How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 127

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! So before you go any further in this article, please reconsider your anchoring frame, your mental model of what “being empathic” means. It’s not enough to pay attention to stakeholder feelings. It’s not enough to show we’re paying attention. We have to find ways to do it respectfully and gently. The Essence of Empathy: Sort-of Acknowledgment The essence of empathic risk communication is understanding what your stakeholders are feeling, and then finding a way to sort-of acknowledge what they’re feeling – without trespassing on their emotional property. I wrote “sort-of acknowledge” instead of just “acknowledge” because you’re dealing with emotional dynamite here. Your acknowledgments have to be gentle, unintrusive. In fact, your acknowledgments may have to be deniable, especially by your stakeholders themselves. People who show you how they feel may really want you to show them that you get it (that you “get them”) – and still need to deny their feelings. For instance, people who are frightened may not want to admit it, and therefore may not want you to notice it too overtly. It isn’t kind, or wise, or empathic to push your stakeholders to acknowledge the feelings you’re sort-of acknowledging, or even to acknowledge your sort-of acknowledgments. Empathic risk communication, in other words, aims to get your stakeholders’ feelings “into the room” without making your stakeholders feel exposed or pinned down. You find a way to signal what you think they might be feeling, and to validate that it’s a pretty understandable way to feel. If you’re reading them right, they will feel more understood, better able to bear their feelings, and thus better able to cope with the situation. They may or may not tell you you’re right. They may even tell you you’re wrong, and insist that you back off – which of course you should do. If you were reading them right in the first place, they will nonetheless feel more understood, better able to bear their feelings, and thus better able to cope with the situation. All this is symmetrical. The relationship itself may not be symmetrical. You may be Goliath to their David, the embodiment of a powerful multinational corporation graciously consenting to listen to their concerns; or you may be David to their Goliath, a lowly corporate supplicant desperately seeking access to their community and a “social license to operate.” (You may be one of these in your mind and the other in theirs.) Either way, empathy is symmetrical. If your stakeholders understand you better, and find ways to sort-of acknowledge what’s going on for you, that too will improve the interaction. What is it, exactly, that needs to be sort-of acknowledged? How your stakeholders feel about the situation – their feelings of anger, fear, unfairness, betrayal, etc. This includes not just the emotions themselves, but also the judgments that intermix with those emotions – their belief that X happened or Y is going to happen, that X was a calamity or Y will be an injustice. It also includes what they wish would happen or fear might happen. How your stakeholders feel about you – mistrust, for example, or dislike, or envy. Once again, this includes judgments as well as emotions – their belief that you did X or you’re going to do Y. Who your stakeholders imagine you are (both in your role and as a person), and how they imagine you feel about the situation and about them – their sense that you don’t like them or don’t trust them; their sense that you’re a callous corporate lackey, an east coast elitist, or whatever they think you are. Some of what you’re sort-of acknowledging is objectively true. Maybe the situation really is unfair, or you really have acted in an untrustworthy way, or you really are an east coast elitist. Some of it is partly true. Some of it is neither true nor false; it’s a matter of opinion, more about values than facts. And some of it is flat-out mistaken. You can’t sort-of acknowledge that you’re an east coast elitist if you’re actually a Midwestern populist; empathy doesn’t mean agreeing with falsehoods. But you can still sort-of acknowledge that it looks that way to them (or if that’s too intrusive, that it might look that way to some people). And you can still sort-of acknowledge the things you have been doing, or have been accused of doing, that might give that impression. For [email protected] Property of Bookemon, do NOT distribute 129