How to Defeat the Empathy Gap

We tend to grossly underestimate the importance and impact of emotions in business (and personal) settings, a dangerous misjudgment known as the empathy gap. To address this issue we need to use emotional intelligence, which relates to understanding and managing your own emotions. They must also rely on social intelligence, which is the ability to understand and influence other people’s emotions and relationships.

To understand the empathy gap, consider the concept of cognitive biases. Cognitive distortions refer to a variety of unconscious mental errors resulting from problems with memory, cognition, attention, and other errors. They occur when our brain tries to simplify the complex world around us and can lead to bad decisions. Cognitive biases like the empathy gap can seriously affect our business relationships and efforts to motivate and engage employees.

empathy gap and performance

A common example of an empathy gap is that too many leaders still assume that financial incentives are the only effective employee motivators. In fact, research shows this is not the case.

Once an employee earns enough to support a middle-class lifestyle, other motivations become more important. These include personal recognition, tribal affiliation or meaningfulness in the workplace. Different employees are motivated by different motivators.

Case in point: A B2B software solutions company experienced a gradual decline in sales and customer satisfaction. It wanted its software engineers to market its services by creating thought leadership. This included writing blogs, making conference presentations, and similar activities.

The company tried to offer its engineers more money, but these financial incentives failed. At this point, management sought outside help.

After many interviews and hours of observation, the consultant realized that the software engineers were not particularly interested in marketing. They were primarily emotionally involved in solving technical problems.

Although they were already earning satisfactory salaries, additional financial compensation did not improve their emotional motivation. When presented with this information, the sales manager asked, somewhat surprised, “Engineers have emotions?”

When he said that, everyone in the room laughed. It wasn’t the derogatory, mocking laughter at having said something obviously wrong. Instead, it was the laughter of silent approval. A lack of social intelligence towards software developers was clearly evident in this interaction.

History shows a number of similar situations where non-technical executives attempted to motivate and engage technical staff. It’s a surprisingly common reaction.

To bridge the empathy gap, it is important to understand how employees are feeling

It’s important to understand that the C-suite didn’t include people with software engineering backgrounds. The CEO was chief sales officer at another company, hired just months earlier to help the company improve declining sales.

He replaced most of the senior staff with his own team, which also didn’t have much experience in software consulting. They had a strong sales and marketing background.

Salespeople are more extroverted and emotionally open. In contrast, software developers are generally introverted and avoid public expressions of emotion.

The tendency to overlook the influence of emotions on people’s behavior is called the empathy gap. The empathy gap is one of many dangerous mistakes known as cognitive biases. These mental blind spots affect decision-making in all areas of life, from business to relationships. Fortunately, recent research has revealed effective strategies to circumvent these dangerous judgment errors, such as narrowing our choices by focusing on the best options available, such as by using this comparison site.

It was made clear to the C-Suite that since engineers rarely show strong emotions, it’s easy to overlook and assume they’re only following rational incentives like money. In fact, research shows that money is not an effective motivator for more complex technical roles.

Forgetting that software developers are primarily driven by emotional stimuli made it difficult to motivate them effectively. When examining what actually motivates engineers, two promising emotional drivers were found:

• The desire for a positive personal reputation outside of the company.
• Social status based on peer recognition from other software engineers within the company.

Effective ways to bridge the empathy gap

To address the motive of personal reputation in the industry, the company changed its message to software developers about selling their services. It stopped focusing on simply increasing sales.

Instead, the company emphasized how individual software developers could gain recognition by gaining thought leadership status. It positioned writing expert blogs and presenting at industry conferences as reputation building for the individual engineer rather than content marketing for the company.

Several steps have been taken to accommodate colleagues’ desire for social status within the company.

The weekly company newsletter began highlighting programmers who achieved hits in their blogs and presentations at industry conferences. The “Employee of the Month” criteria were also modified to encourage these achievements. The promotion process also emphasized the creation of thought leadership content.

Over the next year, engineers increased their conference presentations by 22%. They also got 40% more traffic to their blogs through a combination of more frequent posting and increased engagement from engineers.

These changes can be attributed to the effective integration of emotional and social intelligence into the messages sent to employees to counteract the empathy gap.

Are the motivations of your company well aligned with the emotional drivers? What could be some misalignments? Your next steps are to evaluate these alignments and decide what could be done to achieve better alignment.

Conclusion

Executives must recognize that financial incentives alone cannot motivate employees in the long term. Instead, many employees, such as software developers, are driven by emotional factors. Leaders often ignore the influence of emotions, which is a cognitive bias called the empathy gap. Organizations must employ research-based strategies to align their internal culture with emotional drivers by ensuring their leaders demonstrate emotional and social intelligence. Providing emotional incentives helps improve employee motivation and productivity.