Mean People Suck

How to build a culture of empathy

This article is an excerpt from my book, Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life

Your employees are unhappy and disengaged. Your leaders want their teams to do what they’re told.  This negative cycle is creating toxic work environments, negative growth, and preventing your business from launching the innovation required to win.
 

In researching my new book, “Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads To Bigger Profits and a Better Life,” I learned that most of us simply want to do jobs that we enjoy and have an impact. We want to feel like we are making a difference in our companies and in the lives of our customers and colleagues.

But something gets in the way.

Most employees think that mean people suck. They blame their job, their manager, their company for supporting a culture of abuse. They feel victimized in their careers and wish companies put more focus on the value of empathy.

Interestingly, companies who truly value empathy, and who hire, fire, and promote leaders based on that value have more engaged employees, more loyal customers, and higher stock prices. But how do we create a culture of empathy?

The University of Michigan Institute for Social Researchⁱ found that we are 40% less likely to describe ourselves as having empathy for others today than we were 40 years ago, with the steepest declines in the last 10 years. In the Journal of Patient Experienceⁱⁱ, Dr. Helen Riess talked about studies that show how medical students have less empathy for patients with each passing year of medical school and residency. This happens despite students being taught that empathy improves the patient experience and leads to faster recovery times.

Many executives think they have this covered. The State of Workplace Empathy Studyⁱⁱⁱ reports that 92% of CEOs think their companies have organizational empathy, while less than half of employees agree!

Gallup^iv has been reporting on the lack of employee engagement for years. In their latest survey, 34% of employees report being engaged in their jobs, 53% are disengaged, while 13% are actively disengaged, meaning they are actively sabotaging the objectives of their managers and the companies they work for.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and is counterintuitive to what many of us think we need to get ahead in our professional and personal lives. We learn early on to feel sadness when others get hurt, to treat others the way we want to be treated (the golden rule), that bullying is wrong. We meet firefighters, police officers, and people in armed services and learn that service to our communities is good.

We know that we should be kind but why do so many of us, especially in the business world, not display empathy for others? 

In the past 25 years, the world has been radically disrupted by digital, mobile, and social technology. Our significant others dump us over text, our bosses fire us over email, people shoot down ideas on Twitter, kids get bullied on Instagram and Snapchat, and negative comments flood platforms like YouTube.

Today, we can anonymously spew so much hate without any fear of repercussion. That wasn’t the case 25 years ago because the technology didn’t exist. It’s become the norm and we expect it because the digital world has made it easier for people to be mean.

This disconnect and lack of empathy has permeated into business. Few HR strategies address the need to build a culture of empathy to combat these disruptions. In our fast-paced, hectic office environments, we are more worried about pleasing executives than feeling for those around us.

Too many businesses and executives don’t recognize that infusing empathy into our workplace makes for a more profitable and stable business model. The State of Workplace Empathy Study finds that 42 percent of CEOs recognize the need to display more empathy but don’t know where to start.

The lack of empathy that managers have for employees and that people have for each other is a significant problem that impacts business success and life satisfaction, but it’s only half the problem. It took me a while to learn what the other half of the problem is, even though it should have been obvious.

To help answer these questions, I reflected on previous jobs and sought to figure out “why do we suck?” and why is it so hard to be kind at work?

Most of us spend significant time at work trying to please our leaders. Success means doing what you are asked to do, whether or not it is good for the company and/or delivers results.

The real problem is the org chart and the lines of authority it attempts to define - who is above us and who is below us. It misses the most important person: the customer.

A culture of empathy concerns itself with customer value, employee experience, and measurable results. Employee experience strategies deliver higher Net Promoter Scores which in turn lead to higher profits.

Work cultures and HR strategies must support caring - about customers, managers, employers, and fellow employees. Something has to break the cycle of blindly doing what we’re told by our companies or managers. 

If managers gave employees more room to serve customers’ needs, we could create more positive experiences for customers. Those customers would spend more money with our companies, our company would grow and hire more happy employees, and the virtuous cycle could begin again.

I know that the word “empathy” and the advice of “be kinder” can sound trite in our cynical world. I realize how naïve it sounds that if we follow the golden rule, others will return the favor. As a consultant, keynote speaker, and someone who has had 53 jobs, I have found that this message is the foundation for my success and of those I have studied.

Some might call empathy by other names like customer experience or employee engagement. Companies talk about the bigger problem without addressing the underlying cultural problem they need to fix in order to achieve business growth - employees and customers want improved experiences and a company and managers who care about them.

When we improve those experiences, it directly translates into increased revenue that every CEO desires. Telling a CEO that he or she needs more empathy may not go well. I’ve tried. I once told a room full of CMOs that building a culture of empathy was their number one job, and one of the CMOs remarked that she had too many things to do to make culture important.

Building a culture of empathy is about how we feel and perform at work. Leaders who create a more desirable work environment while treating their employees with respect will see the growth that they want to achieve.

We’re all customers and we ultimately want to support brands and businesses that share our values and care about employees, the environment, and their impact. 

Through a culture of empathy, we can push back against the status quo and the work environments that make us feel disconnected. Developing a culture of empathy isn’t some hippie, new-age notion of employees feeling better at work. It’s about finding meaning in the everyday tasks we perform. It’s about attaching ourselves to a vision of something bigger. It’s about delivering real innovation and impact that we can be proud of. Isn’t that something that every business leader and working professional wants to accomplish?

We can transform our lives, our work environments, and even our company culture into something better, no matter where we sit in the org chart. I know it’s not easy. I’m honored that readers are willing to take this journey with me. I hope that readers get one thing from this book that can help and be shared with others: mean people suck, and life’s too short to be miserable!

Notes

Michael Brenner has been recognized as a Forbes top CMO influencer, a Top Business Keynote Speaker by the Huffington Post and a Top Motivational Speaker by Entrepreneur. He is CEO of Marketing Insider Group, where he has worked with more than 75 brands in building effective content marketing and employee activation programs. Michael is the best-selling author of 3 books including Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life, The Content Formula, and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks.  Visit https://meanpeoplesuck.com/ Connect Michael Brenner Follow @BrennerMichael