As companies grow they become harder to manage. In the confusion managers and executives can latch on to easy metrics such as revenue, growth or profit: hard numbers which leave little to the imagination.
Decades down the line the company has lost itself. It’s obvious to those of us who work with or for these great corporations when they start going awry, but somehow they still manage to sleepwalk into catastrophe.
As someone motivated by R&D and a desire to create new things, and someone who has always had an easy time talking with engineers and clinicians about problems and solutions, I’ve always struggled to put into words something I’ve always innately felt.
That sometimes to have greater control, one must let be willing to let go.
I watched a video entitled “The Surprising Secret of Synchronization” [1] by Veritasium on YouTube, and it made things click.
Here is an experiment that you can do at home:
Take three metronomes and place them on a thin platform of plastic or plywood, which is in turn supported on top 2 soda cans.
Activate each metronome – they will start out desynchronized, but will find themselves in synch, as the force exerted by their swings left and right are averaged out.
What can we learn from this for empathetic leadership?
It’s easy to empathetic when things are going well. If your company 30X’s in size and you have incredible success, it’s natural to invest in corporate services like restaurants, daycare, and very nice office supplies for all of your employees.
When things go bad it’s easy to become jaded. To cut down on costs on an Excel spreadsheet with no concern for the real people behind those numbers. Daycare seems a luxury for many, but for a single parent household it is vital.
To remind your people during good times what it took to get there and to keep the eye on the ball, which is still that same mission as it was when things were going less well. Sometimes that mission will seem incredibly quaint in hindsight.
But also to remind your people in hard times that their work is important and that the company’s wider prospects are not their fault. That they possess inherent value as people, far more important than the business itself.
Money is important. Without it, far from growing, the company will default. Beyond the soft mushy stuff that money can't buy, there's also things that you can't afford no matter your budget - things like honesty, integrity and values are easier to express by those without power or funds, than those with plenty of both.
As an empathetic leader, you are more likely to be reached out to by your people, for good feedback and bad. But also for dozens of observations which might at first glance seem immaterial. Things which "don't move the needle" (aren't captured by the econometric measures in use).
If you average out all of that input – a thing that is far less mathematical than it is qualitative – you gain insight and are able to guide your business in a direction that maps onto what your people are comfortable with. What they want to be doing. This, again, goes back to that quaint mission. The reason they came onboard to begin with.
If metronomes symbolize employees, customers and other stakeholders, the platform empathetic leadership, then the cans symbolize incentives. It’s the responsibility of the empathetic leader to leave behind them an incentive structure which helps their successor to attain the same level of success. All of us learn to be empathetic, so long as we are allowed to see the benefits which take decades to materialize.
Empathy is not the default for corporations.
A generation of successful empathetic leaders could make it so.
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