Partners and Team Leaders: How Increasing Your Empathy Will Make You and Your Team More Effective
To lead effectively in the current crisis requires us to respond with compassion and empathy for our colleagues and our clients. It calls on us to have a deeper understanding of how an individual’s context impacts their ability in the moment—or the day, or the week—to show up and perform the way they need to. It calls on us not just to communicate but to connect. And, now that many of us are working remotely, it calls on us all to be even more proficient in the use of technology and to find new ways of creating connection.
Against this backdrop, partners and team leaders who already demonstrate empathy and those who quickly flex to build and develop their interpersonal skills will emerge as the winners, as will their law firms.
What is empathy?
Empathy is not simply about being “nice” and “caring” (although those attributes can go a long way in building and sustaining relationships). Empathy is a skill that enables us to look at a situation from the perspective of others and understand how they feel about it. It improves the quality of our relationships by powering our ability to connect and collaborate. Even before the current crisis, a consistent theme that emerged from upward review programs across law firms was that associates value—and want to go the extra mile for—partners who show an interest in them as individuals, care about their professional development and respect their personal lives.
There are three different types of empathy. These are:
Cognitive empathy: You understand what someone else is thinking and feeling, for example, by relating to the other side’s perspective during a negotiation.
Emotional empathy: This is best explained by the metaphor of “walking in someone else's shoes” and feeling their emotions.
Compassionate empathy: You feel concern about another's situation and want to help or support the person while remaining detached from their actual feelings.
(Here is more on the different types of empathy and how to develop each one.)
Compassion in action
In this article, I am advocating for partners and team leaders to embrace more cognitive and compassionate empathy in their approaches - to develop and demonstrate what is called “compassion in action.” Neuroscience research indicates that emotional empathy can, if unchecked, lead to emotional burnout. If you experience empathy in this way, the best advice is to feel it but not to let yourself stay there. That will serve neither you nor the team. By contrast, compassionate empathy triggers other areas of the brain, associated with motivation and reward, such that if you experience it, you are motivated to help. Understanding your colleagues, what they are dealing with and how they are feeling is powerful. To act on your understanding is even more so.
How can we flex our empathy?
Here are six steps to cultivate an empathy mindset for yourself and at your firm:
1. Practice self-awareness. Research studies indicate that, while most of us believe we have self-awareness, few of us—maybe as few as 15%—actually do. In any event, how can you increase your self-awareness? The key is to focus not just on your intention—which is what most of us naturally do—but also on the impact of your behavior and words on others. To do this, you need to use your imagination and put yourself in others’ shoes.
Ask yourself: How might this person be feeling? What assumptions, biases and preconceptions are you (consciously or unconsciously) bringing to the situation? Can you let go of viewing the world based on how you personally experience it?
Especially important for many law firm partners in this context is the ability to suspend your bias of personal experience – and this is often challenging because, in most cases, it is personal experience that is one of the drivers of your success.
2. Prepare to be emotionally present. Before any meeting or conversation, pause to think about who will be in the meeting with you – not as a group, but as individuals. What are they each dealing with? What do you need to know to understand each person’s current context?
3. Create the space. We are used to starting conversations with a standard greeting, expecting a generic response (“How are you?” … “I’m fine, thanks.”) and moving quickly to business. If we create the opportunity for people to share what they are experiencing, the more comfortable and authentic they will feel, which will make it easier for them to contribute to the conversation and business at hand. But, how do we accomplish this in a way that doesn’t derail the meeting?
Clearing the space is a coaching technique based on neuroscience that helps to quiet the internal noise that interferes with a person’s ability to think and participate in a conversation. Fundamentally, it involves three key components: (1) acknowledgement; (2) labeling; and (3) choice. It may sound something like this: “I am dealing with the cancellation of my child’s classes this afternoon so that’s causing me some unexpected scheduling issues and is creating stress. I’m going to put that aside for the purposes of this call.” By acknowledging the stress, labeling it and actively choosing to put it aside, your colleague will more likely be able to focus and be productive.
This may not be how we typically start meetings but now is not typical. The more we encourage openness on an ongoing basis within our teams, the better we will be able to lead them and the projects we are working on together.
4. Be led by your curiosity, not solutions. As lawyers, we are often problem-oriented and solutions-focused. But truly empathizing with another person often requires us to put our advisory skillset aside—which can be hard to do—and to listen and remain curious instead. To understand another person’s experience—deeply, with nuance, we must start with a blank slate rather than a preconceived notion or assumption. Instead of listening to offer advice or provide a solution, try being led by curiosity.
5. Listen actively. Rather than focusing on what to say next, practice quietening your inner voice and pay attention to what is being said (and not said). Listen for context: What is their experience? Where are they coming from? And, rather than take the first answer you are given, ask follow-up questions to clarify and explore. Understanding is the key to empathy. If you want to understand, you need to ask questions, often multiple questions. That is true of your colleagues just the same way as it is of your clients.
6. Giving advice: Ask for permission. Our colleagues may not be looking for us to resolve their issues so much as they want us to understand their experiences. Sometimes people simply want to share what they are dealing with, rather than have someone else (try to) fix it. They may already have their own solution in mind, or be ready to devise one on their own. Or they may have identified a clear need which is different from what you think they need. Unless someone requests your advice, your best move may often be to ask a simple question: “How can I help you?” or “What do you need at this point?”
Stress is Our Context.
At this point, it is important to acknowledge that partners and team leaders are, like their teams, experiencing tremendous uncertainty and stress. This is uncharted territory for all of us. Partners who may have experienced previous market disruptions and recessions have not seen this situation before. They carry a heavy burden of expectations: Those of their clients’ and colleagues’ as well as their own expectations of themselves. It may well feel as if everyone is looking at them for answers and solutions where there are none or, at least, none yet. Stress can play an important role in dictating how we respond to social and professional situations. When we are stressed, our cognitive functioning suffers, our focus narrows and we have reduced awareness of all our senses. All this limits our ability to think critically or to learn – including learning about others’ subjective experiences without inserting our own assumptions. How then can leaders develop and practice empathy if they themselves are stressed?
An apparently perverse answer may be to lean into it. Recent neuroscience research suggests that while stress may be uncomfortable, it can be productive in numerous ways including by helping us be more empathetic. And other research indicates that by expressing empathy, leaders can manage their own stress. In other words, it pays to be empathetic since everybody wins.
Empathy for Ourselves.
Being in a leadership role can feel lonely at times. And when we are dealing with stress, we often feel like we have to deal with it on our own, especially partners. Everyone’s situation is unique, but this is where practicing empathy in relation to yourself comes in. This self-compassion and self-care is based on the same principles as practicing empathy in relation to others:
Pause, think about and look to understand what you are experiencing and feeling.
Act on what you discover.
This may involve a solution as seemingly impossible as avoiding overwork—a constant enemy—or as seemingly obvious as staying hydrated, eating healthily and exercising, or as seemingly “alternative” as doing breathing exercises to reduce stress, and practicing mindfulness. However, each of these is worth remembering. For example, see more here (staying hydrated), here (healthy eating), here (stress reduction through exercise and breathing exercises), here (mindfulness) and here (for the ABA’s comprehensive Well-being Toolkit for Lawyers and Legal Employers).
While your team looks to you for leadership—and you undoubtedly want to provide that to them—this needs to be balanced with your giving yourself the opportunity to share with others your own context, how you feel, and where and how others can help you. You may not wish to tell your team all this albeit you might choose to share some of it in the right circumstances. Rather, this is the time for partnership in the truest sense of the word. If you have partners, you don't have to go it alone and you shouldn't. By sharing what you need by way of support, you can both request support and give others the opportunity to give it to you. And, beyond your partners, we can all benefit from using our own personal board of advisors, whether they be peers, friends, spouses, domestic partners, clients or contemporaries such as classmates.
The hashtag #weareinthistogether has become increasingly popular in response to the current crisis. In truth, it was true before COVID. Now, that truth has urgency. We all owe it to ourselves and to each other to build and flex our empathy.
