The Many Sides of Empathy

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Empathy is reciprocal. When the organization and its leaders demonstrate caring for the people who work there, the employees are much more likely to demonstrate caring for the company and their customers. 

Martin Lindstrom has to be one the world’s most interesting people. Since he was a small boy, growing up in Denmark, he has lived a life of travel and adventure that is hard to even imagine. Martin is now a member of Thinkers50 and a world authority in branding. 

In my conversations with Martin, I had not really anticipated a discussion on the topic of empathy. Empathy to me had always sounded like a warm, fuzzy topic that reminded me of words like ‘nice’, ‘caring’, ‘sensitive’, and ‘kind’. It had never dawned on me that empathy was a critically important variable in the success of advertising campaigns! I saw empathy as a universal good. I never imagined that empathy, when misused, could also cause great harm. As we discuss the many sides of empathy, please think about your own life – and how empathy has, or has not, helped you become the person you want to be.

The are several definitions of empathy. Our operational definition:

Empathy – Being able to experience, think or feel from the position of another person.

As is turns out, empathy can be much more multi-faceted and complex than I ever imagined. Let’s talk about four types of empathy and how each can be helpful, or harmful, depending on how it is employed.

1. The empathy of understanding – understanding why and how another person thinks and feel the way that they do.

This type of empathy can be referred as cognitive empathy. On the positive side, being able to understand where people are coming from and why they are doing what they are doing can be incredibly helpful in coaching others. Concerned coaches, parents, friends and partners can be much more effective in developing positive relationships if we can see the world from the perspective of the people we care about.

I have been blessed to be a student of some wonderful teachers who were ‘off the charts’ in demonstrating the empathy of understanding. Let me share one demonstration of this type of empathy and show how it make an incredible difference in my life.  

As a Ph.D. student at UCLA, I had a self-image of being “hip” and “cool.” I fancied myself as a seeker who was focused on human understanding, self-actualization, and the uncovering of profound wisdom. 

Early in the program, I was one of thirteen students in a class led by a wise teacher, Dr. Bob Tannenbaum. Bob had come up with the term sensitivity training, had published the most widely distributed article to appear in the Harvard Business Review, and was a full professor. He was a very important person in our department at UCLA. He was also a great person. 

In Bob’s class, we were encouraged to discuss anything we wanted to discuss. I began by talking about people in Los Angeles. For three weeks I did a monologue about how “screwed up” people in Los Angeles were. “They wear these $78 sequined blue jeans and drive gold Rolls Royces; they are plastic and materialistic; all they care about is impressing others; and they really do not understand what is deep and important in life.” (It was easy for me to be an expert on the people of Los Angeles. I had, after all, grown up in a small town in Kentucky.) One day after listening to me babble for three weeks, Bob looked at me quizzically and asked, “Marshall, who are you talking to?” 

“I am speaking to the group,” I answered. 

“Who in the group are you talking to?” 

“Well, I guess I am talking to everybody,” I replied, not quite knowing where he was headed with this line of questioning. 

“I don’t know if you realize this,” Bob said, “but each time you have spoken, you have looked at only one person. You have addressed your comments toward only one person. And you seem interested in the opinion of only one person. Who is that person?” 

“That is interesting. Let me think about it,” I replied. Then (after careful consideration) I said, “You?” 

He said, “That’s right, me. There are twelve other people in this room. Why don’t you seem interested in any of them?” 

Now that I had dug myself into a hole, I decided to dig even deeper. I said, “You know, Dr. Tannenbaum, I think you can understand the true significance of what I am saying. I think you can truly understand how ‘screwed up’ it is to try to run around and impress people all the time. I believe you have a deep understanding of what is really important in life.” 

Bob looked at me and said, “Marshall, is there any chance that for the last three weeks all you have been trying to do is impress me?” 

I was amazed at Bob’s obvious lack of insight! “Not at all!” I declared. “I don’t think you have understood one thing I have said! I have been explaining to you how screwed up it is to try to impress other people. I think you have totally missed my point, and frankly, I am a little disappointed in your lack of understanding!” 

He looked at me, scratched his beard, and concluded, “No. I think I understand.” 

I looked around and saw twelve people scratching their faces and thinking, “Yes. We understand.” 

Suddenly, I had a deep dislike for Dr. Tannenbaum. I devoted a lot of energy to figuring out his psychological problems and understanding why he was confused. But after six months, it finally dawned on me that the person who with the issue wasn’t him. It wasn’t even the people in Los Angeles. The person with the real issue was me. I finally looked in the mirror and said, “You know, old Dr. Tannenbaum was exactly right. Thank you, Bob Tannenbaum.” 

This lesson on the empathy of understanding was instrumental in shaping my career. I realized that other people may sometimes have a better understanding of why we are doing what we are doing – than we have. I realized that, if we can stop, listen, and think about what others see in us, we have a great opportunity. 

We can compare the self that we want to be with the self we are presenting to the rest of the world. We can then begin to make the real changes needed to align our stated values with our actual behavior. I have told this story at least three hundred times, and I have thought about it more frequently than I have told it. Often when I become self-righteous, preachy, holier than thou, or angry about some perceived injustice, I eventually realize that the issue is not with the other person or people. 

The issue is usually in me. 

Today I work mostly with executives in large organizations. I help them develop a profile of desired leadership behavior. Then I provide them with confidential feedback, which allows them to compare their behavior (as perceived by others) with their profile of desired behavior. I try to help them deal with this feedback in a positive way, to learn from it, and (eventually) to become a good role model for the desired leadership behavior in their organization. 

Although I am supposed to be a “coach,” very little of my coaching involves “sharing my wisdom.” Most of it involves helping my clients learn from the people around them. In this way, the lesson I learned from Bob Tannenbaum has not only helped me in my professional life. It helped me understand people’s deeper motivations. More important, it helped me understand myself.

Effective advertisers have a deep grasp of the empathy of understanding. By understanding why people react the way that they do, effective advertisers can send messages that make us want to buy products – in ways we may not even be aware of. According to Martin Lindstrom, the vast majority of our buying decisions are ‘pre-conscious’ and can be influenced by words, images or sounds without us even knowing we are being influenced. In many cases the advertisers, like my example of Dr. Tannenbaum, understand more about out true motivations than we do!

The empathy of understanding demonstrated by advertisers can 

be either a positive or negative influence on the world, depending on the product or service they are advertising.

Let’s talk about how the empathy of understanding can do more harm than good.

In my own self-assessment of the four types of empathy, I would give myself the highest scores on the empathy of understanding. I have had decades of experience and education from great teachers, like Bob Tannenbaum. As I mentioned earlier, this can be very helpful to me in understanding myself and in helping my clients. It can help me understand other people’s deeper motivations. It can also be used in the wrong way. If I am not careful, I can misuse this same understanding to illustrate how insightful I am like a ‘parlor trick’. I can make other people feel embarrassed or ashamed – especially when I become ‘competitive’. I wince when I remember the times I having done this in the past, with little true regard for the people I was allegedly trying to enlighten.

Unfortunately, on a much deeper level, the empathy of understanding has been used to manipulate millions of people through propaganda. Adolf Hitler had a profound understanding of the pain, shame and anger experienced by German people after World War I. In Mein Kompf, he accurately predicts how he will use this understanding through propaganda to influence the masses. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master of propaganda, used his understanding of why people felt the way they did in a way that led to one of the greatest human tragedies in history. 

Understanding why people are doing what they are doing can be a blessing or a curse. Before we demonstrate this type of understanding we need to ‘look in the mirror’ and make sure we are using our understanding for the right reasons.

2. The empathy of feeling – experiencing the emotional state of the other person.

This type of empathy can be referred to as emotional empathy. One of the most common expressions related to empathy is, “I feel your pain.”

The empathy of feeling occurs when we actually experience the feeling of another person. The world empathy is derived from the Greek em – in combined with pathos – feeling.

Studies of our brains’ reactions to emotional events provide some fascinating insights into the empathy of feeling. In terms of positive emotion, research on rabid fans in the US has shown that the fans have a physiological reaction to their US football team scoring a touchdown – that is almost identical to the reaction of the person who is doing the scoring. 

We often experience this type empathy with characters that we know are only acting. This explains why we smile, laugh, or even cry when watching movies. 

In the caring professions, it can be very helpful to experience the empathy of feeling. By feeling another person’s pain, we can better connect with them and show how much we care.

Hortense Le Gentil is one of the world’s leading coaches and recent author of Aligned – a book on leadership that I frequently recommend. She knows more about the topic of empathy that almost anyone I have met.

When I asked Hortense what empathy meant to her as a coach, she had a profound response, which referred to the Greek origins of the word. She said, “As a coach I need to be able to experience the empathy of feeling as best I can. As in the original Greek, I can join with the other person and be ‘in feeling’. I also need to be able to remove myself to be a great coach. I can not be my best at helping my clients if I am lost in their pain.”

For both the positive and negative, the empathy of feeling is a vicarious experience. As with any vicarious experience this can lead to very negative consequences. On a shallower level, we can substitute experiencing the feelings of people we don’t even know for the experience of living our own lives. Literally, billions of hours have been spent watching reality television so we can escape from our own world and vicariously experience the lives of others. (I tried to calculate the total billions of hours that fans around the world have invested in Kardashian-related internet and television. I gave up!)

My daughter, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, and I have done some interesting research on how people spend their time and how satisfied these same people are with their lives. The results are clear. If you want to have a great life, live your own life! The more hours people spent on vicarious living, the less satisfied they were with their own lives. 

On a deeper level, the empathy of feeling can lead to depression. One of my neighbors, Jim always seemed depressed. I asked him why. He commented, “I have five children. As a father, I can only ever be as happy as my least happy child.”

In some cases, people wear their empathy of feeling as a ‘badge of honor’. A common indicator of this behavior is the comment, “How could anyone be happy when other people in the world are miserable?”

In considering the empathy of feeling, my suggestion is to heed the words of my friend, Hortense. “Join and be able to part.”

In the case of my neighbor who was miserable because his children were sad, I would suggest something that I teach all my coaching clients – lead by example! 

I have asked thousands of parents around the world to complete this sentence in one word, “When my children grow up, I want them to be…”

One word is mentioned by parents more than all other worlds combined. The word, ‘Happy!’

I then provide a challenge, “If you want your children to be happy, your parents to be happy, the people who love you to be happy and the people who respect you at work to be happy – you go first!”

The empathy of feeling works two ways. Not only are we experiencing their feelings – they are experiencing our feelings. 

What feelings to you want them to experience?

3. The empathy of caring – feeling concern for the other person’s reaction.

This type of empathy can be referred to as compassionate empathy or sympathy. The empathy of caring differs from the empathy of feeling in one important way. The empathy of caring is caused by concern for the person’s reaction to the event, not the event itself. 

For example, a football fan of the team, might experience a feeling of joy in the team achieving a score with no knowledge of who was responsible for the score. Another fan of an individual player might experience joy because the player is thrilled with this achievement. In the empathy of caring, you are happy or sad because the person is happy or sad, not because of the situation.

The positive benefits of caring seem obvious on so many levels. Who wants a husband, wife or partner that does not care?

When I interviewed Maria, who was in charge of customer satisfaction for her hospitality company, she loved the concept of the empathy of caring. She noted, “We care if our customers have a positive reaction to what we are doing. We can learn from their experience. We also care about our customers when they are upset because of a negative experience. The fact that our customers are unhappy means we need to do something. Even if the problem was ‘not our fault’ in some absolute sense, we need to let the customers no that their bad experience means that we need to take corrective action.”

Garry Ridge, the CEO of WD 40, has led his organization to incredible financial results for the past 15 years. One of the reasons for Garry’s success is the empathy of caring. Garry truly cares about (what he refers to as) the members of his tribe. If they have any personal or business issue that causes them grief, he and his team do whatever they can to make it clear how much they care. This type is empathy is encouraged and supported throughout the organization. The result? WD40 has some of the most positive employee engagement scores in the world. 

Empathy is reciprocal. When the organization and its leaders demonstrate caring for the people who work there, the employees are much more likely to demonstrate caring for the company and their customers. 

On the surface, it seems that two other types of professionals who should consistently score high on the empathy of caring are investors and Medical Doctors.

For example, would you rather invest your money with an investor of cares about your pain when you lose money or an investor that did not have this kind of personal caring? While the answer sounds obvious, it may not be as simple as it sounds. 

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to listen as one of the world’s most famous and successful hedge fund managers was interviewed, I will call him Scott. He had a net work of many billions of dollars and was deeply admired by the other financial professionals in the room. He was asked, “Today, all you do is invest your own money. You could easily raise billions of dollars for a new fund – and make a fortune! Why in the world did you quit raising funds and investing other people’s money?”

I will never forget Scott’s answer. His voice became more quiet and very serious. He shook his head and replied, “Everyone knows I have made many billions of dollars for my backers. Few consider the fact that I have also lost billions of dollars. In this business, if you are right 52% of the time – and wrong 48% of the time, you come out way ahead.

When I was younger, I never really cared if lost other people’s money. I just thought about my overall number at the end of the year. When I became older, I started caring. To use an analogy from boxing, every loss felt like a body blow. It did not knock me out, but it hurt. Many of my clients were retirement funds. I started thinking about the hard-working families who were counting on me to ensure the security of their retirements. I started getting much more cautious. I passed up opportunities I should have taken. I become much less effective. That is why I quit investing other people’s money.”

I am volunteer coach for two CEOs of childrens hospitals Dr. Jim Downing (St. Jude in Memphis) and Dr. Patrick Frias  (Rady Childrens in San Diego). The empathy of caring is a major issue in any childrens hospital. One of any childrens hospital’s greatest problems is burn out. Why? Caring for children who may die and parents who may be grieving can be extremely stressful. The problem is not that the health care workers do not care. The problem is that they sometimes cannot stop caring. The burden becomes so great that their professional skills, like those of the hedge fund manager, begin to diminish. 

On a personal note, it can be very hard for health care professionals to ‘leave it at work’. If they are not careful, the incredible stress they face on the job can cause strain in their relationships at home.

Why are surgeons discouraged from operating on their children? They personally care too much, and this caring may inhibit their judgment. In the words of my friend, Hortense, they may be able to join with the patient, but no able to disengage enough to have perspective. 

In understanding the empathy of caring, it is important to realize that ‘more’ is not always ‘better’. When will caring help us serve the people we are there for (like Garry Ridge and WD-40) and when can caring go to far and begin to inhibit our effectiveness (like Scott and his hedge fund)?

4. The empathy of doing – taking action to make a difference.

The final type of empathy we will discuss is the empathy of doing – going beyond understanding, feeling, and caring – and actually doing something to make a difference. In some ways, the empathy of doing can be seen as the most important type of empathy. After all, what does it matter how you think or feel, if you are doing nothing to make a positive difference?

Like all forms of empathy, the empathy of doing has a positive side and a negative side. Joan is probably the nicest human being I have ever met in my life. Although she has lots of money, you could never tell it by the way she acts. She is incredibly humble and kind. She does an amazing amount of good work for her community and never talks about it (that is why I am not using her real name).

When discussing empathy with Joan, I talked about how I saw her as a positive role model for the empathy of doing. She then shared with me the negative side of her own behavior. She said, “If I am not careful, I am a fixer. I want to care so much that I can solve other people’s problems, instead of letting them learn from their mistakes and fix their own problems. Instead of helping people take responsibility, I can, without meaning to, help them become dependent.”

The person that I know, who has had the greatest global impact in helping others, is my wonderful friend and volunteer client, Dr. Jim Kim (I always call him Dr. Jim). In order to make a difference in health care, for people who needed it most, Dr. Jim (along with Paul Farmer and their dedicated team) founded Partners in Health. 

They fought incredible battles, against powerful foes, with very little initial support or funding and ended up with Public Health victories that literally saved tens of millions of lives. Understanding, feeling, and caring were never enough. They focused on the hard work on doing! Dr. Jim has had an amazing career. 

After Partners in Health, he became President of Dartmouth College, the CEO of the World Bank and now is the Vice Chairman of Global Investment Partners. He is always focused on helping as many people as he can – and making a positive difference. (At the time of this writing, in his ‘spare time’, he is still on the Board of Partners in Health and is working with them to combat the Covid-19 crisis.)

When we were discussing the empathy of doing, Dr. Jim discussed a potential negative that I had never considered. Many affluent ‘do-gooders’ at some point in life experience guilt. Although they have donated money in the past, they conclude that this is not enough, and they need to visit a developing country to actually work. Unfortunately, they have no real usable skills, expect to be treated like royalty, and end up doing more harm than good. They also expect everyone that they meet to express undying gratitude for their heroism. 

A great lesson, from Dr. Jim is this. It is wonderful to want to help others. Be very clear on why. If our true goal is to help, is this the best way to do it? 

Perhaps for a successful businessperson, just making lots of money and donating it to a great cause would have a much greater impact than wasting the time of professionals whose lives have been dedicated to helping those in the greatest need. 

This Show Is for You – My Best Advice on Empathy

I have interviewed many brilliant people on the topic of empathy. I have tried to learn from the different perspectives shared by coaches, psychologists, thinkers, and leaders. One of the insights that has been most helpful to me – and I hope will be equally helpful to you – came from an unexpected source, a Broadway star!

Telly Leung was a cast member of the television show, Glee. In theater, he has performed in Godspell, Allegiance and Rent. 

He is probably best known for his performance in Aladdin, where he played the lead role of Aladdin on Broadway for over two years. Along with being a great actor, Telly is incredibly thoughtful and a wonderful teacher. 

In describing his role on the stage, Telly said, “When I played the role of Aladdin, I had to demonstrate many extremely different emotional reactions. In the two hours I was on stage, I had to be happy, sad, in love, rejected, serious, light-hearted, angry, and funny. I had to connect emotionally with the other actors. I had to demonstrate empathy for them every time I went out on stage.

Every night I had to fall in love with Princess Jasmine – and I did! (Although when I went home that night, I would still be in love with my husband.) In my workshops I am often asked, ‘How do you stay motivated? Don’t you ever just feel like ‘calling it in’ after hundreds of performances? How can you keep really caring about the audience?”

As Telly continued his voice changed and his eyes lit-up.

“I was a little eight-year-old boy, the first time I saw a play. I was mesmerized by the music, the singing, the dancing, and the joy! I will never forget that wonderful experience.

Every night when I go out on that Broadway stage, I think of that little boy. That ‘little Telly’ who may be sitting in the audience right now. Every night, I tell myself, ‘this show is for you!’”

Telly went on to provide the most helpful and practical advice I have every received on the topic of empathy. He said:

Authentic empathy is doing your best to be the person you need to be for the people who are with you – right now.

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Written by Marshall Goldsmith