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Critical Skills - Empathy

Steven Forth

Steven Forth is a Co-Founder of TeamFit. See his Skill Profile.

Is empathy a skill? Is it something we can learn or cultivate?

Empathy is cropping up more and more often as a critical skill. In the design thinking world, it is seen as central. In order to have a successful design thinking project, one needs to see the world from perspectives other than one's own. Different stakeholders have different needs and experiences. Great design thinking is able to draw on each perspective to imagine new solutions that reconcile divergent interests. Doing this requires empathy. But what is 'empathy'? Is it a skill that can be learned and applied, or is it innate, something you have or you do not? Can empathy be measured in any meaningful way or is it more like a value that is best captured in behaviours?

Digging into this a bit further, one finds psychologists talking about three types of empathy: Cognitive, Emotional and Compassionate. Let's look at each of these using Daniel Goleman's framing. Daniel Goleman wrote one of the critical books on Emotional Intelligence or EQ, empathy plays an important role in emotional intelligence.

Cognitive empathy: knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called "perspective-taking” Cognitive empathy helps in negotiations, motivating other people, understanding diverse viewpoints. It can be disconnected from or ignore deep emotions; doesn’t put you in another’s shoes in a felt sense.

Emotional empathy: is when you feel physically along with the other person, as though their emotions were contagious. Emotional empathy concerns feelings, physical sensation and may leverage mirror neurons in the brain. It helps in close interpersonal relationships and careers like coaching, marketing, management and HR.

Compassionate empathy: is when we not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed. It considers the whole person integrating intellect, emotion and connecting them to action (or behaviour).

With this as context, let's see how empathy is connected to other skills on our People Insights platform. Empathy shows up as a social skill and it is most closely associated with the following skills.

  • Customer Relationship

  • Design Thinking

  • Instructional Design

  • UX Design

  • New Business Identification

Is empathy a social skill or a foundational skill. A social skill is a skill that we use work better with others. Empathy certainly seems to fit this description. A foundational skill is a skill that we use to develop other skills. This is worth thinking about. There seem to be a number of skills where having at least cognitive empathy is needed in order to achieve mastery. We have already mentioned 'design thinking, and the platform is suggesting customer relationship, instructional design, user experience (UX) design and even new business identification. If we follow this across the skill graph we find that this connects to many other skills, from solution sales to coaching to team leadership and cross cultural team management. After some thought, I left empathy as a social skill (I am a curator and can recategorize skills on the system) but I can see certain uses or competency models where I would want to think of empathy as a foundational skill.

Can empathy be evaluated? The default evaluation system on People Analytics is a typical five point scale, going from level 1 (Newbie) to level 5 (Guru). This seems odd. What would it mean to be an 'empathy guru'? Would anyone be comfortable making this assessment? I would not. In fact, this is a general problem with social skills. Evaluations that work well for business, technical and domain skills seem odd for social skills. In this way, social skills seem more like values. Dipping into our survey on values and competency models we find the following.

In fact, this understates response 3, 'Yes, but only by gathering examples of how a person demonstrates the value' as most of the responses in Other referred to behavioural evidence of one kind or another.

This seems to apply to social skills like empathy as well as it does to values. It does not necessarily apply to all social skills though. There are some social skills for which the more conventional levels of expertise approach may work. Collaboration may be one of these. There are people who are better at collaboration than others. This was a key consideration in choosing our new Director of Partnering and Customer Success (more on our new team members in a coming post).

The new Competency Model Modelling Environment that we are launching later this year supports having different rating models for different skill categories. That is a step towards more open and flexible skill models.

Here is a sketch of empathy in the context of other skills.

This was a hard sketch for me to construct and it is a tentative first attempt. Skill models are meant to be dynamic, not canonical, and to evolve with use and to change with context. Perhaps it takes empathy to work on a skill model. One has to imagine how other people will use the model, play with different ways to connect the skills and reflect on the outcomes!

Ibbaka posts on critical skills