Guest Blog by Tom Porter, author: “All I Need to Know About Business I Learned from a Duck”

  

Nature

In the November 2009 issue of Biology Letters, Dr. Karen McComb, a UK expert on animal communication and cognition provided the first hard evidence to support stories of elephant mourning.  “Most mammals show only passing interest in the dead remains of their own or other species.  In comparison, African elephants are reported not only to exhibit unusual behaviors on encountering the bodies of dead con-specifics, becoming highly agitated and investigating them with the truck and feet, but also to pay considerable attention to the skulls, ivory and associated bones of elephants that are long dead.”

 

To investigate the unusual behavior, McComb’s team studied families of elephants living in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya.  In each test, they presented the animals with a choice of three objects.  These were placed 25 to 30 meters away from the nearest elephant, their location (left, center, right) systematically varied.  The elephant reaction was then observed and video recorded from a distance.

 

The first experiment, 19 different family groups were presented with an elephant skull, a piece of ivory and a piece of wood.  The animals showed a strong preference for the ivory, and for the skull over the wood.  Preference for ivory was very marked, even through it was the smallest object on offer.  Elephants placed their feet, which have a sense of feeling, on the ivory and rocked it gently back and forth.

 

In another experiment, 17 families were presented with skulls from an elephant, a buffalo and a rhinoceros.  “The elephant skull received significantly more attention than the skulls of the other two large herbivores, irrespective of its position in the array,” said McComb.

 

These studies and other scientific research support the view that numerous and diverse animals have rich and deep emotional lives.  Emotions have evolved as adaptations in numerous species and they serve as social glue to bond animals with one another.”

 

Business

Tom Peters, the world-renowned business consulting guru, professes that empathy is probably the one attitude that’s most important to his business success.  “There are a thousand people that are smarter than I am but for some reason I got a good dose (thanks to mother) of empathy, and so I’m able to connect with people better.” 

 

Bruna Martinuzzi, president and founder of Clarion Enterprises, a company that specializes in emotional intelligence and leadership training said, “There are numerous studies that link empathy to business results.  They include studies that correlate empathy with increased sales, with the performance of the best managers of product development teams and with enhanced performance in an increasingly diverse workforce.”

 

Dr. Daniel Goleman in a Harvard Business Review article entitled “What Makes a Leader” made an additional observation by stating, “Empathy is also particularly critical to leadership development in this age of young, independent, highly marketable and mobile workers.” 

 

With so many documented business benefits and hard, tangible results attributed to utilization of empathy in conducting business, why aren’t more companies practicing it?  One reason might be the mistaken notion that empathy is all about those “touchy-feely” aspects of a person, and many managers (and HR people) don’t feel comfortable practicing “touchy-feely”.  What they may not understand is that empathy first requires reasoning abilities (to understand another person’s thoughts, feelings, reactions, concerns and motives) as well as the emotional capacity to care for that person’s concerns. 

 

Perhaps another reason is it’s considered to be difficult to teach and even harder to manage and measure.

 

But what if teaching people to be more empathetic toward their managers and fellow workers, toward their customers and even outside of the workplace toward members of their family was easy to teach, manage and measure?  What if it merely involved five pointers?

 

1. Listen with your ears, eyes and heart.
2. Don’t interrupt people.
3. Tune in to non-verbal communication.
4. Be fully present when you are with people (this includes phone conversations).
5. Take a personal interest in people.

 

What gains in profitability and market share do you think an organization that fully integrated “empathy” into its value proposition would experience?  What gains in employee morale, employee retention, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty would an “empathetic company” experience over the course of a day, a year … 5 years?

 

And what would it cost a company to provide educational seminars and workshops on empathy to its officers and employees?  What might it cost a company if its competitor committed to differentiating itself in the market by converting the culture to one of empathy … putting yourself in the other person’s shoes or seeing things through someone else’s eyes?

 

Maybe the time has come to not only truly listen to our fellow human beings, but to listen and practice the lesson that elephants can teach all of us in the business world – which is to simply show that you care. 

 

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