on the importance of empathy

Burt Bacharach famously sang, “What the world needs now / Is love, sweet love”; The Beatles equally touted the message, “All you need is love”. Both are arguably positive messages, but they’re not correct.

Even particularly maladjusted and otherwise unpleasant people can, by all accounts, love. After all, Hitler, an odiously evil man purportedly loved his girlfriend and last minute wife, Eva Braun.

Love is personal, is intimate, and can supposedly co-exist with evil or otherwise repellent behavioural traits.

Empathy is more important. Empathy is what allows us to build societies. Unlike love, empathy is about being able to understand, and perhaps even share in the feelings of other people – regardless of any relationship with them. Empathy creates connection between people of entirely different cultures and backgrounds.

Fascists have been increasingly arguing that empathy is some form of weakness. If it were not for their other more reprehensible behaviours and beliefs, this would be a pitiable state; instead, it might be argued that it is their lack of empathy that stokes the fires of their bigotry and hatred. Regardless of cause and effect, their lack of empathy makes them sad, scared and selfish individuals that pose a genuine risk to society. (In this day and age, I would invite everyone to become urgently familiar with the paradox of tolerance.)

the importance of empathy Credit: Bigstock.

Stepping away from references to politics, empathy is such a critically important trait that the success or failure (either financially, or as an impact to society) of modern IT is fundamentally wrapped up in the level of empathy that a product or even a company embodies.

User Experience (UX) is derived from empathy. What do the users — people we may not particularly know — want and need? What are their motivators and their pain points? Failing to empathise with users leads to brutalist user experiences that may essentially present a solution, but typically in a way that does not leave the user satisfied.

Software development works best when it has empathy in the driver’s seat. Empathy is a primary motivator for developers wanting to do better than just good enough; sure, artistic pride comes into play (and anyone who tries to tell you that software development isn’t a creative art form is deluding themselves) – but it is empathy, acknowledged or otherwise, that will drive software developers to the best results: the most robust code, because they can understand that users want reliable products, and the most efficient code, because they understand that users can’t just hardware-upgrade their way out of performance problems.

Empathy is the driving motivator for good product management. Sure, there are business motivators for good products – revenue, total addressable market, and so on. But every product manager derives successful user engagement via products that are built with empathy for the needs of the users.

The entire sales process works best when supported by empathy. Simon Sinek encapsulates this with Start with Why, since empathy is what allows us to connect the why of the customer to the why of the business. Sales people/account managers exist to create personal connections with buyers, and those personal connections are formed from empathy. That empathy evolves from a shared like for sportsball, parenthood, music, food – or any number of things; but it evolves from people being able to understand and connect to one another. Good sellers empathise and create empathy. Likewise, empathy is critical for sales engineering, too. A sales engineer should be a wealth of knowledge that can be relied on by customers, but knowledge doesn’t create connection; it’s being able to connect that knowledge to the needs of the customer.

Not just all the above, either: Customer support. Professional services. Consulting. You name it. Every single aspect of modern IT can be done without empathy. But in every scenario that lack of empathy will drive poor experience, bad reputations, and drive away repeat business. Empathy is what brings customers back. Empathy is what drives the greatest shared successes. Empathy creates true strength within business and IT.

We must not lose sight of that.

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