Fascinating Work Empathy Tactics That Can Help Your Business and Work Grow

While working in a team with many different people, you might have witnessed the cross conflict in which even if you are right, you need to do what others say. Here others can be your boss/colleague/juniors.

While reading the book “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss, I learned a very good method on Tactical Empathy.

Team discussion and collaboration are part of teamwork. When everyone agrees on the same goal and pursues the same makes a great team. But when there is teamwork there is a scope of conflicts, and that conflict might be tiny or very heated. And when you find yourself in such a situation, and if you don’t want to be the guy who accepts just everything even that is not right, there comes negotiation.

In conflict, there is always one side that emerges as aggressive. If one side wins that means another side is defeated, but negotiation makes it a win-win for all sides. In a win-win, there is nothing to lose but makes everyone happy.

Empathy means being aware other side’s perspective and using that awareness for us to negotiate the situation.

For example, I will create a dummy scenario to explain this tactic.

Scenario: 2 parties working together to achieve the same goal → “Site launch of the customer”. Here 2 parties are the main development team that creates the site, one content team which prepares the content of the site.

The content team works with the client to prepare proper and good content to put on the site. The content team one day provides some data to upload on the server. Though content is prepared by the content team in collaboration with the client, it was not the scope of the development team to validate the content.

After applying changes to the server, the client noticed some abnormalities in the site and reported that the latest changes affected the site badly. Now, there is always an internal discussion with the team (development team) about reason and how to avoid it next time.

Here starts the real deal: The manager (of the development team), who is always bullied and aggressive on everyone. Indeed, the manager asks the right question to the team, “how to avoid such a situation next time?”. But any answer does not matter to him, as he has already decided the answer and next steps.

The manager: OK team, what is the actual root cause of the issue client reported?

Team: The issue is related to the content which was uploaded yesterday.

The manager: Why do we upload the content? Shouldn’t we pay attention to what are doing?

Team: well, as per terms of work, we will only facilitate content provided by the content team. It is the content team’s responsibility to make sure to have proper content and they need to be verified with the client before providing it to us.

The manager: Ok, ok. Now, what should be the next step? How should we avoid such a situation?

Team: There are some options to deal with such a situation.

Give some testing environment to the content team, where they can apply such changes and they can evaluate if there are any issues.

Permit the content team for applying changes directly on the main server.

We start validating content before applying it on the server.

The manager: well, what do you think I discuss with all parties when the project starts? You are saying that what I’m dealing with is wrong? How can you even suggest this? I know what was the deal when the project was signed.

Note that, here the manager is now going out of the line and got an ego problem. There are 2 options to deal with this:

Leave: Just avoid conflict and leave. Tell the manager that ok,

Play fire with fire: Tell the manager “if you don’t want to listen, why are you even asking me?”

But there can be a 3rd option, negotiation by using Empathy. In which you are not leaving or playing fire and it is not the form of butter polish.

Team: Hi manager, I know you are in a tough position and want to resolve this issue soon as possible. I understand your situation and I’m total with you on this. I tried to find some possible ways and only these 3 are the possible options that I can think of, which can resolve from next time. If you are ok, we should put this to the client and see what is their stand. What do you say?

The manager: Yeah, ok. Let’s ask this client and see what they say.

Here, what just happen is called Empathy. In this, you are not agreeing blindly with what the manager says and you are not being aggressive on what you are thinking. Here you are leveraging the situation of the manager to explain your point.

Isn’t this a win-win?

Originally published on Medium.com