Empathy: Four Action Steps that help you Win by Guest Author
Commanders on their walkie-talkies spoke the local dialect as they coordinated the attack.
We had just fought the deadliest battle to date. We kept winning each time, but the attacks kept getting bigger.
Things did not add up.
We were supposed to be fighting terrorists who crossed the border into Afghanistan.
We’d been watching the border for large flows of fighters. We did not detect any.
The attacks seemed to come outside the planting and harvesting times.
The local elders who met with us were close associates of government officials. They also seemed very young.
It dawned on us that everything we had assumed about the situation in that part of Afghanistan was wrong.
We were not fighting an external terrorist group.
We were fighting a local insurrection.
Ninety-five percent of the people who we thought we were helping were trying to kill us.
The more fighting that took place, the more they could recruit.
Unless something changed, we would remain in a cycle of violence for the next year.
Empathy is the ability to see a situation from someone else’s point of view. It’s different than sympathy. You do not need to agree with the other person or take on the same emotions. As a leader, you need to understand other people’s points of view and the implications so that you can learn and adapt successfully. It’s an essential leadership quality.
The consequences were deadly if we did not understand why people were fighting us. We were in Afghanistan to prevent terrorist groups from using the country as a platform to attack the United States again. That meant helping to rebuild a country that, in 2007, had been at war for nearly thirty years.
We’d been told that the violence was coming from terrorists that infiltrated from neighboring Pakistan.
Figuring out that those reports were false was like a Copernican moment for us. Suddenly, so many contradictions and inconsistencies fell away. We were no longer trying to understand a dynamic and deadly situation using a flawed mental model.
Why did people we were trying to help want to kill us?
We learned that there had been a lot of civilian casualties in the area before we arrived. I understood why that might motivate people to fight back. I would if some foreign army came into my neighborhood and killed or wounded my family and friends.
What was disturbing is that local officials and their friends manipulated intelligence to settle scores with their rivals. They would report to American forces that a particular competitor was a terrorist. After enough reports, these forces took action, unwittingly, against people who had done nothing wrong.
In the minds of the people, these civilian-casualty-causing raids were unjustified. One of the targets was a locally famous leader who successfully took on the Soviets and their Afghan allies in the 1980s. When he decided to fight back, most of the people in the area joined him.
The more we began to understand this problem and others that motivated people to fight against us, the more we could see that their reasons were mostly practical rather than ideological.
By refraining from actions that incited anger, lessening the harm done, and building trust, we might find sufficient common ground to stop the cycle of violence, even cooperate.
The standard for success in empathy was for us to be able to explain their point of view on an issue so well that they would say, “Yes, that’s exactly right.”
Reaching that level of empathy was challenging among people of a very different culture and language, but we did our best.
Those efforts rubbed off on local Afghans, who began trying to understand our point of view.
Empathy helped us build a bridge and begin to cooperate. We started with small measures and worked towards larger ones.
After about six months of trust-building and cooperation, the local elders felt strong enough to approach the insurgent leader. They asked him to give the relationship a chance because it was benefitting the poverty-stricken people.
He agreed.
Levels of violence reduced by about ninety percent. The insurgent leader later reconciled with the government. He and his group have been fighting the Taliban ever since. It is the only outcome like it in the twenty-year history of the war.
I’ve met my former adversary ten times in return trips to Afghanistan. When I asked him what made the difference, he mentioned many examples of trust and cooperation with the villages.
Empathy made a difference.
How does this story relate to leadership in businesses and nonprofits? Here are four action steps that will help you attract and retain customers, boost productivity, and outsmart your competitors.
- Speak customer language about their outcomes and aspirations. To do that, you need to understand their point of view so well that you are reflecting their dreams to them. Once people know that you help them get the results they want, you will gain and retain loyal customers.
- Understand your employees’ points of view. Empathy will help you build consensus and gain buy-in for your policies, values, and tough decisions. You will have better engagement, productivity, and retention.
- Learn each employee’s natural strengths (aka Superpowers) so that you can customize their roles. People who use their natural inclinations each day are 2X to 3X more productive than their peers. Our servant-leader archetype quizhelps you to identify these superpowers.
- See yourself from your competitor’s point of view. Where are potential vulnerabilities in your marketplace that they might exploit? Empathy will help you identify essential shifts in the market so that you can act quickly and anticipate your competitor’s moves.
Christopher D. Kolenda is the founder of the Strategic Leaders Academy. Once you are ready to put these action steps in place, our empathy maps will help you create game-plans so that you can achieve these outcomes. Contact Chris at chris@strategicleadersacademy.com.
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