails or an employee that leaves, ask yourself: Was the manager trained to be empathetic?