Hi Reader,

Last week we left off on this "empathy" thread. I mentioned how, in my experience, encouraging my teammates to respond with empathy seems to have produced only more-frequent apologies.

"I'm so sorry to hear you're having issues."

"Really sorry about that."

"I'm very sorry about such-and-such."

"I'm so sorry to hear that blahblahblah."

And that's what it feels like to me. Just blahblahblah.

Empathy is NOT blahblahblah. Wouldn't you agree?

During the week, I got one message from a reader that elaborated on this. They said that, for them, the most annoying thing is to have to get through "a litany of polite phrases telling me how they're going to be so happy to help me, etc. I'm very much a 'let's just get to the point' sort of person."

Right, so there's this attempt to appear empathetic, but the actual result is the opposite of empathy. If I were being empathetic, as soon as I got a whiff that the person I was helping was a "'let's just get to the point' sort of person," then empathy would dictate that I get to the point, even if—no, especially if—I wanted to spend a bunch of time saying all the "polite" things.

Ah, that's it! The current status quo confuses empathy with politeness.

So, here's the truly difficult question this email series is aimed at answering: since empathy is something customers want, and since training for empathy gets us politeness rather than actual empathy, how do we jolt ordinary socially- and culturally-conditioned people (i.e. all of us) out of politeness and into true empathy?

Now, here's where we get into my bread-and-butter! Because to answer this question, we can't just look at behavior. And we can't merely look at language. And we can't even only look at the technical problem being presented. We have to look at the people involved in the interaction—at BOTH of them, AS PEOPLE.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that the surface-level interaction that's happening, which both parties might express as I-have-a-problem-you-can-solve (to be clear, BOTH people have this exact same problem: the customer has a problem the tech person can solve technically; and the tech person has a problem the customer can solve by going away), is a reflection of a deeper human interaction.

I see that might not have been clear, and this does feel like a difficult distinction to make. I'll say it another way: in this standing example of an interaction between a customer and a tech support agent, we usually look at the customer as if they have a problem, and the tech support agent as if they're responsible for providing a solution. I'm trying to acknowledge that perspective as well as offer a different one that is also true, and I think true on a deeper human level. Yes, the customer has a problem. A technical problem. AND the customer is a problem. A problem for the tech support person.

This is also true for the tech support person. They have a problem: the customer taking up their time when they could be doing other stuff. And they are a problem: they're a busy, slow, distracted, mistake-prone, self-obsessed, mortal human being who is far from the ideal sort of being you would want to solve a technical issue.

I'm trying to drill down to an expression of this shared problem/solution relationship that I can express simply. I think it's a little easier to see it from this second perspective, but let's take the leap because we're running out of time and words.

Here's how I'll express the shared problem both these people have—as people—that's driving their behavior whether or not they're aware of it:

I'm suffering and alone and I don't know what to do.

Whuf. Writing that hit me hard. How about you?

Besides being hard-hitting, this is where the conversation starts to get really interesting. More next week.