When I was a young leader, I prided myself on being able to build strong teams. I understood the principles of a strong team mission and vision, ongoing communication, and accountability. What I did not understand was the power of empathy. I learned that from a member of my team — let’s call her Eve — as we prepared to execute a large event for which she was the leader.
How I Learned About Empathy While Leading a Team
We were having our weekly team meeting and, when she gave her report, it was clear that she was stressed about the upcoming event and the amount of work that remained. I recalled the same scenario the previous year. Although that event was successful, we would have created a much stronger end product together if we had addressed many small issues along the way. I was not going to let those kinds of issues happen again. My solution was to involve more people in the final weeks before we executed the event.
Immediately, I gathered the team together and asked who could help Eve. I assigned everyone on the team additional duties and adjourned the meeting thinking that I had accomplished three important things: I helped Eve, I gave other team members a chance to learn new skills, and I ensured a very successful event.
Yet, over the next week, I noticed that Eve was avoiding me. She also seemed depressed, so I pulled her aside and asked what was wrong. She looked at me, mustered her courage, and said, “Did you think so little of me that you gave my work to others to do in order to ensure success?
I was shocked by her reaction. As we continued talking, I realized that, throughout our meetings during the year, she had been outlining scheduling problems that were wreaking havoc with event planning. She had described these problems as originating from other staff members not meeting deadlines.
I was sympathetic — that is, I could relate to her problems from my point of view. I, too, had dealt with people who had not met important deadlines, thus hindering my ability to deliver effectively.
But had I been empathetic — that is, had I metaphorically climbed into her shoes and experienced the problems the way she was seeing them — I would have understood that the problem was not really with Eve or the other staff members, but with the planning schedule itself. I spent more time listening to Eve, cataloguing the issues and when and with whom they occurred. I then listened to the other staff members who had missed important deadlines and grew to understand their issues and concerns.
My aha moment came when I understood that given the way our processes and timelines were configured, we had doomed staff members to failure. Employing some design thinking, we sharpened our organizational focus and redesigned underlying processes and timelines. Both productivity and morale improved as a result.
How Empathy Fits into Google’s Recent Study on Teams
While reading a recent New York Times article called “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” I was reminded of the value of empathy. The article takes the reader through Google’s Aristotle Project, which sought to determine why some teams are so effective while others stumble. The Google team found that the most effective teams shared two behaviors:
- Team members speak in roughly the same proportion, which the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” What’s particularly noteworthy: Researchers found that the collective intelligence of the group declined when only one person or a small group spoke.
- Effective teams had high social sensitivity. That is, “they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues.
In illustrating the principles of an effective team, the New York Times article describes the operational workings of two different teams in Google’s Aristotle Project. Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. The leader works to keep the agenda on track, cutting people off when they take the group off course. This team is efficient, with no idle chitchat or long debates. The team begins and ends its meeting at the scheduled time.
Most of us have been trained to believe that this model makes for the most effective teams.
Team B is made up of top executives and middle managers. Teammates jump in and out of discussions and, when a team member changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him or her off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, people stay and continue to talk about their lives.
Likewise, many of us have been trained to believe that this is a model of an ineffective team.
In studying the effectiveness of both teams, Google found that although Team A was optimized for peak efficiency, the group’s norms discouraged equal speaking. The takeaway from this study was that Team A would continue to act like individuals once they come together. Moreover, there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they would become more collectively intelligent.
Indeed, this collective intelligence is what makes teams most effective.
Seven Practices to Bring Empathy into School Governance
After reading the piece, I immediately began thinking about boards of trustees and the role of empathy in effective governance. When we build a board, we consider needed skills and abilities. However, we don’t pay equal attention to the behaviors and norms that will create a high-functioning board.
I believe the Google study gives us some important clues as to how we can bring empathy to bear in improving governance:
1. Choose board members for their passion for the school’s mission. Often we look only at the skills that board members bring to the table. This is important, but without that deep caring about the school’s mission, it is difficult to build those personal connections that will make the board collectively effective.
2. Pay attention to how you onboard new trustees. As you recruit new trustees, take time to interview them and listen to what they have to say. Ask questions such as:
- How can we make the most of the talents and abilities you bring to the board?
- If this was a year from now and we looked back upon the board’s work, how would you define success?
Onboarding new trustees from their perspective will help to infuse that perspective into board work.
3. Build a diverse board. Like Google’s Team B, diverse boards bring different perspectives, providing the ability to view circumstances through many different lenses.
4. Select a board chair with high levels of emotional intelligence. We select board chairs based on their observed leadership ability and their commitment to the school — hugely important attributes — but do we also consider emotional intelligence, an important attribute of leadership? Emotionally intelligent leaders are infused with the gift of empathy. That empathetic leadership will set the stage for how other board members should interact.
5. Define the role of the executive committee to support, not overstep. In this fast-paced world, an executive committee can be important in making needed decisions quickly at times when it is hard to convene the entire board. Yet if the committee’s role is not handled carefully, it can lead to disenfranchising other board members.
As one leader put it, “Other board members resent that an in-group knows more than they do; all decisions appear to be cooked at the executive committee before the board gets them. The other board members feel like second-class citizens."
Define the role of the executive committee and involve the entire board in discussing that role. When the executive committee has to step in to take quick action, ensure that you clearly communicate all facts to other board members.
6. Build assessment into every board meeting, and pay special attention to feedback from new trustees. At the end of every board meeting, take time to ask every board member to informally evaluate the effectiveness of the board meeting: what went well, what needs work, how well the board took advantage of individual trustee strengths, etc.
7. Build trust among the entire board. If you want to have a board in which everyone feels free to speak or voice a different point of view, then you need a foundation of trust. Here are a few principles to follow:
- Time – Relationships take time; working and simply kicking back together can form the foundation of a trusting relationship.
- Transparency – Adhere to the doctrine of no surprises; the head and the board need to continually share information to form the bonds of a trusting relationship.
- Communication – Without communication, systems usually break. It’s what we share with each other, how we share it, and how often we share it that build trust and empathy.
How Everyone in an Organization Thrives
When it comes to governing and leading teams, we are all on an endless learning curve. I often think about the lesson I learned from Eve and how it continues to help me grow as a leader. Recently, I read The Empathy Factor, and one line from the book encapsulated the key learning for me: “The main reason organizations that try to manage change fail is their tendency to treat human systems as though they were mechanical processes."
We are all human. When we work from a place of understanding, we thrive, and our work prospers.
