Does Empathy Have a Place in Business?
By: Kelly Cashin
Tags: Cx, Corporate Culture, Empathy, UX, Values

I run into it everywhere- job descriptions, company core values, mission statements... Empathy, once a scientific term for an interpersonal skill used by psychologists, is now a corporate buzzword used to describe not businesses relate to their customers.

And like all buzzwords, empathy is losing meaning.

What is empathy supposed to mean?

If we start at the very beginning, there’s the German word “einfühlung” (later translated to “empathy” in English). A word in aesthetic theory for our unique human ability to project inner experiences onto objects in the natural world. Like when we ascribe feelings of majesty, courage, or adventure to a mountain scenery.

The term was later adopted by psychologists for the phenomenon of sharing another person’s point of view. In Funny Face, the character Jo puts it, “Empathy is to project your imagination so that you actually feel what the other person is feeling. You put yourself in the other person’s place.”

Unfortunately, we make a lot of assumptions when we imagine what someone else is feeling. There is more potential for alienation than understanding in this version of empathy.

An example is my recent experience on a used car website. A bug on the site kept logging me out of my account. When I turned to the chatbot for help, I was met with a kind of artificial empathy.

The CX team behind this copy imagines I must feel lonely and need to be consoled because I forgot my password.

The irony is that I feel more alienated by this response because of how wrong the bot is.

What should empathy look like?

It might be hard to know. Empathy is in a decline.

Frankly, the process is demanding for both people involved. R.D. Laing details the barriers to empathy in his book The Politics of Experience.

I cannot avoid trying to understand your experience. Because although I do not experience your experience, which is invisible to me, I experience you as experiencing. I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experiencing you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on.

All that to say, our experience of another person is an expression of their experience i.e. their behavior. If I want to empathize with you, and not just project my own imagination onto your behavior…

You must be brought to the realization that your behavior is motivated by an experience.

You have to share your experience within this realization.

I have to provide you with my own understanding of your experience.

You have to communicate your experience with me in such a way that relates to my understanding of your experience.

Repeat until we are on the same page.

If I’m providing you a service, I might want to avoid projecting my imagination onto your behavior- but what about this? Do you need me to also understand your internal experiences and the intricacies that led us to interacting? And will that enhance our transaction?

I’m just asking…

… does empathy have a place in business?

The obvious benefit of empathy: it results in a deep understanding.

Understanding can lead to better conflict-resolution, equity, compassion… Traits I need in my interpersonal relationships. Traits I would like to see in my leaders and my teammates.

But I don’t want to lose empathy to an artificial and corporatized version of the skill abused to make OKR’s.