One of the most persistent challenges that organizations face is promoting and sustaining interdepartmental collaboration. It’s surprisingly common for communication and collaboration across department lines to represent the lowest scores on annual employee surveys.
There are a lot of common-sense interventions that can help. Any improvement start with the establishment of shared goals and priorities. You can adjust the cadence and content of meetings. You can improve role clarity and communication practices. If you really wanted to make headway, you could create written collaboration and communication plans that lay out the specific areas that require departments to work together. But at the end of the day, it will all fall short if you don’t address the role of empathy in interpersonal and intergroup relationships. There are a number of reasons for this, and here are my top three.
Empathy promotes the perspective-taking we need to work collectively toward a shared goal.
There are different types of empathy. Emotional empathy (also known as affective empathy) is the ability to read the emotions of others and feel their emotions with them. Cognitive empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s position and see a situation from their perspective. While emotional empathy is dramatically aided by shared experience, cognitive empathy in particular allows us to better understand others with whom we lack shared experience. This is especially important when collaborative partners come from different backgrounds and have little or no experience with one another’s personal or professional worlds. Cognitive empathy brings an accurate understanding of others so individuals or teams can work together toward a common goal rather than focusing on accomplishing siloed goals without consideration of how requests, decisions, and actions may impact other stakeholders.
Empathy in collaboration increases the chances of getting the best decision and getting buy-in from stakeholders.
When a decision is made or a problem is solved with empathetic consideration of the impacts on all parties (both those actively engaged in the collaboration and those more peripherally affected), it becomes more likely that we find a course of action that is truly win-win. It creates the opportunity to mitigate any potentially unfair or unevenly distributed impacts and leaves those involved feeling seen and being supported as the plan is executed. When people believe that they have been seen, considered, and helped, they become much more likely to buy in and work for the success of the plan rather than resentfully holding back.
Empathy helps us overcome obstacles caused by interpersonal and intergroup dynamics.
As humans, we tend to “sort” ourselves into groups based on shared characteristics. We form groups with people who are “like us” in some way or another, and also are both consciously and subconsciously prone to sorting others into groups that are “not like us” in certain ways. This creates a wide variety of groups, both implicitly and explicitly, and the relationships that exist between various groups have a massive impact on our ability to collaborate with one another. Empathy is what bridges the gap between groups to make collaboration the practiced mode of operation rather than competition. It’s what moves us to ask questions about feasibility and capacity as we make plans that require effort and participation from others. And it’s always helpful to remember that intergroup dynamics play out horizontally across departments as well as vertically between senior management, middle management, and frontline employees.
Simply put, empathy isn’t just about understanding people’s feelings and then accommodating them. It’s also about understanding the connection between the different parts of system and how they impact one another. Once we understand, and give due legitimacy to the perspectives of other groups and individuals, we can use that empathetic understanding to make great choices about how to decide and operate together. And that’s what it takes to lead everyone forward toward accomplishing shared goals together.
Want to learn more about empathy and how it can help people in your organization be successful in their collaborative efforts? Check out the resources below and reach out via email at andy@leadforwardco.com to learn more about training, coaching, and consulting solutions that will help you and your team to move forward.
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