Wandering around the airport today, I noticed a book by Peter Bazalgette, called The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society. I didn’t buy it but had the fleeting thought that empathy in business is probably the new black and that we would likely see a slew of publications on how to get better at it, now that its a skill that differentiates us from the machines. As I waited for my flight to be called, I speculated whether empathy could be taught.
About ten years ago, I read a book by the autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen. At the time, I was interested in attributes of masculine and feminine thinking as a result of reading I was doing on national dispositions towards one or the other of these styles. So I accidentally stumbled on what I later found out remains a controversial hypothesis about autism. In his hypothesis, Dr Baron-Cohen (yes, they are related) describes a spectrum* with Empathising at one end and Systemising at the other end. Psychology Today explains:
“As a starting point to this theory, Baron-Cohen argued that sex differences can be classified as falling into two domains of human thought: ’empathizing’ and ‘systemizing’. Empathizing refers to the tendency to attribute mental states to others or to have empathy or sympathy. It has also been equated with ‘theory of mind’ or the ability to understand that others have thoughts, emotions and desires. Systemizing is the tendency to organize things into systems or to develop rules or principles to understand complex systems.”
I remember reading about the attributes of Systemising and thinking at the time that “systems” were how most large companies were operated and those who were best at developing and maintaining these tended to be prized as a result. Empathy, by marked contrast, was not a necessary attribute for success in a corporation. Until now. Harvard Business Review has created a company Empathy Index and, in a comment about companies that ranked higher on the Index, say “(these) are the companies that retain the best people, create environments where diverse teams thrive, and ultimately reap the greatest financial rewards.” So, if they are to be believed, an increasing investment in empathetic behaviours may positively impact the bottom line. But, by their own admission, it’s an intangible quality and a direct correlation between results and empathy is difficult to prove.
I am sceptical empathy can be easily taught or learned in a corporate context as I still don’t see a uniformly great appetite for doing so. Where it does happen, it requires great corporate effort to make the change from all those years of praising systemising, like turning a Ballmer Microsoft into a Nadella Microsoft. For the many other corporates though, I am of the opinion there is still too much to be gained from being a systemiser and no real need to change.
*If you want to self-test where you sit on his AQ/EQ spectrum, the tests are available online.