How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! 8. Empathy in Risk Communication by Peter M. Sandman - with an Afterword by Jody Lanard Everybody agrees that empathy is crucial to risk communication. Vincent Covello, for example, argues that caring/empathy accounts for fifty percent of trust; the other fifty percent, he says, is shared about equally by dedication/commitment, honesty/openness, and competence/expertise. He often quotes an old saying to the effect that people (especially people who are upset) don’t care what you know until they know that you care. So if you do care, showing you care is obviously crucial. What isn’t so obvious is how to show you care, how to express your empathy. Advice from a risk communication consultant to “be empathic” or “show you care” is of limited value without specifics about how. Too often it leaves clients thinking they’re supposed to check off some kind of empathy box – say something like “we are all so sorry for your loss” or “we don’t blame you for being upset” and then move on to the topic at hand. Or it just leaves clients rightly wondering what exactly they are supposed to do. Nor is the consultant’s advice to “just use your intuition” very helpful (or very empathic). Our intuition about empathy is often wrong. We need guidelines. And the guidelines can be profoundly counterintuitive. When a stakeholder is recounting how upset he or she is about something your company has done or plans to do, it might be tempting to murmur sympathetically, “I know how you feel.” That sounds like it should be an empathic thing to say. Yet every risk communication practitioner soon discovers that it doesn’t feel the least bit empathic to the recipient. The invariable response is an angry, “No you don’t!” Paradoxically, “I can’t imagine how that must feel” makes people feel more understood than “I know how you feel.” Clearly there must be more to expressing empathy than just telling others you feel their pain. It turns out people are often very proprietary about their pain. They don’t take well to strangers who claim to feel it. It’s theirs! And yet they don’t take well to strangers who seem oblivious to their pain either, or who deny that they’re feeling it, or who tell them they shouldn’t be feeling it. For example when there’s a terrorist attack, an infectious disease outbreak, or some other crisis, officials sometimes think the empathic thing to do is to reassure the frightened public. “We have the situation under control,” they may announce (whether it’s true or not). “There is no cause for alarm.” But experienced crisis managers know that this sort of empty reassurance isn’t reassuring. Instead of making people feel understood, supported, and cared for, it makes them feel abandoned, alone with their fear. “The situation looks pretty bleak right now” is actually a more empathic piece of crisis communication than “everything is under control.” Of course you don’t just say the situation looks bleak and stop there. You tell people what you’re doing to protect them, what they can do to protect themselves, how much you hope things will improve, etc. But starting with a worried acknowledgment of how bad the situation looks so far is a huge empathic improvement over starting with a cheery expression of overconfidence and a false claim that there’s nothing to worry about. Even if there really isn’t much to worry about, and your goal is to help people calm down rather than gear up for the emergency, it’s still essential to empathize with their concern, not to trash it. But “I know how unnecessarily upset you are” isn’t the way! The dilemma of empathic communication, in other words, is finding a middle path between two mistakes: being oblivious to your stakeholders’ feelings and intruding on your stakeholders’ feelings. Much of what has been written about empathy focuses on not being oblivious, so novice risk communicators are likely to think obliviousness is the only problem. They’re likely to suppose that the vague admonition to “Be empathic!” means they should keep pointing out what their stakeholders are feeling (“You’re upset”), that they know what their stakeholders are feeling (“I can tell you’re upset”), and that they appreciate how their stakeholders came to feel that way (“I understand why you’re so upset”). There are worse ways of intruding (“You’ &R7GW

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