Listening to my good friend and fellow speaker Martin G. Moore deliver a splendid speech on leadership recently, I was struck by a comment he made about empathy.  “No amount of empathy is too much,” he said, adding that a leader needs to understand her people as deeply as possible.  It’s an important concept in this era of short cuts, fast takes, and social media summaries of people, missions, and organizations in a few dismissive words.

We are an information-overloaded species, and the only surprise in that statement is that we always have been.  Even in the ancient savannah, there were too many sounds, smells, and suspicious shadows lurking at the corner of our eyes to process with all the time we needed.  Today, not only is there still too much information coming at us through our five senses a good deal of the time, but there is far too much data to process in a host of ways we are not very good at processing.

But if a leader has no more important job than, well, leading, then even in this context knowing her people is the key.  So, empathy.

I was particularly struck by Martin’s comment because I had just seen a study referenced that talked about how we think about empathy.  The study found that we don’t understand how to be empathetic in the right way.

What we believe is that we figure out what other people are thinking by studying their facial expressions and body language.  But what actually works better is to put ourselves in their shoes.  This finding is astonishing if you give it more than a passing thought.  How else do we find out what the people around us are feeling but by studying their facial expressions and body language?  Putting ourselves in their proverbial shoes is demanding intellectual and emotional work.  It requires vulnerability, creativity, and something that the psychologists call the ‘theory of mind’ – meaning the ability to realize that not everyone thinks and feels the way we do.  This imaginative work is not easy, and I think it is getting harder and harder as our lives move faster and faster.  Why should I slow down my day to get inside the minds of other people?  Far easier to study them briefly and draw my own conclusions based on the evidence of my eyes.

The study even asked people to look at their own body language from a month prior – and it turned out they were pretty bad at decoding their own body language.  Better if they had to, well, put themselves in their own shoes.

I’ve been saying for years that we are not very good at decoding body language – see my recent post about spotting liars – and this study is confirmation.  We are better at understanding strong emotional responses in people that we know well – when a child comes home from school in tears or bouncing up and down with joy – but that’s about it.  To understand body language, we have to be willing to study the ‘steady state’ body language of our ‘victim’ and then be ready to spot the changes.  It’s in the changes that we find the limited understanding that we can.  Looking at strangers, like they do on TV, and saying, ‘he just robbed a bank,’ is fun to imagine but silly to rely on.

Do the work, spend the time.  Imagine what it’s like to live in Bangladesh, or Johannesburg, or New Jersey.  Take what you know and ask yourself, what would that feel like?  Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  Maybe that little step will start the world off in a better direction.