Seven ways to improve your empathy skills

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EmpathyEmpathy is fast becoming recognised as an essential skill that improves relationships between individuals and contributes to business success. Research into the impact of increased empathy goes back decades, and businesses recognise its importance. Ford Motor Company has even asked its engineers, who are mostly men, to wear the Empathy Belly so that they can experience some of the physical effects of pregnancy.

What is less widely understood is that empathy is a skill that people can learn, improve and strengthen, like any other skill. We all know people who seem to be naturally empathic, but we never question whether that’s an innate ability or whether they’ve actually just learnt well and use the skill a lot. Indeed, women are expected to be more empathic than men, but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy where women get a lot more practice as empathic burdens are placed disproportionately on their shoulders.

Women are assumed to be ‘naturally empathic’, but in reality we learn it just the same as every other skill, which means we don’t always get it right. So let’s take a look at what empathy is and isn’t, and techniques for improving your empathy skills.

Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. It is the skill to develop insights into how others are thinking and why they react as they do, the capacity to recognise people’s emotional inner life, and the desire to make them feel heard and understood. Empathy creates trust and trust improves relationships.

Business is as much about building good relationships as it is delivering a service or product, so it’s obvious how empathy feeds into the bottom line. Empathy is also important in an academic context, allowing lecturers, tutors, supervisors and researchers to build strong and healthy relationships with their students, co-authors, collaborators and peers.

Empathy is increasingly important as globalisation increases as well. Working with international teams from multiple cultures requires more empathy than working within a familiar and homogenous group. And sensitivity is especially required when working with, and on issues affecting, minorities and underserved communities. The advocate must develop deep empathy for the people they serve in order to be effective.

But empathy is not about taking on more emotional labour, it’s not about always being the person who de-escalates tension within the workplace, is the shoulder to cry on or the person to rage at. It is not about taking on other people’s work in order to make life easier for them, and it is not about exhibiting people-pleasing behaviours such as pretending to agree or apologising all the time. And it’s not about avoiding conflict or being compliant.

Indeed, dealing with conflict is a scenario where empathy is especially important – understanding why there is disagreement and what is motivating the people involved can provide important insights into potential solutions. And sometimes, those solutions have nothing to do with the putative subject of the argument, because the real problem lies elsewhere and thus so does the answer.  

So how do you improve your empathy muscles? Here are a few tips to try:

  1. Listen, and listen fully. Focus all your attention on what people are saying, rather than checking your phone or mentally preparing your next response as they speak. The more you pay attention to what they are saying, the more you will hear the nuance in their tone of voice, and that will tell you a lot about how they are feeling.

  2. Make eye contact, but don’t stare. Eye contact is a crucial aspect of body language which indicates honesty, sincerity, confidence and comfort, and that you actually are paying attention! Staring, on the other hand, is a sign of aggression. If you’re not comfortable making eye contact, practice with someone you trust, but be careful not to overcompensate.

  3. Pay attention to body language. Facial expressions and posture can all tell us something about how the people we’re talking to are feeling. Are they tense, relaxed, excited? Their body language and facial expressions might be saying something very different to what their words are saying, and could give you insights into their real thought processes.

  4. Don’t interrupt unless you really have to. No matter how keen you are to put your point of view across, it’s generally better to let people finish so that you reduce the risk of misunderstanding and help them to feel heard. Sometimes, however, interruptions are necessary, so when you do interrupt, be respectful and polite about it.

  5. Acknowledge. Once you’ve listened, acknowledge what you have heard. People don’t just want to speak, they want to be heard, they want their feelings to be recognised. This doesn’t mean using trite formulations like, “What I hear is…”, but explaining your understanding of the problem they have expressed can help ensure that you really have got it right, and gives them a chance to clarify if they need to.

  6. Pay attention to group dynamics. Empathy is not just important in one-on-one conversations, but also in groups. Is someone being excluded? Why might that be? Are there undercurrents of aggression, frustration, or other negative emotions that you can spot via body language? What is the power dynamic? Understanding group dynamics will help you function better in that group and, if you’re a manager, give you key insights into potential interventions to improve team cohesion.

  7. Engage in scenarios thinking. We respond better to difficult situations if we’ve already got a mental model of what needs to be done, so run some thought experiments, perhaps even practice with a trusted friend, to work out your response to various problems. This will not only help you spot warning signs so that you can intervene earlier, but also help you respond empathetically should issues arise, rather than reacting in surprise.

Empathy is a skill and like any other skill, the more you do it the better you’ll get at it. But equally, don’t overdo it. Empathy is a finite resource and it is possible to wind up with ‘compassion fatigue’, so use the empathy you have very wisely. If you’re a manager, make sure your staff are taking their fair share of the empathy load. Better still, look for ways to reduce that load, perhaps by changing team culture, building in breaks so staff with empathically demanding roles can focus on other things, and facilitating better team communications.

Should you become a STEM communicator?

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Science communicationsFor many people who work in STEM, and especially those in research, science communications or ‘scicomm’ has become an essential part of their job. But if you’re not already engaged in scicomm, should you start?

Why communicate science?

Science is in demand: Journalists are always looking for stories, politicians and campaigners need information to develop policy, fellow citizens want to understand the world around them, and entrepreneurs are looking for new products. STEM research has never had such a wide and varied audience.

On the other side of the coin, STEM institutions are realising that clear and accessible communication of their research is essential to building good relationships with – and gaining the approval of – their communities. Funders are also seeing the value, and frequently request that grant applicants explain how they are going to communicate their findings to stakeholders and the public. And employers, whether in academia or industry, increasingly recognise the importance of scicomm skills and will look for, and expect to find, evidence of STEM communication on your CV.

And of course, many people who add a communications angle to their work find it affirming and enjoyable, and it reminds them of why they went into STEM in the first place. So if you want to expand your skillset and make your CV more attractive, it’s certainly worth acquiring some scicomm skills.

Where to start?

The first and most important think that you need to decide is who you want to talk to. Who is your audience? Are you talking to colleagues, other scientists in your field who use the same jargon and who are already familiar with the ideas and concepts you want to discuss? Or do you want to be more of an advisor, sharing information with those who lack it and seek it, for example, the panel members of a parliamentary enquiry who need explanations in everyday language? Or would you prefer to be talking to the general public, demystifying your area of expertise, putting current affairs into context, and helping people understand the research being published in your field?

The kind of STEM communications you want to do, the audience you want to address, and your relationship with them will change where you start and how you develop your new skills. Getting the roles and relationships right is the first step to effective communication.

Deciding on your strategy

So, consider these questions when you face a STEM communication challenge, and keep your answers in mind as you prepare. Even for the simple task of giving a talk, you need to know:

  1. What is the purpose of the exercise and of my contribution?

It could be educating, advising, campaigning, developing policy, lobbying, pitching, selling, entertaining, sharing or listening, or some combination of these.

  1. Who am I talking to?

Are they older or younger, senior or junior in rank, experts in your subject or not, preparing for exams, personally affected, knowledgeable and passionate activists, people who share your values or hold different ones … ?

  1. What kind of space and size of audience will I face, and for how long?

A small group around a table for two hours, a lecture hall full of people for 40 minutes, or science festival participants should they choose to stop at your stall for a minute or two?

  1. What is my role on this occasion?

Are you an expert armed with facts, an advocate aiming to persuade, an advisor offering suggestions, or a fellow citizen looking to share knowledge and learn from others?

Once you have clear answers to these questions, your communication strategy will emerge.

For example, imagine that you are an engineer, and you have been asked to visit a school to meet 12 teenagers who are thinking of studying engineering.  You will be expected to advise them, but also to keep them entertained (they expect both of these from adults in their school). You can find out from the school what stage of their education they have reached (what choices are still open to them?), and what their cultural backgrounds are (are family members likely to be professionals?). You have been given a slot at a lunch-break – 40 minutes, after the students have eaten (they may be wishing they were outside). You are an expert with experience (and so can offer stories about the exciting and important jobs you and your friends do), but you also want to be a possible future colleague for the young people (so you are accessible and congenial). You are different from them now, but you are inviting them to become your equals, and so you make that seem possible.

Sharing your expertise, and learning from others

STEM professionals are valuable to society because of their expertise. It is their job to know about their subject, and to recognise that other people reply on them for this knowledge. But at the same time, where many people are affected by the outcomes of scientific knowledge, we should recognise that their own expertise and experience that may contribute to better understandings overall, and to more cohesive and equitable collaborations between science and society.

Developing communications skills and confidence, whether that’s in public speaking, writing, podcasting or media appearances, will help you develop your broader STEM career. Many learned societies provide training, and there are plenty of courses and resources available online. Talk to people who have had some practice and learn from them. Find out about your local science festival and offer to help. Read science blogs, listen to podcasts, follow science communicators on Twitter or Facebook, and think analytically about what you see and hear – what was fun, what was interesting, what was clearly explained (and how)?

Start a Twitter account, Facebook page, blog or podcast and remember that like all skills, communication takes practice. Dive in. You will probably enjoy it, and so will your audience. Your CV will benefit too.

By Jane Gregory.

Five productivity hacks to kickstart your day

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If you’re struggling to get your work days off on the right foot, then these five tips will help you rethink and prioritise your To Do list, and give you some tools for tackling even the most mundane of tasks.

Refine your ‘To Do’ list

To Do lists are possibly the oldest productivity tool we have, and many words have been spilt about exactly how best to maintain them. There are countless apps and websites to manage them, a lot of which let you set an incredible level of detail for each task such as allotting it to a project, adding a deadline, and defining multiple statuses that each task might progress through. The dirty truth is that it doesn’t really matter which app you use, or whether you prefer to rely on pen and paper, so long as you actually keep your list up to date and refer to it regularly.

Equally, amongst all To Do list tips, there’s only one that’s truly essential: Each to do item must be a single, well-defined task that can be executed without requiring further clarification. So ‘Write report’ is not a task, but ‘Draft report structure in bullet points’ is. Quite often, if you’re looking at your To Do list and feeling overwhelmed by it all and unsure where to start, it’s because you have written down a list of projects, not a list of tasks.

Luckily, the fix is relatively easy: rewrite your list and make sure that each item is a single action that you have clearly defined and could begin without needing to think further about what it means.

Urgent vs Important

Rare is the person whose To Do list isn’t, to all intents and purposes, infinite. As soon as you finish one thing, something else pops up to take its place. There is no end, let alone an end in sight. Equally true is that not all of the tasks on your list are actually worth doing, but how can you tell what you should focus on, and what you should ditch (or get someone else to do)?

Urgent vs important matrixOnce your To Do list has been rewritten, you can use the Urgent vs Important Matrix, or Eisenhower Matrix, to prioritise it. List your tasks in a two-by-two grid, classifying each task by whether it’s urgent or not urgent, important or not important.

Your main priority should generally be those tasks that fall into the urgent and important quadrant. Tasks that are not urgent but are important are next in line, or should be scheduled so that they don’t become urgent. Tasks that are urgent but not important need a bit of interrogation: Why are they on your To Do list and what would you gain by doing them? Can you delegate them or not do them? Anything in the not urgent and not important quadrant just needs striking off your list completely.

It’s much easier to focus when you can properly prioritise your tasks, and it’s easier to drop the distractions and interruptions once you recognise them for what they are.

The Pomodoro Technique

On days when it’s really hard to get started, the Pomodoro Technique is perfect. Named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer – pomodoro means tomato in Italian – it is possibly the simplest way to force yourself to get on with your work:

  1. Decide what you’re going to do
  2. Set a timer for 25 minutes.
  3. Start.
  4. Stop when the timer goes off, and take a 3-5 minute break

If you are really struggling with focus, then set the timer for 15 minutes – anyone can focus for 15 minutes, on any task and quite often once you’ve got started, it’s much easier to keep going.

The official technique, which was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s, includes more details around counting pomodoros, which is what each bout of productivity is called, into sets of four, recording each completion with a tick, and taking longer breaks after sets. But ultimately, it’s really about just putting a timer on, and now allowing yourself any distractions at all until you hear that alarm go off.

Buddyworking

For challenging days, a ‘buddy working’ system, where you explain your goals for the next half hour to a friend or colleague and then check back in at the allotted time to report on your progress, can really help you to hold yourself accountable. Buddy working can be very effective when you’ve got particularly tedious or gnarly tasks on your list that you really don’t want to do – telling someone what you’re going to do creates a commitment strong enough to push you through the difficult task. And your friends can nag you if you get distracted!

Track your time

The one thing easier than losing time to social media, chatting, or making cups of tea is not recognising when you’ve lost time to social media, chatting, or making cups of tea. And worse, if you’ve had the wrong kind of busy day, full of unanticipated or involved tasks, it can be easy to feel as if you haven’t done anything.

The best way to tackle both of these problems is to track your time so that you know exactly how much time you spent doing what. There are quite a few time trackers available, although Toggl is probably the best of the free trackers. Using it to track work on particular projects or types of task will give you a clear idea at the end of the day just how you used your time.

When setting up a time tracker, don’t be too specific with your tasks, so “Admin”, “Email”, or “Executive Report” are sensible categories, but “Sending an email to Georgina Harries” is too specific. It’s also important to be honest with yourself, and to turn the tracker off when you check Facebook or go to make a cuppa.

Toggl allows you to track in your browser, or using a desktop app, so it’s really easy to start and stop the timer. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you’re in the habit, you’ll gain a useful insight into your own habits. Are you taking a longer lunch than you should? Or losing time when you’re switching tasks? Or spending more time on social media than you imagined?

A time tracker will help reveal these gaps in your day so that you can make adjustments, such as maybe moving your lunch earlier so that you get a clearer run in the afternoon, or giving yourself a defined break mid-afternoon so that you can regain a little clarity for the last part of the day.

Four mentoring styles

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MentoringMentoring has developed a lot over recent years, not least because the internet means that your mentor doesn’t have be local to you anymore. Gone are the days when mentoring meant vague chats about career aspirations over coffee. Instead, we have video, voice and text chats, email, forums, and shared documents, and a level of flexibility and variety in mentor relationships that yesterday’s mentees could only dream of.

That flexibility is exemplified by the four different types of modern mentorships: one-to-one, reverse, process and group. Which style is right for you depends a lot on what you want to get out of the mentoring relationship, but you don’t need to stick to just one style, or just have one mentor. You can mix and match to meet your needs and can change up your mentoring relationship style as you and your circumstances change. So, what are these four different approaches to mentoring?

One-to-one

Traditional mentoring pairs a senior employee with a junior colleague so that the latter can ask for advice from someone who’s been there and done that. When mentor and mentee are well paired, valuable and long-term professional relationships can be created, benefiting both mentor and mentee.

The stereotypical one-to-one pairing imagines a very senior mentor with a still-wet-behind-the-ears mentee, but realistically it’s better to have a mentor who’s just a little bit more experienced than you, one who can remember what it’s like to be in your shoes. And that mentor can themselves be a mentee of someone more senior. ‘Mentor’ isn’t a job title that you graduate into once you’re senior enough, it’s a temporary mantle that you wear whilst you help someone else, and you can wear it at almost any point in your career.
One-to-one mentorships tend to be focused on personal and professional development, on improving soft and transferrable skills, and on guiding you through a particular phase in your career.

Reverse

As the name suggests, reverse mentoring sees a more junior employee mentoring a senior colleague in a one-to-one mentorship relationship. Again, reverse mentoring has its stereotypes, of a technologically savvy new hire helping pre-retirement board members access their email and learn about new-fangled things like social media. But again, the stereotypes don’t do this form of mentoring justice.

Reverse mentoring is immensely valuable in bridging generational divides, helping older colleagues understand the culture, needs and values of younger generations. It’s also valuable for senior colleagues to understand the day-to-day experiences of and challenges faced by junior colleagues, through which they can better understand their own business and staff, and effect valuable cultural change. If a business wants to improve staff retention and reduce churn, reverse mentoring is one valuable way to understand what changes need to be made.

It’s also valuable for the more junior mentor, who gets an insight into the challenges management are facing and can learn about leadership and the business decision making process.

Process

Sometimes, you need help to get you through a particular task, perhaps because it’s new to you and you need the wisdom and experience of someone who has done it before. Or maybe it’s complicated and you could just do with a second pair of eyes to help sense-check your decisions. You might be applying for a promotion for the first time, or organising an event or meeting, or submitting your first scientific paper, or just trying to get a bit of code to work properly.

Process mentoring can be very a short experience, just long enough to get a decision made or something fixed, or it can be a relationship that lasts for months or years. It all depends on the specific process that you’re working your way through. But process mentoring is a common and valuable form of mentoring which is focused on discrete, tangible outcomes and with a clear endpoint. Process mentoring is suited to both one-to-one mentoring relationships and groups mentoring.

Group

Group mentoring is far more common than perhaps we realise. From formal tutor groups or advisory councils to Facebook groups, Slack channels and even Twitter, we’ve all asked groups of friends, colleagues and contacts for help at one point or another. Group mentoring, where the mentee asks for help from a group in the hope that one or two people might have had relevant experience is such a fundamental human behaviour that we do it all the time in all sorts of contexts.

Being a part of a community that has expressly gathered in order to mentor and be mentored can be invaluable. Indeed, a recent study of MBA students indicated that successful women surround themselves with a close inner circle of other women who can “share private information about things like an organization’s attitudes toward female leaders, which helps strengthen women’s job search, interviewing, and negotiation strategies.”

Because group mentoring is often ad hoc and informal, it can be a great way to start your mentoring journey, and can help you find people working in your industry that you’d like to either mentor or be mentored by.

Has the leaky pipeline really been fixed?

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Female plumberThe ‘leaky pipeline’ is a familiar metaphor to those interested in discussions of women in STEM. The pipeline – the process of going from school to undergraduate level and on into academia until reaching professorship – is seen to leak people, particularly women and minorities, at each successive rung of the academic ladder. Despite its ubiquity, there are growing concerns that the leaky pipeline metaphor is harmful and inaccurate.

A recent paper by David Miller and Jonathan Wai suggests that the pipeline is no longer leaking. The paper examined the percentage of students who go from undergraduate level to PhD level using retrospective analyses of data from US citizens. The data itself seems sound, as do the analyses, but I am concerned about the conclusions drawn.  The authors found that while women, in general, used to be awarded PhDs at a lower rate than their male undergraduate counterparts, this is no longer the case: the sexes have converged. This means that male and female undergraduates are equally likely to continue their academic studies. Wonderful news! The pipeline has been fixed!

Well, not so fast. The paper has examined a very particular point in the academic career: the transition from the undergraduate level where a student is really trying to gauge their level of interest in a subject while putting off the whole ‘find a job’ thing for a few years, to the postgraduate level where they feel they may have some real interest and aptitude for their chosen field and would like to pursue it further (and maybe put off that whole ‘find a job’ thing for a few more years!). While obviously it is great to know that women are no longer systematically biased against when it comes to being accepted for PhDs, that step is only one on the long route to becoming a fully fledged academic. And, as the authors point out:

“…the pipeline metaphor may be an apt description of academic transitions after the Ph.D. Academic pathways are considerably more rigid after the Ph.D. degree than before the bachelor’s degree.” [p8]

The paper is cautious and focused in its conclusions, which is as scientific research should be. However, from an online article written by one of the co-authors, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the leaky pipeline metaphor was now dead:

“…new research of which I am the coauthor shows this pervasive leaky pipeline metaphor is wrong for nearly all postsecondary pathways in science and engineering.”

The paper, however, does not say that, and the data doesn’t support such an assertion. It’s bad enough when press officers overhype research due a lack of understanding of the work, but to see an actual author misrepresent their research is extremely disappointing.

So, as much as we might wish it to be true, this paper doesn’t support the idea that the leaky pipeline has been completely sealed. But what about its use as a metaphor? Well, there are two sides to any metaphor: those of accuracy and utility. It appears that despite some areas where cautious optimism may be applied, as shown above, the metaphor is still largely accurate. But is it useful?

The main problem with the metaphor is that it implies that the leak needs to be fixed. Yet the pipeline must leak. In the UK alone there were 98,000 students accepted onto STEM course in 2013. There aren’t enough academic positions for all those students to be employed, and the country would be significantly worse off if all those students decided to work in academia rather than take their skills to other employment sectors where they would make a beneficial contribution.

Specifically in the context of women in STEM, there are concerns that the leaky pipeline metaphor is harming the discussion. That by saying that every woman who leaves academic STEM is a loss, a great deal of internalised pressure is placed on women to pursue careers they are unhappy with and it creates a feeling a failure when they decide to follow a different career path. As Andrew Penner points out, by referring to the leaky pipeline:

“we risk trivializing the contributions of women and men who choose to pursue other endeavors when we define success as becoming a STEM professor at a research university“.

Matthew Cannady and colleagues recently examined the way in which the ‘leaky pipeline’ metaphor fails. They explain that:

“. . . a metaphor positing that those who “leak out,” presumably into a drain, are lost to STEM fails to recognize that there are careers that may not require a STEM bachelor’s degree but do require STEM knowledge and skills and contribute to the public good. The fact that the pipeline metaphor does little to illuminate the paths of mathematics or science educators, or scientifically literate citizens, further challenges its usefulness.” [pp446]

The metaphor, while sadly accurate, appears to be more of a hindrance than a help when trying to discuss and improve women’s representation in academic science. It may be time to find a new metaphor, one that properly appreciates that there are many career choices that allow women, and men, to make use of their scientific training. However, it remains a fact that women are still being excluded from the higher echelons of academia, and whilst that remains true we will all lose out.

The guest post by Sarah Hearne was originally published in April 2015.