Leadership and Empathy

One of the most powerful capabilities that leaders and managers can possess is empathy. Arguably, the same could be said for anyone – we can best understand and help others when we’re able to see the world from their perspective. Carl Rogers (who incidentally was the first to coin the term “psychological safety”) said that empathy is one of the most delicate and powerful ways of applying ourselves to serve others, and is the most precious gift one can give to another. 

If we truly open ourselves to seeing how life is experienced by someone else, if we can draw their world into ours and see the world through their eyes, we risk (or even necessitate) changing ourselves. Thus, empathy is ego-ically risky – most of the time, most of us resist change, but true empathy almost always results in a change to the way we see the world, and that can be scary and feel threatening to the fragility of our human ego.

To help children learn empathy, we teach them through play, by showing and acknowledging emotions, sharing stories, and encouraging self-reflection. But how can we do that for busy, important leaders and managers? 

The pressure to acquire more knowledge

Maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes feel like there’s a social (especially if you spend any time on LinkedIn) pressure to read and consume as much non-fiction related to our roles and careers as possible, gathering and accumulating knowledge like we’re possessive dragons sitting on our hoard of gold, and our professional value is somehow connected to the sheer volume of important things that we know. I’m sure that many folks in leadership positions, or anyone working in this knowledge economy, likely feels similarly at times. There’s just not enough time to read all the important business books as it is, so reading fiction can feel like an indulgence, a childish luxury, or a waste of valuable time that could otherwise be spent learning more “important stuff”.

However, fortunately for book lovers, a great deal of evidence suggests otherwise. Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) – the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings – than readers of non-fiction, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors.

Reading Fiction Improves Empathy

It seems that reading fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, can positively influence our capacity for empathy. Reading stories, taking part in a narrative through the perspective of the characters is like exercising our capacity for empathy – transporting ourselves into another person’s experience for a while. And like any exercise, the more we do it, the stronger that muscle becomes; in fact, evidence suggests that reading fiction is more effective than empathy training programs.

This effect is contingent on the reader’s “emotional transportation into the narrative”. So if you’re going to read fiction, make it good. (Aside: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re not enjoying a book, put it down. You don’t have to finish it.)

Research shows that the positive effects of reading fiction on empathy persist long term, and indeed do not always manifest immediately, but build over time as people reflect their fictionalised experiences onto the real world and real people.

So maybe instead of this drive to constantly pursue the accumulation of knowledge through non-fiction, we should simply encourage ourselves and others to read more fiction. It helps us to relax, and it can build our capacity for empathy, which makes us potentially better leaders, better managers, and better colleagues.

And we can give ourselves a break for wanting to escape into a good story, because by reading fiction, whether it’s Terry Pratchett or Zadie Smith, it results in a change to the way we see the world, helping us we to see how life is experienced by someone else, draw their world into ours and see the world through their eyes. Non-fiction describes the world we’re in, but fiction creates new worlds to safely explore. 

As Warren Bennis said, “The process of becoming a leader is much the same as the process of becoming an integrated human being.”

P.S.We just got back from another visit to Andalusia, and I took two books with me, along with my kindle. 

Punk to Monk: 

Shelter were one of my favourite bands growing up. Led by frontman Ray Raghunath Cappo, they were also one of my first introductions to eastern and yogic philosophies. Shelter grew out of the “straight edge” scene that was originally catalysed by Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye. Straight edge fans would draw black X’s on their hands that represented the X that door staff would draw on underage gig goers to prevent them being served alcohol, and this was co-opted by members of the straight edge scene to signal that they rejected alcohol and drugs. I saw Shelter play at the Princess Charlotte in Leicester in 1996 (I think), and acquired a copy of the Bhagavad Gita shortly after. This is an incredible autobiography by Ray. 

Restorative Practice at Work:

Thanks so much to Lesley for sending me a copy of her excellent and very practical guide to restorative practice in healthcare contexts. I love Lesley’s approach to making restorative practice actually practical – from civility to circle meetings. So much of this book spoke to me, but especially the framing of failure that, as humans, we are certain to err – we can try not to, but we will. We are however in control of how we respond to failure – restorative practice can help us define what a positive response to failure looks like when it happens to us or those around us.

Despite taking rare time to read the two non-fiction books above, I always relish being able to dive into fiction. I’m currently on my third journey back through Terry Pratchett’s incredible Discworld series (and more), which I first started reading not that long before that 1996 Shelter gig. I dearly love Pratchett’s writing, and an awful lot of what I have learned about the world, I learned from Terry’s books. I find in general that reading fiction allows my mind to relax and move away from the anxiety-hunting, generating-lists-of-things-to-do mode in a way that non-fiction rarely provides. 

“And what would humans be without love?”

RARE, said Death.”

Links:

Listen to Empathy, by Shelter

Empathic: an unappreciated way of being. Carl Rogers.  https://doi.org/10.1177/001100007500500202 

How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation, by P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/

Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Dan R. Johnson https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.10.005 

Reading fiction and reading minds: the role of simulation in the default network. Diana I. Tamir, Andrew B. Bricker, David Dodell-Feder, and Jason P. Mitchell https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733342/ 

Does reading fiction make us better people? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190523-does-reading-fiction-make-us-better-people

Mar R. A., Oatley K., Hirsh J., dela Paz J., Peterson J. B. (2006) Bookworms versus nerds: exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.002 

Critical Thinking… and the Art of Close Reading https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ718563.pdf

Teding van Berkhout, E., & Malouff, J. M. (2016). The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 32–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000093 


Further Links:

Speaking up at work
Non-Violent Communication
Behaviours that Foster Psychological Safety
The Difference Between Trust And Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety Online Workshops – half of places sold already

You can now book your place on our online workshops! Taking place in the last two weeks of July, you can book on one, some, or all six and save 10% Book here.

We also have a Practice Masterclass scheduled for the 8th August at a time that suits people in Australia and New Zealand. It’s an experiment, so if this goes well and we get enough attendees, we’ll schedule a full round of workshops at a similar time. You’re also more than welcome to book a place if you’re not in Australia or NZ if the time suits you! Book here.

Options include Intermediate, Advanced, Management, Measurement, Practices, and the new Train-The-Trainer supplementary workshop. 

Psychsafety.com courses all now come with Credly Badges! After the course, you’ll receive an email to claim your badge, which you can use to evidence your CPD and share on your LinkedIn profile.

Note: in addition to affordability based pricing, we offer one free scholarship place on every workshop we deliver. Preference is given to people in lower-income countries and from disadvantaged or under-represented groups. 

Psychological Safety in Practice

Apologies

Thanks so much to community member Jonathan Cohen MD for contributing this excellent piece on being, and saying, sorry: Hard to Say I’m Sorry: Apologies in the Workplace. This is a fantastic piece that articulately describes what a genuine apology looks like, how to apologise, and how not to as well.

Mental health in Aviation

The Royal Aeronautical Society’s latest briefing paper, “The Mental Health Challenge to Civil Aviation Safety in the 21st Century,” emphasises the need for “Psychosocial Risk Management” (PsRM) to ensure industry safety and efficiency. The paper highlights that mental health issues are widespread across various safety-critical roles, not just air crew, and are integral to maintaining operational safety. The paper suggests that mental health initiatives can yield benefits through improved productivity and reduced absenteeism, but I would suggest that the underlying causes, such as long hours, high targets, inflexible working arrangements etc must be addressed, otherwise these initiatives simply act as a sticking plaster – or worse, mask the real issues.

“Attrition” in Consulting firms

McKinsey, and other big consulting forms, are stepping up efforts to increase “attrition” and many of its consultants will all be graded this month, with those deemed to be underperforming being “counselled to leave” (which is another term for that egregious practice of “managing out”). This piece in the FT dives into it: Consulting firms step up efforts to push out their low performers. What I find surprising is not the leadership approach of these large consulting firms, who have always adopted a cutthroat “survival of the fittest” approach to recruitment, it’s that other large organisations actually pay these types of consulting orgs huge amounts of cash to deliver “cultural transformation” programmes… 

Generative AI risks

This is a great piece in TechTarget by George Lawton, summarising the risks and concerns in using “AI” and LLMs such as Chat GPT and Gemini. Whilst this is a subject with only tangential relevance to psychological safety, it is highly relevant to the world of work, and poses serious concerns as well as benefits.

LLMs generate text probabilistically – based on correlations, not causality, and have very little capacity to determine the accuracy of information. AI generated text is designed to look as true and rigorous as possible – if you ask it to write in an academic way, it will do so, but that doesn’t make what it says any more accurate, even though it may appear so. It’s also currently very difficult to ascertain the source of information presented by generative AI – the text or code it generated may have come from a copyrighted source, but validating that is near impossible. 

One of the greatest dangers of AI however is the amplification of existing negative biases. Due to their probabilistic nature, LLMs express biased assumptions about gender, ethnicity, neurodiversity, physical ability and other traits, specifically those aligned with people’s perceptions, rather than those grounded in fact. Again, if we trust the content that AIs and LLMs create, we risk amplifying those existing biases.

This week’s poem:

Stephen Lawrence isn’t on the National Curriculum, by Josephine Corcoran

I tuck you in
with long ago & far away,
pull the blanket of it wasn’t us, it wasn’t
here, around your heart although I know
that five inches is 13 centimetres,
that 130 yards would cost a lot
of blood. There’ll be Rosa Parks
& Martin Luther King for homework,
there always is & someone saying it’s good
we teach them that,
but no-one has a map of south east London,
today your teacher didn’t say his name.
I teach you this: he spelled it with a ‘PH’
not a ‘V’, in 1993
he was eighteen,
he wanted to be an architect,
he was waiting for a bus.

Josephine Corcoran is a writer, tutor and parent. Every year, on 22 April, Stephen Lawrence Day is an opportunity for people to come together and honour Stephen’s life and legacy and stand up against discrimination.