Empathy in the Workplace 101

It's Not Enough to Put Yourself in Others' Shoes...

When searching for the "perfect" photograph for this article across various image banks, I was met with a somewhat amusing yet obvious surprise: when you search for the word "empathy," almost all you find are images of very sad, depressed individuals—some even crying—being comforted by another person with a compassionate expression.

Why is it that empathy (at least on these platforms) is predominantly associated with another person's suffering? Well, empathy is much more than that.

According to the consensus in neuroscience, empathy is the ability to understand another person's emotional experience. This includes not only sadness but also emotions like joy, anger, calmness, surprise, optimism, pessimism, and any other complex combination of emotional states.

Empathy enables us to "resonate" with other minds

We are social beings thanks to our Social Brain, and alongside language and narratives, empathy plays a crucial role in our daily lives.

It allows us to cooperate and live within socially adopted norms. Analyzing empathy through Social Neuroscience, it's important to grasp its elements or components before discussing it in professional relationships.

Practically speaking, empathy can be divided into an affective component (known as affective empathy), a cognitive component (cognitive empathy), and an "executive" component, involving the decision to act based on the affective or cognitive empathy being experienced. All three components can be activated, some or none. What's interesting is that in all our social interactions, we're constantly making decisions based on our ability (mostly unconscious) to activate these components.

Affective Empathy

Also known as Emotional Contagion (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012), it refers to our ability to activate a memory or recall an emotion in our brain to replicate what we're perceiving through our senses, and "feel" what the other person is likely experiencing. This emotional contagion can be conscious or unconscious. For instance, someone entering a room with anger can through their non-verbal cues trigger a memory of anger in us, causing us to feel that emotion... even if we don't fully understand its origin.

Cognitive Empathy

Emotion Understanding (Decety, 2011), Mentalizing, or Perspective Taking (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012), refers to our ability to understand both our own emotions and those of others. It's called cognitive because it goes beyond emotional contagion, which is difficult to avoid, and requires us to verbalize (either aloud or in our minds) what we're experiencing and feeling.

Following the previous example, after being "infected" by the person's anger, we move on to understanding what we're feeling, and subsequently projecting that awareness into the other person's behavior, confirming that indeed, our colleague is going through a tough time.

It's crucial to note that a person might have a great capacity for understanding another's emotions (cognitive empathy) without necessarily being emotionally affected (affective empathy). For instance, through body language, voice tone, and the words chosen by someone abruptly entering our space, we might deduce they're angry, yet manage to prevent our own memory of anger from triggering a surge of adrenaline.

Therefore, when our brain attempts to decode another person's emotional experience, it may activate one or both of these mechanisms. However, according to Social Neuroscience, true "empathy" in its most altruistic and valuable sense has not yet been achieved.

Prosocial Concern

What can we do now with what we can feel and understand? Take action.

Prosocial Concern (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012), Self-regulation (Decety, 2011), or as proposed by other authors, Compassion, is perhaps the key component of what we commonly know as empathy. It's the conscious decision to enhance another person's experience.

In my opinion, there's no use in feeling or understanding others' emotional states if it doesn't lead to action. Action that prompts us to seek effective ways to communicate, improve another's experience in the face of negative emotions, and even validate and affirm positive emotions.

Empathy in the Workplace

Empathy is crucial in the workplace. Why? Because in organizational contexts, we're driven to achieve specific results alongside a diverse group of individuals with varying personality traits, emotional states, cultures, worldviews, and above all, communication styles.

At work, we don't often have the same comfort in relating as we do with friends, partners, or family—those with whom we share many commonalities and trust enough to show how we feel.

The workplace (where we typically spend most of our week) demands that we leverage our emotional and cognitive capital to maintain harmony. Diplomacy, leadership, and empathy must coexist in balance to achieve results without sacrificing well-being.

Each employee is like a neuron in a larger collective brain, and when one neuron fires, when one "shines," others do too, thereby bringing an organization to life—a healthy, coherent entity capable of achieving its goals.

To truly be empathetic individuals, it's not enough to put ourselves in others' shoes. We must decide to walk with them to genuinely feel and understand others' experiences.