Empathy has become something of a buzzword recently, it appears regularly on vision and mission statements as well as the three keywords used to describe yourself. This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all, empathy is a great quality, right? Well, not always, and my fear is that not only the word, but the emotion is becoming over-used.

A lot of my recent work has been helping businesses better understand and more authentically improve their diversity and inclusion. I talk a lot about how empathy is an important part of this, in practising active listening in truly understanding how the other person is feeling and that’s all valid. However, the truth is you can’t always see the other person’s perspective, not authentically.  



Empathy is genuinely putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, understanding exactly how they feel and articulating that. One of the challenges I see people are having is in trying to be empathetic, they can come off as patronising.

For example, if we take a stereotypical white male middle-aged manager, he can’t truly understand the struggle that his younger black female colleague maybe having because he is unlikely to have experienced that himself.  Telling her “I know exactly how you feel” isn’t authentic, empathy doesn’t work in this situation, what’s needed is compassion.

Compassion is when confronted by someone else’s issue, feeling motivated to relieve the suffering. There are circumstances where someone doesn’t want to hear you “completely understand” when you clearly can’t, instead “That must feel awful” “please tell me more about that”, or “how can I help?” are much more authentic and powerful.

I’m not advocating that we stop being empathetic, it’s a tremendously powerful and useful emotion, I’m just saying it’s not the answer to everything. You don’t have to have experienced what someone is going through to help them, you just have to want to.