CHAPTER 19

Lead with Empathy

Chris loves selling. He’s the only person I’ve heard of who chose to take a retail sales job not because he needed the money but to practice his sales skills.

He also did the exercises in this book, as you are doing. He’s in his late 20s, finished college, and is the consummate self-starter. He would never settle down into a desk job working for someone else. He loves helping customers directly.

When he started the exercises, cold calling was a basic part of his business’s sales process. He had started cold calling on the advice of a mentor he trusted and valued. Despite some early success, by the time he did this book’s exercises, he found cold calling frustrating and unproductive. Still, he continued to do it several times a week. He had to force himself to, steeling his nerves to handle the inevitable rejection that never stopped hurting.

The Method in Unit 3 led him to reconsider the beliefs he got from his mentor and conclude that they had stopped working for him. He then used The Method to move cold calling out of his life. Based on his success selling in person, he decided to shift to in- person marketing—specifically seminars. Most people fear public speaking, but he had experience there and looked forward to it. He hadn’t booked a room, promoted an event, or done other event-planning and marketing tasks, so those parts became his challenge.

The exercises led him to make things happen. Meaningful Connection steered him to see people in his community and beyond as more approachable. Make People Feel Understood motivated him to talk to people to learn how they wanted to be led and sold.

He began practicing this chapter’s exercise, Lead with Empathy, to lead his retail coworkers to improve their selling with their passions—their equivalents of Shaquille O’Neal competing with Wilt Chamberlain. One coworker’s Universal Emotion was to find beauty in the world, and Chris showed him a beauty in satisfying a customer that he had never seen before. Another had a passion for history, and Chris showed him how sharing history helped create influential relationships. His coworkers’ sales went up, and they praised him to the store managers. He also practiced Lead with Empathy with his managers, developing peer relationships with them despite their authority over him. He practiced with customers, learning their needs better and upselling them to products that satisfied them more.

Retail was for practice, though. His passion was to start giving seminars.

First he needed a room. He visited a nearby event space and did Lead with Empathy with the owner. He wanted the owner to give him a deal on the room. Instead of starting an impersonal transaction, Chris asked the owner what his passion was. The conversation began about coffee (his cocktail-party answer) and then deepened to the owner discussing what life was about for him (his Universal Emotion)—in his words, being one with nature, outside the city, in the wilderness, hiking and fishing. Chris then connected this passion to Chris’s task of giving him a deal on the room. Specifically, instead of asking for terms to rent the space, Chris proposed giving him a deal that would help him get out in the wilderness more.

Despite Chris starting vaguely, the owner brightened at Chris’s understanding of what he cared about—the wilderness. They talked in terms of helping each other achieve their goals instead of the dollars and cents of renting a space. The owner offered Chris discounts, flexibility, and more. Chris offered to share his revenue. Chris booked the room, they enjoyed working together, and they both felt that they were getting a better deal than usual.

Chris told me that had he known how pleased Lead with Empathy would make both parties, he would have used it earlier and more assertively.

Chris and Mark, the Event-Marketing Pro

The next time came soon. Chris needed to fill the seats for the seminar. He remembered an acquaintance he hadn’t seen in years, Mark, who worked in event marketing at a Fortune 100 company. Chris’s success with the event space owner gave him confidence to approach Mark to do Lead with Empathy. His task was to get Mark to help him market his first seminar. As a result of his success with the event space owner, instead of feeling like he was asking a favor, he expected to bring out Mark’s relevant passions and help him act on them with his project.

They met over dinner. After catching up, Chris asked Mark what his passion was. Mark started talking about playing drums, but the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle revealed that Mark loved teaching drums, which in his words meant creating things and making progress. Mark enjoyed opening up about those passions, as if he hadn’t gotten to talk about them in too long.

Chris saw that Mark’s job no longer connected his passions to his work, despite his six-figure salary, or more likely because of it, like the old man giving the kids dollars. He also saw that connecting Mark’s words—“teaching,” “creating things,” and “making progress”—to his project would motivate him. So Chris said that he had a project with opportunities for those things using those words. Mark was intrigued and engaged and asked to know more. Chris described his project and needs in Mark’s language.

Mark became enthusiastic about helping Chris, which he saw as enabling a friend to implement his passions. In Mark’s view, he was probably “teaching” a friend to “create something” and “make progress.”

They started collaborating. Beyond helping plan and promote one event, Mark taught Chris his practice to plan and promote events in general. In fact, he did it for free. Why not? He enjoyed it.

Did Mark feel used, giving freely what his employer paid him for? On the contrary, he loved the project. In fact, Chris told me that Mark felt liberated and enjoyed working with him for free more than doing his job, which felt oppressive in comparison. Mark’s paid work and his project with Chris may have looked similar, but Chris’s using Lead with Empathy imbued their collaboration with MVIP. Mark’s bosses could have motivated Mark as Chris did, but they didn’t. Almost no one does, so when Chris, or anyone, connects someone’s passions to a task, they love working on it. We all do. We love working on what we care about.

Within six months, Chris led his first seminar that brought in over $10,000.

Deepak and the Family Store

Deepak was an NYU student who did these exercises. He was about 20 years old and majoring in political science. After taking my course, he went home for winter vacation. When he returned, he told me that his parents had asked him to make himself useful by working the floor of their retail business, selling antiques.

Deepak had never taken a sales course nor a business course besides mine, so he used all he had—Meaningful Connection to connect with customers, then Make People Feel Understood to learn their interests, and Lead with Empathy to motivate them to buy based on their interests.

The result: He outsold the professional salespeople who had worked the same floor for years.

He told me that Lead with Empathy taught him two useful leadership insights through sales. First, you couldn’t tell by looking at people what they wanted or were willing to spend. You had to talk to them, and when you did you learned a lot. Second, when you knew what they wanted—their passions—you could connect their passions to things that were open to take on meaning, like antiques. So he did Lead with Empathy with customers on the floor; created MVIP for them by showing how an antique for sale met their interests; and made many happy, satisfied customers.

The Lead with Empathy Exercise

Make People Feel Understood had you lead people to talk about their passions. You probably had some rewarding conversations where they shared a lot. As much as people like talking about their passions, they love acting on them.

Connecting someone’s passion to your task imbues it with MVIP. Many managers assume others’ motivations, don’t learn their passions, and motivate them with external incentives. They devalue their passions by valuing external incentives over them, like the old man giving the kids the dollars, only he did it on purpose. Most managers do it like bulls in china shops of people’s emotions. We did Make People Feel Understood to make people feel comfortable sharing their passions. You probably felt a tug to influence them with what they shared. Once Phil Jackson knew about Shaquille O’Neal’s competition with Wilt Chamberlain, he knew he could motivate him with it.

Devaluing people’s passions leads them to forget or suppress them, resent their work and managers, and want to leave projects. Motivating people to resist you and leave the project is the opposite of effective leadership.

Lead with Empathy enables people to work for reasons they wanted to in the first place. They’ll often feel liberated, thinking things like, “Finally, I can do this for the reasons I wanted to.” They’ll feel inspired and often work hard. They will often ask you to raise standards, hold them more accountable, give them more responsibility, hold deadlines, and manage them more tightly. They’ll thank you for leading them to work so hard.

If you’ve had a professor for a class you loved (or sports coach, music teacher, manager, etc.), you know the feeling of working hard for yourself, not the professor, even though the professor assigned the work. You felt like you were improving yourself. You appreciated their standards and deadlines for motivating you. You wanted them to evaluate you.

Note that this exercise does not require you to have authority over the people you lead. You can do this exercise with people anywhere in an organization or outside. My students often use it to lead their work managers to manage them how they like. Another application is to motivate clients to buy, like Deepak did. Another is to attract people to your teams and start them on your project. Another is to overcome misunderstandings in personal relationships.

I recommend trying the exercise in a variety of contexts, not just the workplace.

What to Do

Practice the script at least three times in one direction and once in the other. In university, I assign students to do it once a day for a week.

The Script

This exercise sandwiches Make People Feel Understood with two steps before and one step after it. The new steps are in bold:

1.Think of a task you want done that someone you know can do.

2.Know that if you lead them to do that task for their passion, they will feel emotional reward.

3.Ask, “What’s your passion?” or something similar, like, “I can tell that you work harder on this than you have to. What’s your motivation to care so much?”

4.They’ll usually give a cocktail-party answer.

5.Confirm your understanding.

6.Confirmation/Clarification Cycle:

•Let them correct you.

•Ask confirmation or clarification questions to refine your understanding.

•Confirm your new understanding.

7.Repeat to Universal Emotion.

8.Connect their passion (their Universal Emotion) to your task.

Example

Since most of Lead with Empathy overlaps with Make People Feel Understood, if someone’s task was, say, for me to buy his or her leadership book, he or she could have led me through the dialogue in the example in chapter 18 and then added,

You know, if you want to learn and grow as a leader, I can tell you about a book that covers someone growing a lot like you, with some subtle but important differences. People who have read it found it helped their development. I think you might like reading it.

And I would feel motivated to buy the book or at least read it.

Discussion

Note that unlike Make People Feel Understood, which you can start with anyone, you start Lead with Empathy with someone who can do a task you want done. Also, instead of asking for the person’s passion broadly, you’ll generally ask about his or her passion in terms of how it is relevant to the task. For example, questions like the following show how to lead people to share passions relevant to the task you want done:

I notice you put more attention into the design when you work on weekly reports. Am I right that you care more about it than most?

or

You seem to like working on this project. What’s your passion behind it?

Step 8 is easier in practice than in the abstract. You generally say in this step that to achieve the person’s goal, you think that working on the task could help. If you want someone to finish a report by Friday and the person’s Universal Emotion is to make his or her parents proud, you might say, “You know, I don’t know your parents personally, but with people depending on this report and the time crunch we’re under, I have a feeling that telling them you got it done on time with high quality would make them proud. I’d be happy to help you make that work if you want.” It may sound contrived when it’s not about your passion, but to someone who just mentioned how much he or she wants to make his or her parents proud, the words give the task meaning.

The first time you Lead with Empathy, finding a task appropriate to someone you know may feel hard. By the fifth time, you’ll wonder how you led people on important projects without first learning their relevant passions. You deprived them of MVIP if you didn’t connect their passions to their work. Students often start practicing Lead with Empathy on work-related tasks. You’ll find many outside work, like for someone to listen to you, to stop interrupting you, to help you move, to consider your proposal, to help around the house, and so on.

Is Lead with Empathy Manipulation?

People often ask if leading people through their emotions is manipulation. Learning experientially helps best here. After you lead a few people this way, you see how much people love and prefer it. Even more, after someone leads you with empathy a few times, you’ll see how liberating and comfortable it feels. A few comments may help.

IT PASSES THE GOLDEN RULE

People don’t ask if it’s manipulation after being led this way themselves. In fact, one of my clients’ most common questions after learning to lead this way is how to get their bosses to lead them this way.

When you feel understood on something important and your passion connects to your work, you feel great and often inspired, like, “Finally, I can talk about these things I care about” and “Finally, I can work for the reasons I’ve wanted to.” When you feel that joy and enthusiasm, you’ll wish your leaders led you this way.

If something passes the Golden Rule of reciprocity—that you want someone else to do it unto you—it’s hard to label it as bad. More likely, you’ll have a problem leading without relevant emotions.

A FIRM LEAD HELPS

If you’ve partner danced, like waltz or tango, you know one person leads and the other follows. The leader pushes the follower to indicate where to move.

Growing up I learned not to push people, so when I learned partner dancing, I led lightly. Then a dance teacher gave an exercise where the women led the men. For the first time I was on the receiving end of a light lead—yuck! How confusing! I couldn’t tell what my partner wanted me to do, so I couldn’t follow or perform to my ability.

A firm lead, when skillful, helps a lot more than a weak one. When he or she knows what the leader wants, the follower has more freedom to spin and so on, even to disagree or push back. Only when you know someone will catch you will you risk falling.

You can call a firm lead manipulation, but the label doesn’t matter. What matters is what builds relationships and works.

YOU’LL DEVELOP MORE EMPATHY FOR THEM

The feeling you’ll get when you reach a Universal Emotion of “I bet if I led the person with this, I could get them to do a lot more” may sound like you could abuse it, but “universal” means you also feel that emotion. That’s empathy. You will automatically feel like you couldn’t and wouldn’t use what they shared for your advantage at their expense.

Besides feeling respect for their passion, you also recognize that abusing their trust would undermine that relationship. So, from a rational, pragmatic perspective, you sense that it’s not in your interests to take advantage of them.

AFTER PRACTICE, YOU’LL CALL EXTERNAL INCENTIVES MANIPULATIVE

Most people contrast Leading with Empathy with what they’re used to—usually, leading through external incentives like hiring, promoting, offering raises, increasing responsibility, demoting, and firing. These tools help manage but not necessarily lead.

After leading people based on their emotions, you’ll look back on leading people with external incentives as fake and manipulative, and not in the sense of a firm lead in partner dancing. People need to pay rent and eat, so salaries matter, but nobody wants their gravestone to say, “He got the corner office” or “She rose in the organization fast.” Neglecting emotions neglects MVIP.

In time, Lead with Empathy will lead you to base more and more of your professional and personal relationships. Sadly, our world’s focus on external incentives has led many managers to lose sight of what creates MVIP. For better or worse, after people experience you leading them with empathy and MVIP, society’s lack of it will drive them back to you.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

Once I made a habit of leading with empathy, compassion, and MVIP, I couldn’t think of leading with only external incentives again, which I find superficial, ineffective, and impersonal in comparison. You need external incentives for management, but I distinguish leadership from management. If people don’t like sales, a big bonus won’t inspire them to like it. But if you connect their passion to a task so that they feel ownership of it, then if the project needs selling, they’ll figure it out. They’ll probably feel more like they’re fulfilling their passion or serving their community, but they’ll do it and thank you for enabling them to.

Instead of leading through, say, offering a promotion, Lead with Empathy leads you to ask, “What would this promotion mean to this person?” If you don’t know the answer, you realize the importance of the Clarification/Confirmation Cycle to find out the people’s Universal Emotions and what they care about. When you can answer, you connect their passion to the task and create MVIP for them in their work, which you’ll both find rewarding.

Students often start Lead with Empathy tentatively. They wonder if they’ll be able to motivate others as I described. Some aren’t yet comfortable talking about emotions and passions. For many, the first time it clicks is transformational—on a scale that could only have come experientially. It also reveals a path to leading like their heroes and role models. It may take time and practice, and you’ll make mistakes, but it’s a matter of practice. There are no mysteries or superhuman leaps.

I hope you’ve seen something similar and feel motivated to keep developing. If you do, the results are a world of difference from people who failed at leadership challenges they were unprepared for and concluded they couldn’t lead or weren’t born to.

I hope you’ve also had people do the exercise with you to experience personally the MVIP that Lead with Empathy creates in the follower. In my experience, it’s liberating, inspiring, and fun.

Inspiring Your Teams and John Wooden

Most leaders would love to do what John Wooden did. Wooden was one of the greatest coaches of any sport in any time. He coached the UCLA men’s basketball team to 10 championships in 12 years, among other achievements. No one has won more than four since. He didn’t just coach his players to win. He coached them to become better people.

While books have been written by and about him and his coaching, players he coached describe his practice as having a core like Lead with Empathy.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was one of his top players, winning three college championships. Despite later winning six NBA championships as a professional with other coaches, he describes Wooden’s leadership almost beyond compare:

It’s hard to talk about Coach Wooden simply because he was a complex man, but he taught in a very simple way. He just used sports as a means to teach us how to apply ourselves to any situation. Any success that I’ve had as a parent, I have to give Coach Wooden credit for showing me how it was done.

He didn’t expect much from us. He just wanted us to do what he did, which was to get our education and learn how to compete according to the rules. It made a big difference to us that he never expected us to do anything that he didn’t do. But then again he graduated from Purdue on time and was a consensus All-American, so he set quite an example and it made it possible to understand that we could do it, but it took some work and he showed us how to do it.

He was more like a parent than a coach. He was a selfless and giving human being, but he was a disciplinarian. We learned all about those aspects of life that most kids want to skip over. He wouldn’t let us do that.

Talk about MVIP: “Any success that I’ve had as a parent, I have to give Coach Wooden credit.” Not just success in basketball but as a parent, which happened years later. Even with Abdul-Jabbar’s passion for basketball, his children must have meant more. That’s how much Wooden’s leadership meant.

How did Wooden do it? Abdul-Jabbar tells us, “He taught in a very simple way. He just used sports as a means to teach us how to apply ourselves to any situation.” Sounds like Lead with Empathy—connecting his players’ passion (for winning basketball games) to his tasks (of discipline, practice, and what “most kids want to skip over”). Despite having the top recruits in the nation, Wooden began the first practice of each season with exercises as basic as how to put on socks.

His players learned discipline, education, playing by the rules, and all the lofty goals leaders aspire to teach. Discipline, integrity, and such don’t come from lectures, nor by listening to others’ stories or watching inspirational videos. They come from low-level tasks with quality and attention to detail, like putting on socks when done with passion, which Lead with Empathy instills. Academic approaches to teaching leadership teach about integrity without necessarily developing it. Lead with Empathy develops it without necessarily talking about it.

John Wooden was human. What he did, you can, too. You live in different circumstances, so your outcomes may look different, but you can inspire as effectively with your teammates. The path for you to get those results is the same as the one for his players to get theirs: learn their passions and connect them to the task of practicing the basics.