Diversity: You can’t outsource Empathy!

Three thoughts:

1.  Empathy = the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It is a key aspect of emotional intelligence, and a key strength for future leaders.
2. In general, girls are socialised to be more empathetic than boys. This stays with most people into adulthood.
3.  So we can
   • Be more mindful and balanced in how we socialise both boys and girls = building empathetic leaders (humans!) of the future, and
   • Ensure all leadership teams have a balance of women and men = short route to upgrade leadership

In this article I am exploring empathy and diversity. Some of the thoughts come from a great book ‘The secret thoughts of successful women’, by Valerie Young. It is primarily about Imposter Syndrome, and includes thinking about the origin of some gender behaviour differences, including empathy.

1) Empathy = the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It is a key aspect of emotional intelligence, and a key strength of future leaders.

One of our key roles as leaders is to enable and grow the people around us. Various studies including the big study released by Google, show that ‘psychological safety’ is a key factor in enabling people to perform. Trust, being heard, feeling understood, being allowed to make mistakes and learn, being able to show vulnerability. This needs to be embraced and role modelled by senior leaders, and then will be adopted throughout the organisation. Asking great questions, really listening to answers – for sure. That is hard enough for some leaders! Empathy is one step further …. being able to listen, acknowledge, share and not pass judgement, not give a solution.

2) In general girls are socialised to be more empathetic than boys. This stays with most people in to adulthood.

This is of course a huge generalisation – you will know highly empathetic men and un-empathetic women. Still I believe the tendencies are indeed thus. Here below are some supporting thoughts from Valerie Young’s book (sometimes quoting studies / thoughts of others):

• From a young age, girls learn from their mothers to sacrifice themselves by putting others’ needs first. The notion that being virtuous lies in self-sacrifice,
• in itself complicates women’s journey to ‘success’; however it ingrains empathy.
• Girls are socialised in to a culture of care, concern and connection.
• Communication is a tool that can be used in different ways. Generally men use it to create solutions and fix problems, whereas women use it to express thoughts and feelings.
• One reason that men are more resilient to criticism is that they grow up hearing more of it. Carol Dweck conducted a grade school observation, which she found that boys receive 8x more criticism for their conduct than girls.
• “I can go in to a room of women and I can say “we have players that aren’t fit†and they all think I am talking about them individually … (but) if I did the same thing with men, the men on the team would go “coach is right. I’m the only one fit here. The rest of these guys better get it together.†Tony Di Cicco (US women’s soccer coach)
• Boys grow up learning to exaggerate. In the animal kingdom, survival of the fittest often means that the male of the specie has to appear bigger than he really is. “Display behaviour†is used to attract females and ward off rival males. When you grow up playing sports, you learn that bluffing and exaggerating are part of the game.

3) So we can

a) Be more mindful and balanced in how we socialise both boys and girls = building empathetic leaders (humans!) of the future

I am not going to presume to suggest how anyone might socialise their (or anyone else’s) children! But I hope this article might be interesting & provocative enough for each of us to think about how we can sow the seeds of empathy in all young people.

b) Ensure all leadership teams have a balance of women and men = short term route to upgrade leadership

Gloria Feldt, commenting on Ernst & Young, Catalyst, the World Bank and MicKinsey says “(they) all discovered over the past few years that once parliaments and corporate boards reach 30 percent female representation, the quality of decisions improve, the guys behave better, and there is less corruptionâ€.

I would add that, I believe it is hard for most people to understand what it is like to be a minority, until you have been a minority. Once you have done so (and I have), then you can better understand why it is so important to get a balance of whatever constituents you are looking for in a team – in this case men and women. While you remain a clear minority, the tendency is to adapt to the prevailing behaviours to survive. Once the minority group is big enough, they create enough safety to bring in new behaviour and thus evolve the group.