Empathy and accountability
Empathy and accountability can help us make it through crises and come out the other side.
When COVID-19 pandemic started thrusting its way into our lives, it really changed the way we could stay connected to each other. When we could no longer meet at cafes and pubs and have conversations over a hot or cold drink most of our social and work life started to happen on screens and through headphones. Many things have gone virtual – virtual coffee time, virtual art bites, virtual galleries, virtual everything.
Well, in all honesty, I think this virtual space hasn’t been too bad for me personally. I mean apart from being able to socialise in my pyjamas, as long as I’ve had a nice top on, I’ve actually grown my network. I get to meet people who live miles away just with a click of a button. Would I have preferred to meet those beautiful humans in a little quirky cafe instead of my rectangular screen? Of course, I would, but the Zoom links in my calendar seem to be doing just about all right. It’s great to be able to still connect with people and have great conversations but it sometimes feels that a level of conversational nuance and empathy gets lost in the virtual space. There’s so much that can’t happen online but does it necessarily need to be a negative experience?
We all feel doubt, uncertainty, excitement, hope and all other basic human feelings but we seem to have developed great skills at hiding all these feelings behind the screens. I think we can do a better job at relating to each other. Perhaps we should be more intentional in revealing more of ourselves and not be afraid of showing our vulnerabilities. We also need to make an effort to learn more about the people we are connecting with.
At a Virgin StartUp Digital MeetUp, Richard Brandson asked Simon Sinek what problem he would solve if he wanted to start a business right now? His answer was very timely – he said he would like to solve how we relate to each other. “We’re living in a time when we’re more judgemental, we’re very bad at listening, we think everything is black and white … There are a lot of human skills that are missing. We need to learn empathy, we need to learn how to give and receive feedback”.
And it doesn’t end there. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking “I want to be awful today”. When we understand what people want or need to do better, we certainly need to take action and DO something meaningful to help change the situation. Empathy is “Oh I understand now”, accountability is “OK now let’s work together to solve the problem and make things happen.” Empathy and accountability interact with each other to make real changes happen – we really need to take ownership of the situations, take on challenges, fail and learn from mistakes and find solutions.
Empathy without accountability is a recipe for chaos and disaster. It creates a totally wrong sense of what’s acceptable and what’s not. What we really need is a high-accountability, high-empathy culture. The right balance creates a space where we feel valued and heard so we can develop a shared sense of mission, a common purpose. It helps build relationships on mutual trust and respect that contributes to superior results and of course happier humans.
We need to consider both accountability and empathy to get things done properly and perhaps make a few friends along the way.
