🎭What's So Great About Empathy?🎭

Especially at work?

Hey everyone,

In the past month or so, I’ve encountered numerous situations where I couldn’t help but notice the impact of empathy.

Acting empathetically is woven into just about everything I publish at Lying to Ourselves. But this week, I’ll point out some small ways I’ve noticed its presence (or absence) at work.

Awareness of empathy in the products and processes we encounter is beneficial because recognizing empathy trains us to practice it. It also helps us understand how empathy is applied. Noticing empathy is important for what we will talk about next week: how to hire empathetic people.

Hope you enjoy,

Ben

---

🎭What's So Great About Empathy?🎭

Empathy has been having a real moment. For the past ten or so years, the idea of an “empathetic person,” “empathetic leader,” “empathetic workplace,” and “empathetic (AKA human-centered) design” have benefitted from glowing media coverage and considerable corporate attention.

My cynical side finds most of this activity comical. Do we need to corporatize the idea that we should care, even just a tiny amount, about other people? 

Sadly yes, I believe we do.

In this post, I’ll point out some examples from Product and Sales where empathy was either present or absent. My goal is to illustrate that demonstrating empathy, however small, has tremendous value in a corporate context. 

Empathy in Sales

Many of you are familiar with the dreaded Sales Development email or LinkedIn message.

You know the type. The structure usually goes like this:

Hello [your name],

A question vaguely related to your industry

3-5 paragraphs on what this person’s company does.

An ask for a meeting.

“Warm Regards,”

Sender’s name

Confession, I have Sales Development Reps on my team. However, they will tell you I do not like them sending anything like the example above. Why? 

1. These automated messages are built for scale. It is very difficult to empathize on a one-to-one level at scale.

2. There’s no explanation of “why” this person is reaching out.

3. There is very little personalization.

4. There are no indicators that the person cares about me or my challenges at work.

All of the above factors make it very clear that the people sending that style of outreach lack empathy. Further, there’s a good chance that the organization also lacks it.

So what does good look like? A friend who leads a large sales organization recently told me about an SDR who reached out to him. In contrast to the above example, this SDR did the following:

1. They looked up my friend online and found his Twitter feed.

2. They saw that he was a fan of an obscure European soccer club.

3. They looked up the top goal scorer of that club.

4. They wrote a short but interesting email where he used the top goal scorer of the soccer club as a metaphor for the benefits of my friend/their prospect using their product.

5. The SDR booked the meeting.

That style of reach-out works; does it take more time? Of course! But it is way more effective, so any upfront time investment quickly pays dividends.

My point here is that empathizing, even just a little, about your potential customers can help you stand out. Taking the time to research, being thoughtful about why you’re reaching out, and respecting that you could be wrong (by keeping it short) indicate that you care about your prospects as people first. In a world where marketing automation is a $5.2B industry, a little empathy goes a long way.

Empathy in Product

There is no shortage of products that lack empathy. A colleague of mine recently shared this piece with me that captures this sentiment well. See if this story about activating a phone rings any bells:¹

Today’s example, my former employer, Verizon. I have been a Verizon customer for years. For (mostly silly) reasons, at 10pm last night, I wanted to add a new line of service to my account. I had a Google Pixel 6 in my hand, it had no SIM, and I just wanted to download an eSIM and get going.

Verizon’s website and mobile app said it could be done “immediately” and service active in 4 to 24 hours. So I entered my IMEI (for SIM2 as directed), I signed up, picked a number prefix, and was waiting for a QR code.

What I got was an email with a link to a website that said I needed to speak with a representative. And representatives aren’t available till 0800. So at 0805 I spoke with a representative who didn’t know what I wanted. With some gentle coaxing I got the representative to understand that I didn’t have an iPhone (never have even though she insisted that I have an iPhone) and that I needed a QR code to activate my phone. No such thing, she assured me. Just power cycle the phone she said. So I played along, no good. After 15m on the phone, Lisa figured out (maybe she did a google search) and said she could read out my QR code to me. Then she realized that she had to email it to me, which she did and in 30s I was all set.

Contrast that frustrating experience with the onboarding experience of everyone’s favorite piece of Chinese spyware, TikTok.

TikTok is hoovering up corporate marketing spend from other social media and entertainment companies. That is because TikTok understands, better than any other B2C tech company, how to give its users what they want. In other words, it’s winning by putting the user’s immediate need first.²

At its core, TikTok is an entertainment platform. If you’ve never used it before, then the Tiktok onboarding experience is so simple that it’s offputting. There’s no account creation, no “learn how to use this” tutorials, and no popups. TikTok understands that you want to see entertaining videos, so it shows you videos other people have found entertaining as quickly as possible and goes from there.

It may be dangerous from a geopolitical perspective, but TikTok is winning by deeply empathizing with its users.

Noticing empathy, but why?

Most of you are here because you like what I say about hiring and the new labor market. Although I’m not addressing hiring specifically in this piece, I want to clarify that understanding and sharing another’s feelings underlie everything we do, especially at work.

Recognizing empathetic examples in your everyday life is a great way to become more empathetic and trains you to recognize it in yourself and others. Whivch sets us up well for next week’s topic of how to hire empathetic people.

1. Pun intended.

2. Contrast that with Facebook, which is virtually unusable.