Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  At Sub Rosa, we talk about this as brand “indigeneity.” We have certain words and phrases we have used for years, and they are aligned and consistent with the business we’ve built. The archetypes are a perfect example of this. We use them as a sort of shibboleth, a shorthand inside language that is unique to us. To us, they’re part of our canon.

  We also have traditions that keep us focused on what really matters. One of those traditions is something we call our “fresh eyes” meeting. Every few months we gather all of the newest people to the Sub Rosa family for a roundtable conversation with a few of the senior leaders in the company. We call the session “fresh eyes” because the new employees still have the benefit of some objectivity, some external perspective on things. That perspective doesn’t last forever, so we take this opportunity to ask them what they see that we do well, what we could do better, what’s confusing, and what’s refreshing. Who knows? We might be overlooking something important such as the check-writing-every-other-Tuesday example. It’s a great tradition we’ve developed that continues to give us a fresh view on our business.

  Before you can manifest your company’s purpose, you need to know what it is, and it needs to be uniformly understood across the company. For years, we have been consistent in our language and our purpose, and every member of our team internalizes them and brings them forth in their work. In its simplest form, Sub Rosa helps companies explore, learn, and grow with empathy. This is our root structure, our foundation. It’s that strong connection to our origins that creates a powerful path to understanding where we’ve come from and, ultimately, how we’ll arrive at our next destination.

  CHAPTER FIVE EXERCISES

  Connecting to Your Roots

  This exercise will help you use this chapter’s four-part framework to unearth the powerful elements of a company’s early beginnings. They will serve as provocations for articulating what is most indigenous and valuable within your own organization and establishing a strong foundation from which to grow and evolve.

  Origin Story

  A first step is to commit your company’s origin story to written form. If you’re the founder of the company, you’ve got a head start because you probably are a big part of the story. But only a few of us are founders, so if you aren’t one, you need to seek that person out, along with other team members who were there during the early days. Remember, you are looking not just for who did what but primarily why the company was started and what drove the founder(s) to bring it to life.

  If the founder(s) are not available to you, a good place to start is early documents, such as bylaws, mission statements, letters to the staff, and so on. Treat this exercise like a scavenger hunt for the company’s early artifacts. Talk to retired or early-stage team members. Hunt down press articles about the company. Use your empathic, intuitive skills to get into the mind of the founder(s) and develop a sense of the most important aspects of the business; look for the ones that still serve the company and its mission today.

  Language

  Is there an internal lexicon that the company uses, formally or informally? Do team members speak in a code of acronyms and phrases that are unique to the business? If so, ask yourself why that is and delve into the meaning behind those phrases or terms.

  It’s likely that the language was established while the company was defining what it is (and is not), and decoding it will reveal more than just meanings of words and phrases. Levi’s has talked about pioneers since the Gold Rush, but the term has evolved over time. Today it doesn’t refer to the same people as it did more than 150 years ago, but it captures the same idea. What words like this are ingrained in your company’s essence, and how can you make them relevant to today’s world?

  You may find some common “inside baseball” language that isn’t connected to the past but has taken root more recently as a result of new leadership or direction. It is also helpful to understand these terms as an insight into the values of the company’s culture.

  Traditions

  For this exercise, start by documenting two to three of your team’s or organization’s traditions, being sure to include the details of their origins, why the company continues to do them, and what they add to the overall culture of the business.

  Next, take a moment to identify your team’s or business’s current pain points. For instance, what do you unnecessarily endure or struggle with on a regular basis?

  Now consider if there is any connection between the traditions you identified and the pain points. Are some traditions actually causing pain in the current business? Are the traditions oblivious to the issues? Or perhaps the traditions could be used better—directing them at the issues you identified to help cure them. Take a moment to outline your thoughts on this topic, and see if an opportunity emerges to use traditions in a new way.

  In addition, it’s entirely acceptable for companies to create new traditions based on the direction the company is going in. Ask yourself what sort of new traditions might be created to help change circumstances for the better. Consider some of these thought-starters:

  • Should the tradition be designed to add to or subtract from the issue? For example, if you have too many pointless meetings, you might consider a monthly tradition of evaluating and editing down all current meetings.

  • Should the tradition be based on your newfound origin story? Could an aspect of the company’s history be reignited in the hearts and minds of the current team?

  • Should the tradition work with your internal team, or would you be better served by creating a tradition that includes an external party? Consider inviting your customers or clients into the new tradition to help broaden participants’ perspectives.

  Purpose

  The exercises in chapter 3 included a way of using the Aspirational Self to establish and understand your own raison d’être, or purpose. Let’s now pull out to a wider perspective, no longer considering just yourself but the whole team or organization.

  Conduct the same exercise, mapping information into the Venn diagram on the next page and see what you place at the center. This process helps to illuminate the primary purpose of your team or organization and will ultimately aid in making more focused, informed decisions aligned to your overall reason for being.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Our Role in Context

  In 2017, my phone’s caller ID lit up: “US Government.” Immediately I flashed back to every remotely dubious act I’ve ever committed. Was I sure I’d paid that speeding ticket in New Mexico? Had my college pot dealer’s cell phone been seized? I couldn’t imagine why the government was calling me.

  Cautiously I picked up and was greeted by a pleasant-sounding man who introduced himself. “Hi, Michael, this is Captain Bokmeyer from the United States Military Academy at West Point.”

  A sigh of relief—I wasn’t going to jail (yet).

  Captain Justin Bokmeyer was an avid listener to our Applied Empathy podcast, a monthly series we had been producing for a little more than a year. He was hoping that Sub Rosa could come to West Point to work with some senior cadets, the coaches in the athletics department, and, if that went well, the generals who run the academy. He wanted us to talk about our philosophy on empathy and help some of the West Point instructors find ways to incorporate it into their training programs.

  That was kind of mind blowing. West Point wanted us to help it become more empathic? Perhaps it was narrow-minded of me, but I had never imagined that the military would have a strong desire or demand for empathy. It was too cool an opportunity to pass up. I told Captain Bokmeyer to count us in, and we set a date for a few weeks later.

  We do this sort of training often, but typically the audience is more “corporate” or “design” focused. I knew I had better give some thought to how the groups at West Point might hear what we have to say. Would they be skeptical? Would they think applied empathy sounded too “soft” and emotional? I’ll admit I even had a brief crisis of confidence when I pictured myself in a r
oom full of military personnel talking about “Sages” and “Seekers.” I wondered if I should make changes to my usual presentation, altering some of our language to sound less mystical, but the material had already won over plenty of tough-minded CEOs, so I kept it as is.

  EMPATHY ARRIVES AT WEST POINT

  A month later, as I drove through the springtime bloom of trees along New Jersey’s Palisades Parkway, I was nervous again. I wasn’t worried about my material, but this particular assignment had extra significance for me. I have great admiration and respect for the men and women of our armed services. They have chosen a life of service to protect our rights and freedoms, allowing me to live my life talking about branding, practicing indigenous medicine, and writing books. I take what they do seriously, and if this was an opportunity for me to give something back to them, I wanted to do a really good job.

  Arriving at the gate, I saw military police checking identification and inspecting vehicles, and that’s when another pang of anxiety shot through me. Maybe I was a smuggler in a past life, because inspections like that always send me into a state of fight or flight. After a quick chat with the stone-jawed officer, I was waved through to visitor parking, where I met Captain Bokmeyer and was immediately put at ease by his warm smile and crisp handshake.

  His hair was cut short, his eyes focused, and his posture like a board. “Great to meet you, sir,” he said confidently. When we’d spoken on the phone, I had already said he didn’t need to call me “sir,” but I guess old habits die hard. He said we would first head to the athletic facilities, where we would begin empathy training for the coaching staff. It was 7:30 a.m., and the campus was already alive and in motion.

  Driving across the historic campus, we passed cadets going through their morning drills while I focused on how I was going to connect empathically with the West Point coaches by putting myself into their shoes. I thought back to the coaches I’d had when I was growing up. Sports were a huge part of my life. I went from basketball to hockey to baseball to pickup games or simply skateboarding around town. My supportive parents, driving me to and from practices, scrimmages, and tournaments—they must have felt as though it were a part-time job.

  COACHING EMPATHY

  Playing so many sports, I learned early on that some coaches were better than others. But to be fair, that was also true of my own athletic abilities. I quickly took to some sports, such as basketball and track and field, while others, such as soccer and baseball, seemed to have been designed to highlight my lack of coordination. Still I persevered, and many times I discovered that it was the coach who made all the difference in whether or not I improved.

  I had coaches who barked orders from the sidelines, their faces red while they screamed at preteens as if we were training for the Olympics. I had phone-it-in coaches who ran us through some drills and then collected their paycheck. They had little interest in the win-loss column and were more concerned with not being hassled by parents who wanted to know why their kids weren’t playing enough or why practice started late. I also had my own dad, who loved sports and always volunteered to coach whatever youth team I was on. That was a great experience for both of us, but as I grew up and started to play more competitively, he (begrudgingly) moved to the sidelines. In retrospect, I think what I was observing with the best of my coaches was a sense of empathy. But I hadn’t seen anything until I met Coach Harry.

  In high school, I was a lanky six-foot-tall freshman when I went out for the basketball team, led by Coach Harry. He had something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Some of my teammates got a stern talking-to when they passed the ball sloppily; others were praised when they did something right. His technique with me was different: he pulled me aside and demonstrated, calmly and without condescension, how I could change my footwork to give me a better position on the court or how I could alter the angle of my elbow to improve my shooting. I didn’t have the word for it at the time, but what Coach Harry was teaching me—aside from how to hit a ten-foot jump shot—was empathy.

  He understood each player’s makeup and knew how to adjust his coaching style in ways that would get the most out of all of us. The best coaches, like the best leaders, use empathy to do their job well. They know which players thrive on discipline and which ones need more gentle mentorship. Some of this is intuitive, but I believe they learn it by testing which approach gives them the best results with different kinds of people. I hadn’t thought about that for more than two decades, but as we drove across the West Point campus, these memories flooded back and helped give me the confidence to walk into a room filled with fifty accomplished career athletic coaches.

  Whether they knew it or not, empathy was already a big part of their coaching arsenal. No professional, college-level coach can get that far without having some empathy up his or her sleeve. My job was to help them realize that and to help them connect to it more deeply. We began by discussing the tensions that arise and how empathy can help a coach get through them. I always find it helpful to lay those out early in the conversation so that people recognize that working with empathy will bring out certain challenges. It’s a normal part of the process, and my doing this helps people become comfortable enough to proceed.

  I then described the Empathic Archetypes. We talked about each one, and I asked the coaches to examine their strengths and weaknesses across each of the seven archetypes. Heads were nodding in the crowd, and many of them took voluminous notes.

  One of the coaches asked, “Are you saying we need to pick one of these archetypes and focus only on that as a coaching style?” This was a great opportunity to highlight the flexibility of using the archetypes, and I began by explaining that actually, it’s quite the opposite; we want to raise our awareness of all of the different archetypes, recognizing that having a broader array from which to choose helps us get the most out of each person on the team. The coaches liked hearing that because it reinforced something they already intuitively knew: that every player is different and good coaching depends on being able to pivot from one style in order to get the most out of all of them. I gave Coach Harry a little mental fist bump for helping set me up for that conversation.

  I walked through a few case studies, showing how we at Sub Rosa put empathy into action. Then I opened the room for some conversation. I recall a comment from the head football coach. Army football has a long and lasting legacy throughout all of college sports, so I knew that being the head coach at West Point is a big deal. He said, “Coaching is based on instinct and an understanding of the talents and mind-sets of our athletes. Even though we are in a very command-and-control military environment, we as coaches need to remember that we’ll get the most out of our players when we approach each of them with a sense of empathy for how they are best motivated.” This felt like a huge win for the approach we’ve been developing over the years.

  BASIC (EMPATHY) TRAINING

  Later that day I met with several different groups of cadets and ran through a similar series of workshops. When West Point cadets graduate, many of them are deployed as officers in the US Army and immediately made responsible for leading forty soldiers who themselves are just barely out of their teenage years. That’s forty lives they must direct and protect. I don’t know about you, but I had a hard enough time keeping myself out of trouble at that age. The cadets I saw at West Point believed that understanding how to apply empathy would be useful to them in the next phase of their journey.

  We had just begun using the Q&E cards a few months earlier at training sessions to help people “limber up” their empathic muscles, and I had a feeling they would also help the cadets get their minds ready to think more empathically.

  Soon after we passed out the cards, I could see the cadets beginning to identify which archetypes matched with their empathic strengths and weaknesses. The conversations among them were about improvements they could make, and they went the next step of drawing cards that corresponded to their least comfortable archetypes and figuring out how they
could boost their skills in those areas. As soldiers, they took naturally to training and development, and they dealt with the archetypes easily. After just a few hours, those bright, talented young leaders had begun to make empathy a part of their tool kit. It was an honor to play a role in bringing a new skill to those soldiers at that critical time in their development.

  A few days later, Captain Bokmeyer called again. I was beginning to like seeing “US Government” show up on my caller ID. He wanted me to come back, this time to work with the generals of West Point. Soon I found myself in a room full of laser-focused, clear-eyed career military officers. “This is going to be a tough room,” I thought. Not only was my material a little “new age,” but I seriously stood out with my beard and long hair. Still I soldiered on and was happy to discover that they were genuinely interested in delving into empathy training.

  We talked about the tensions that arise when we engage with empathy, the Empathic Archetypes, and a few case studies; the same as I had shared with the other groups. Then I distributed the Q&E cards and asked the generals to pair off and ask each other some questions from archetypes they perceived to be strengths and some they felt were potential weaknesses.

  Just as the cadets had immediately connected with the Q&E cards, the generals instinctively knew what to do with them. The decks were quickly divvied up, and the generals broke into pairs to start their conversations.

  When the cards are being used, I pay attention to the overall changes in the room. Is the volume getting louder as people engage? Are people smiling? Are they gesticulating? Has the energy gotten lighter? In that case, all of the above happened. I was seeing hardened military generals cracking jokes, in some cases, and leaning in to have heart-to-hearts, in others. No matter how many times I’ve done trainings like this, it still excites me to see the power of empathy at work.