- From Daniel Pink, Author
Your ME Instructions were:
Raise your dominate hand. Take your index finger
and draw a capital E your forehead.
Remember how you drew it. Don’t
google this. I will follow-up around
lunch on Monday.
 |
| Drawn for Me |
Is the letter drawn so that it
faces you – that is, backward to a person looking you? Or is the letter drawn
so that the viewer can read it? Neither way is right or wrong. But the
direction of that letter might tell you something about your disposition.
This seemingly innocent parlor
trick is actually a method social scientists have used for more than a decade
to measure perspective-taking – the
ability to step outside one’s own experience and see the world from someone
else’s viewpoint.
 |
| Drawn for Others |
People who write the E so that it’s backward to themselves but
legible to their partner have taken the other’s perspective. Those who
draw the E so that it’s readable to themselves but backward to others
haven’t bothered to consider the other
person’s point of view. In an intriguing set of experiments a few years
ago, a group of American social scientists led by Adam Galinsky at Northwestern
University’s Kellogg School of Management used the “E test” and some other
techniques to investigate the connection between
power and empathy. They found that while most people seem
naturally inclined to take the other’s perspective, providing people a dose of
power correlated with their being less likely to draw the E in the
perspective-taking way. In other words, a
surplus
of power seemed to be connected, and perhaps even led, to a
deficit of empathy.
As the researchers wrote: “Across
these studies, power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how
others see, think, and feel.”
This finding might reveal what’s
gone wrong with leadership at every level. On the altar of action orientation
and tough-mindedness, we’ve sacrificed the fundamentally human quality of
empathy.
To be sure, empathy shouldn’t be
the only quality of leaders. If an executive is too worried that a decision
might hurt Caroline’s feelings or make Rajiv sad, he’ll never get anything
done.
Thinking strategically and acting
vigorously are essential.
But action orientation without
sufficient empathy has at least two flaws. First, people resist going along
with proposed actions, which can impede progress. It’s a sturdy principle of organizational
life that people quit bosses, not
companies. Second, if people do go along, they do so reluctantly,
leading to an atmosphere of
compliance rather than engagement.
The key is to strike a delicate
balance between action-orientation and perspective-taking. It’s not a matter of
deciding between hitting your numbers (test scores) or drawing the E. It’s a
matter of hitting your numbers by drawing the E.
What’s more, unlike many
technical skills, empathy is extremely difficult to shift to low-cost providers
and nearly impossible to reduce to lines of code in a computer program – which
makes it a scarce, and therefore more valuable, commodity.
That’s why empathy is racing into
many other business functions. For instance, medical schools, especially in the
US, are using questionnaires to measure empathy levels of young physicians
because scores on this empathy index correlate with patient outcomes in ways
that traditional metrics do not.
Designers are donning thick
glasses to distort their vision, sticking cotton in their ears to reduce their
hearing, and slipping on garden gloves to limit their dexterity – all in an
effort to design better products and services for the elderly by empathizing
with what it’s really like to be old.
And when so many consumer
transactions can be executed online, learning how to see the world from the
perspective of customers and prospects has become integral to customer service
and sales.
Yet somehow in the higher reaches
of business, even in our supposedly more enlightened era, empathy, when it’s
discussed at all, is often dismissed as frivolous or, worse, “soft.”
A dean of an American business
school stated that when alumni return to campus to guest lecture, the current
students invariably ask them a version of this question: As you think back on
what you learned in B-school, what do you wish you had paid more attention to
or had studied more?
And invariably the answer is the
same.
“I’m glad I studied finance and
accounting and the quantitative subjects,” the graduates say. “But I wish I had
taken all that soft stuff more seriously.”
After they left the orderly farm
of a case study for the roaring jungle of a real business, it turned out that
what seemed superficially soft – organizational behavior, psychology, people
smarts, communication and, yes, empathy – were crucial. Spreadsheets are easy.
Spreadsheets never get bored, call in sick, or lose their motivation.
But influencing people requires
more than simply putting the correct number in the proper cell and applying the
right formula. And since most leaders have reasonably sound technical/managerial
skills, as well as access to the same
information and tools, mastery of these nominally soft aptitudes is creating a
fault line that’s separating who moves up and who
stays put.
So if you’re a leader, and we all are,
especially a new one, sprinkle a few seasonings on your newly acquired bowl of
power. Talk less, listen more. Treat everybody with respect. And if one of your
employees asks you to draw a vowel on your
forehead, you know what to do.
