October 12, 2022 • 16 mins
Expanding our Vocabulary – Empathy Caveats
While empathy is not a new vocabulary, some of aspects of empathy might be. We need to be careful in how we use the term empathy.
Against Empathy – the Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom is available where you buy books.
A video interview with Paul Bloom - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjBhxq_YpiQ
For the Love of Work – How to Make Better Mistakes https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-make-better-mistakes/id1530443742?i=1000498761809
Kim Scott’s story of ruinous empathy - https://www.radicalcandor.com/video-ruinous-empathy-story-kim-scott/
Connect with Tanya Hewitt on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-hewitt-55804529/
Buy her a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tanyah
Credits:
Adam Johns – voiceover - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjohns730/
Beverley McKiver – composer and player of the music Tell Me About Love - https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleymckiver/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:03):
Welcome to Beyond the Minimum, where we'll be exploring the world of work. We'll be chatting about concepts, ideas and phrases, explore practices and delve into what good looks like. Work can be purposeful value lead, and more meaningful to all who interact with the workplace. This podcast is brought to you by Tanya Hewitt who lives in unceded Algonquin, Anishinaabeg territory, otherwise known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
(00:33):
Hello, everyone. It is true that I haven't been driving as much as I did before the global pandemic hit us in2020. However, I have been noticing a lot of driver behavior that is disturbing. For example, a few days ago, I was driving a very familiar route. And I thought I had enough time I would estimate about 400 meters to be able to change lanes to be able to get into the lane that I wanted to be in in order to turn as I left a stoplight, I noticed that right behind the car beside me was a motorcycle and I thought, oh, okay, I will not cut off this motorcycle. However, I will need to get over before the end of the lane before my turn off. And I signaled and I realized that there were two cars that didn't allow me to be able to enter the lane. And it wasn't as though I was panicked. But it was interesting to realize, I was trying to be able to give notice that I wanted to get into the different lane. And it seemed as though these drivers were just possessive and basically thinking, Well, I don't know what they were thinking, I shouldn't be saying that. But the fact of
(02:03):
the matter is, I didn't get into that lane. And a little while ago, somebody in one of the networks I frequenthad given a seminar on cooperative driving. And I thought, I suspect a lot of people haven't heard of this term cooperative driving, given a lot of the behavior that I've been seeing. So if you do drive, I would encourage you to think about other drivers and maybe be a little bit gracious. And if they are trying to get into your lane, let them in. It's not as though there is some kind of race to be won. But it would be nice to be a little bit more cooperative on our roads.
(02:53):
Today's episode is expanding our vocabulary.
Hello, today's episode is not really a new vocabulary. But it is a caveat of a word that everybody knows. Sotoday we're going to be talking about the caveats of empathy. Just the other day I saw a LinkedIn post. And of course, there are many, many of them that talked about empathy being a core competency of leaders. And it just goes without saying, of course, leaders need to be empathetic as does everybody, like empathetic is just so well, seemingly understood out there. So in this episode, I just like to bring up a couple of caveats on being empathetic. Not that it's a bad thing. But if it goes in a couple of directions, it can start to become not so great.
(03:55):
I live in Ontario, and I am very blessed to be able to have access to this incredible television station thatI have been watching for many, many years. And in doing so, I have been exposed to a lot of concepts. This being one of them. It was an interview on the agenda with Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom has a book entitled Against Empathy, the Case for Rational Compassion. Now, to be fair, he does preface the whole concept on your definition of empathy. So it is important to be able to have that straight. I looked up the Oxford Learner's Dictionary on what they say empathy is defined as so they say it is the ability to understand another person's feelings whereas compassion is a strong feeling of sympathy for people and or animals who are suffering and a desire to help them. Notice the difference in what the Oxford learner says empathy is just taking on somebody else's feelings. Whereas compassion is desiring to help the people who have such feelings that I think is very aligned with what Paul Bloom had defined in his book, rational compassion. And, you know, a book entitled
(05:37):
against empathy, how could you not have a book tour going almost everywhere. So let's just take a scenario.This is not necessarily from the book, but this is one that I think illustrates the concept nicely, say you're taking a walk, and you're beside a river or a lake or somebody of water, and you see somebody drowning in that body of water, screaming for help, you may instinctively go and help the person like who wouldn't, you know, but you might not see the rocks or the rapids or the depths of the water. And instead of being of help, you are overcome with fear for your own safety. So instead of being of assistance to the drowning person, you are now focused exclusively on your own safety, realizing that you don't have the capability to save anyone, by yourself in these conditions, and you have essentially taking yourself out of the game. This is why the Coast Guard will really question if people want to jump into a body of water to save somebody, because if they now have to save to drowning people, you've made their job worse, rather than having just one person and maybe
(07:06):
somebody else going to get the Coast Guard, just to play out that scenario, recruiting help and talking withthe victim could be a better choice, rather than playing the hero. So this is a bit what Paul Bloom was talking about and against empathy, instead of falling prey to empathy, and ensuring that you feel the pain of someone else who needs help take stock of your position, so that you can offer the help without being drawn in and needing it yourself. So this is empathy at the extreme. And that's Paul's suggestion, rational compassion, do good, but not at the expense of being of assistance, like you feel compassionate towards whatever the cause is. But you're not going to take on all of the emotions, that people who are likely victims, you're not going to take on their emotions, which then take you out of the game entirely. That's one aspect of where empathy can go off the rails.
(08:14):
Let's move to almost the other extreme, where you're not trying to be the hero, you're almost trying to be asinoffensive as possible. And this concept is called ruinous empathy. So I heard of this on another podcast For the Love of Work, and I'll link the episode in the show notes, we tend to want to be nice to everyone. We tend not to want to rock the boat, and to continue with the status quo so as not to offend anyone. As Kim Scott has said on her website, you won't tell somebody that their fly is open, because you don't want to embarrass them. But the consequence of that is that the person walks around to the next 15 people who also don't tell that person that their fly's open, and that person is far more embarrassed, because of nobody telling them that their fly's open. So Kim Scott was just such a person. And in a short video that I'll put in the show notes, she talks about hiring a guy that she really, really liked, not in a amorous way, but she got along with this guy and thought that he was just a super addition to her team. She started to get some Inklings from her from
(09:34):
other people on the team that he wasn't pulling his weight and that it wasn't a great hire. But she thoughtwell, you know, that just give him some time. Like it's just a matter of him getting used to the place and and the team will get used to him, and she didn't want to hurt his feelings, of course, because she she honestly liked this guy. And she didn't say anything when she he was appraised of the shortcomings in his performance. But it got to a point where her team basically revolted on her and said, It's either him or the rest of us. She knew at that point that she had to deal with this situation, and to have the difficult conversation with the employee that really she didn't want her to offend.
(10:28):
So, you know, she got up her courage, and she knew that she needed to fire this guy. So this was going to be areally crappy conversation. But what she learned was that when she gave the while the statement that his performance was subpar, and had been subpar, subpar for some time, actually really wasn't all that great. Soon after he was hired, he was shocked and said, something akin to Why didn't you tell me then you knew that my performance wasn't good, but you didn't say anything. So at that moment, she realized that she was prioritizing her inadequacy of raising performance issues when they occurred, and really not giving him information that he could have benefited from getting at the time when it first came to her her problem with delivering that information. Her perception of hurting his feelings, resulted in him losing his job. And that really struck her because it wasn't only him with the poor performance, but it was her unwillingness to tell him about the poor performance that ended up in the whole firing situation as in the first place. And had the
(11:54):
poor performance been raised early, then the employee could have course corrected, it would have been helpfulinformation to him to guess not offensive information as she first thought it would be. So she has termed this concept, ruinous empathy. The fear of hurting others feelings might be denying them information that they need to know. So Pat Lencioni is another person that I follow ad nauseam, I listened to his podcasts and I've I was in his network for some time. I love his material. Pat Lencioni and his team talk about the difference between being nice and being kind. Being nice, like Kim Scott had been, is being super saccharin always seen the positive and scared of offending anyone at all times. Being kind is telling people not what they want to hear. But what they need to know. This is actually a very big topic. And I will likely record a few different podcasts on this overall topic, because it's quite tricky. And I want to serve you as best I can with packaging the information in digestible chunks. So today, we talked about empathy, and that it can have some
(13:22):
dark sides. If we want to feel completely what victims are feeling, we take ourselves out of the game and jointhe victim instead of rational compassion, allowing ourselves to be of assistance to help the victims and their situation. If we hide information from people due to the fear of not hurting their feelings, like if this is information that could help the person improve, we are practicing ruinous empathy. So I encourage you to think about your use of the word empathy, and your practice of empathy. And if either fall into areas I have talked about in this episode, you yourself can course correct and avoid these problems with empathy.
(14:15):
I thank you for listening. I don't know if this is your first episode, or if you are a regular listener,having really appreciated some of this content. I just wanted to tell you that I really do appreciate you for listening. If you would like to express your gratitude for this podcast, I would encourage you to buy me a coffee, head on over to buy me a coffee.com/tanyah that's buy b-u-y me m-e a coffee c-o-f-f-e-e all one word.com/t-a-n-y-a-h tanyah. I will put this in the show notes. And I would really sincerely appreciate your support. In addition to that, you can rate and review this podcast and I really, really appreciate that you are here listening to what I am sending out to you guys. Thanks so much.
(15:27):
Thank you so much for listening to Beyond the Minimum with Tanya Hewitt. We hope this episode aligned withyou. Maybe it was diametrically opposed to us at any rate, we trust it made you think the more we can think about our workplaces and start talking about them, the more we can collectively make a real difference. If you're living in Canada, please find out the Indigenous territory in which you reside. Begin using it to introduce yourself. Please reach out to Tanya through her email Tanya@beyondsafetycompliance.ca. Connect and chat with her on LinkedIn. Follow her company Beyond Safety Compliance. And remember to ask yourself the question, How does your work look? Because we can always go Beyond the Minimum.
Welcome to Beyond the Minimum, where we'll be exploring the world of work. We'll be chatting about concepts, ideas and phrases, explore practices and delve into what good looks like. Work can be purposeful value lead, and more meaningful to all who interact with the workplace. This podcast is brought to you by Tanya Hewitt who lives in unceded Algonquin, Anishinaabeg territory, otherwise known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
(00:33):
Hello, everyone. It is true that I haven't been driving as much as I did before the global pandemic hit us in2020. However, I have been noticing a lot of driver behavior that is disturbing. For example, a few days ago, I was driving a very familiar route. And I thought I had enough time I would estimate about 400 meters to be able to change lanes to be able to get into the lane that I wanted to be in in order to turn as I left a stoplight, I noticed that right behind the car beside me was a motorcycle and I thought, oh, okay, I will not cut off this motorcycle. However, I will need to get over before the end of the lane before my turn off. And I signaled and I realized that there were two cars that didn't allow me to be able to enter the lane. And it wasn't as though I was panicked. But it was interesting to realize, I was trying to be able to give notice that I wanted to get into the different lane. And it seemed as though these drivers were just possessive and basically thinking, Well, I don't know what they were thinking, I shouldn't be saying that. But the fact of
(02:03):
the matter is, I didn't get into that lane. And a little while ago, somebody in one of the networks I frequenthad given a seminar on cooperative driving. And I thought, I suspect a lot of people haven't heard of this term cooperative driving, given a lot of the behavior that I've been seeing. So if you do drive, I would encourage you to think about other drivers and maybe be a little bit gracious. And if they are trying to get into your lane, let them in. It's not as though there is some kind of race to be won. But it would be nice to be a little bit more cooperative on our roads.
(02:53):
Today's episode is expanding our vocabulary.
Hello, today's episode is not really a new vocabulary. But it is a caveat of a word that everybody knows. Sotoday we're going to be talking about the caveats of empathy. Just the other day I saw a LinkedIn post. And of course, there are many, many of them that talked about empathy being a core competency of leaders. And it just goes without saying, of course, leaders need to be empathetic as does everybody, like empathetic is just so well, seemingly understood out there. So in this episode, I just like to bring up a couple of caveats on being empathetic. Not that it's a bad thing. But if it goes in a couple of directions, it can start to become not so great.
(03:55):
I live in Ontario, and I am very blessed to be able to have access to this incredible television station thatI have been watching for many, many years. And in doing so, I have been exposed to a lot of concepts. This being one of them. It was an interview on the agenda with Paul Bloom. Paul Bloom has a book entitled Against Empathy, the Case for Rational Compassion. Now, to be fair, he does preface the whole concept on your definition of empathy. So it is important to be able to have that straight. I looked up the Oxford Learner's Dictionary on what they say empathy is defined as so they say it is the ability to understand another person's feelings whereas compassion is a strong feeling of sympathy for people and or animals who are suffering and a desire to help them. Notice the difference in what the Oxford learner says empathy is just taking on somebody else's feelings. Whereas compassion is desiring to help the people who have such feelings that I think is very aligned with what Paul Bloom had defined in his book, rational compassion. And, you know, a book entitled
(05:37):
against empathy, how could you not have a book tour going almost everywhere. So let's just take a scenario.This is not necessarily from the book, but this is one that I think illustrates the concept nicely, say you're taking a walk, and you're beside a river or a lake or somebody of water, and you see somebody drowning in that body of water, screaming for help, you may instinctively go and help the person like who wouldn't, you know, but you might not see the rocks or the rapids or the depths of the water. And instead of being of help, you are overcome with fear for your own safety. So instead of being of assistance to the drowning person, you are now focused exclusively on your own safety, realizing that you don't have the capability to save anyone, by yourself in these conditions, and you have essentially taking yourself out of the game. This is why the Coast Guard will really question if people want to jump into a body of water to save somebody, because if they now have to save to drowning people, you've made their job worse, rather than having just one person and maybe
(07:06):
somebody else going to get the Coast Guard, just to play out that scenario, recruiting help and talking withthe victim could be a better choice, rather than playing the hero. So this is a bit what Paul Bloom was talking about and against empathy, instead of falling prey to empathy, and ensuring that you feel the pain of someone else who needs help take stock of your position, so that you can offer the help without being drawn in and needing it yourself. So this is empathy at the extreme. And that's Paul's suggestion, rational compassion, do good, but not at the expense of being of assistance, like you feel compassionate towards whatever the cause is. But you're not going to take on all of the emotions, that people who are likely victims, you're not going to take on their emotions, which then take you out of the game entirely. That's one aspect of where empathy can go off the rails.
(08:14):
Let's move to almost the other extreme, where you're not trying to be the hero, you're almost trying to be asinoffensive as possible. And this concept is called ruinous empathy. So I heard of this on another podcast For the Love of Work, and I'll link the episode in the show notes, we tend to want to be nice to everyone. We tend not to want to rock the boat, and to continue with the status quo so as not to offend anyone. As Kim Scott has said on her website, you won't tell somebody that their fly is open, because you don't want to embarrass them. But the consequence of that is that the person walks around to the next 15 people who also don't tell that person that their fly's open, and that person is far more embarrassed, because of nobody telling them that their fly's open. So Kim Scott was just such a person. And in a short video that I'll put in the show notes, she talks about hiring a guy that she really, really liked, not in a amorous way, but she got along with this guy and thought that he was just a super addition to her team. She started to get some Inklings from her from
(09:34):
other people on the team that he wasn't pulling his weight and that it wasn't a great hire. But she thoughtwell, you know, that just give him some time. Like it's just a matter of him getting used to the place and and the team will get used to him, and she didn't want to hurt his feelings, of course, because she she honestly liked this guy. And she didn't say anything when she he was appraised of the shortcomings in his performance. But it got to a point where her team basically revolted on her and said, It's either him or the rest of us. She knew at that point that she had to deal with this situation, and to have the difficult conversation with the employee that really she didn't want her to offend.
(10:28):
So, you know, she got up her courage, and she knew that she needed to fire this guy. So this was going to be areally crappy conversation. But what she learned was that when she gave the while the statement that his performance was subpar, and had been subpar, subpar for some time, actually really wasn't all that great. Soon after he was hired, he was shocked and said, something akin to Why didn't you tell me then you knew that my performance wasn't good, but you didn't say anything. So at that moment, she realized that she was prioritizing her inadequacy of raising performance issues when they occurred, and really not giving him information that he could have benefited from getting at the time when it first came to her her problem with delivering that information. Her perception of hurting his feelings, resulted in him losing his job. And that really struck her because it wasn't only him with the poor performance, but it was her unwillingness to tell him about the poor performance that ended up in the whole firing situation as in the first place. And had the
(11:54):
poor performance been raised early, then the employee could have course corrected, it would have been helpfulinformation to him to guess not offensive information as she first thought it would be. So she has termed this concept, ruinous empathy. The fear of hurting others feelings might be denying them information that they need to know. So Pat Lencioni is another person that I follow ad nauseam, I listened to his podcasts and I've I was in his network for some time. I love his material. Pat Lencioni and his team talk about the difference between being nice and being kind. Being nice, like Kim Scott had been, is being super saccharin always seen the positive and scared of offending anyone at all times. Being kind is telling people not what they want to hear. But what they need to know. This is actually a very big topic. And I will likely record a few different podcasts on this overall topic, because it's quite tricky. And I want to serve you as best I can with packaging the information in digestible chunks. So today, we talked about empathy, and that it can have some
(13:22):
dark sides. If we want to feel completely what victims are feeling, we take ourselves out of the game and jointhe victim instead of rational compassion, allowing ourselves to be of assistance to help the victims and their situation. If we hide information from people due to the fear of not hurting their feelings, like if this is information that could help the person improve, we are practicing ruinous empathy. So I encourage you to think about your use of the word empathy, and your practice of empathy. And if either fall into areas I have talked about in this episode, you yourself can course correct and avoid these problems with empathy.
(14:15):
I thank you for listening. I don't know if this is your first episode, or if you are a regular listener,having really appreciated some of this content. I just wanted to tell you that I really do appreciate you for listening. If you would like to express your gratitude for this podcast, I would encourage you to buy me a coffee, head on over to buy me a coffee.com/tanyah that's buy b-u-y me m-e a coffee c-o-f-f-e-e all one word.com/t-a-n-y-a-h tanyah. I will put this in the show notes. And I would really sincerely appreciate your support. In addition to that, you can rate and review this podcast and I really, really appreciate that you are here listening to what I am sending out to you guys. Thanks so much.
(15:27):
Thank you so much for listening to Beyond the Minimum with Tanya Hewitt. We hope this episode aligned withyou. Maybe it was diametrically opposed to us at any rate, we trust it made you think the more we can think about our workplaces and start talking about them, the more we can collectively make a real difference. If you're living in Canada, please find out the Indigenous territory in which you reside. Begin using it to introduce yourself. Please reach out to Tanya through her email Tanya@beyondsafetycompliance.ca. Connect and chat with her on LinkedIn. Follow her company Beyond Safety Compliance. And remember to ask yourself the question, How does your work look? Because we can always go Beyond the Minimum.
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