Business Crayons definition of Empathy in Business – Building Common Ground with others’ emotions
According to Psychology today, Sympathy is feeling of concern for someone else, and a desire that they become happier or better off, while Empathy involves sharing the other person’s emotions. Compassion is an empathetic understanding of a person’s feelings accompanied by altruism, or a desire to act on that person’s behalf.
“In the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It™, we call this kind of empathy Tactical Empathy™. Very simply, Tactical Empathy is the process of knowingly and intentionally influencing your counterpart’s emotions to make deals.” Chris Voss
Long before I read Chris Voss’s book, I had a heated exchange with a colleague regarding the use of Empathy as a Tactic. After a group discussion on how to be empathetic and the importance of Empathy in a negotiation, I summed up the discussion with, “so, empathy is just another tactic to use in influencing the other person to get what you want.” By their reaction you would have thought I had declared the world was flat.
In business situations, the use of Empathy is all about the giver gaining something from the person they are trying to influence. Undoubtedly you have read articles or seen posts on LinkedIn regarding the importance of empathy or being empathetic. Being Process Aware, we need to recognize when people are using Empathy as a Tactic on us, “feeling for your situation.” Remember they don’t really care about your situation, if they did, they would be showing sympathy or compassion. They are simply trying to build Common Ground with your emotions to get what they want!