9 Simple Actions You Can Take to Build a Culture of Empathy
9 Simple Actions You Can Take to Build a Culture of Empathy
You can build an accidental culture, or a purposeful culture. Take action to build a culture of empathy, and reap the rewards.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
I like to keep my articles evergreen, always relevant, and high quality. Occasionally, when I stumble on an article that I sent a few years ago, I update it to my current writing style (which I’d like to believe is improving over time), and re-send it. This was originally sent years ago, but I have updated it to be super awesome.
If you had a job you really enjoyed, what was it about that position that made it so attractive? I think we can generally agree that a 9-5 job, particularly in an office, is not optimal. So what is it about that position that was memorable?
For most people, the answer is culture. The culture of a workplace can be a fantastic asset, or a liability. It can drive you to go home and dream about early retirement. It can also drive you to put in an extra hour at work on a Friday night because you had something you really wanted to finish with the team.
Culture is not strictly about leadership principles or mission statements. I don't think you can document the culture of a company. Culture is the set of behaviors your workplace rewards, and which it punishes. Which things lead to promotion and raises, and which things lead to being walked out the door.
Culture is also not consistent inside a company. Culture is driven through human behavior. The culture of your workplace heavily impacted by your co-workers, particularly your leadership team. A single leader can make a thousand-person organization a great place, or a terrible one.
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Rewards and Punishment
Rewarding output over personal behaviors
Manager Fred - "I know John is a jerk, but he gets so much done. Everyone just needs to learn how to work with him."
When Fred verbally says that we should ignore poor behavior, he's condoning it. When we excuse or accept bad behavior, we are accepting it into our workplace. When we trade competence for rudeness, we implicitly say that we value ability to complete tasks over being a polite co-worker.
I’ve been guilty of this. Early in my time at Amazon, I prided myself in being patient with rude, but competent co-workers. I had thick skin, and I was able to brush off poor behavior if they could contribute to my team’s success.
I wasn’t thinking about the issue correctly. As a manager, I had the ability (with some HR work) to remove someone from the team. If their personality issues reached the point where it bothered me enough, I could remove them.
But their co-workers? They didn’t have that power. They had to sit around with this jerk, putting up with their nonsense. Some people didn’t mind. Others did. And by implicitly expecting people to work with jerks, I was condoning that behavior.
It wasn’t until later in my career where I figured out a few tools to deal with it. In short: 1) Having less patience for poor behavior from co-workers. 2) Making certain I have an extremely open door for my team members to tell me if there’s a personality problem on the team.
Rewarding outcomes over methods to achieve them
Director Joan - "Michael's team completed yet another feature launch this year on schedule, despite many setbacks. I'm going to be putting him up for promotion."
What Joan isn't mentioning is that Michael's team worked weekends for the last two months. His team had heavy attrition, with members transferring off the team due to the terrible work-life balance. Michael achieved his launch by burning through his employees. Such behavior may work to achieve short-term goals, but is bad for the group eventually.
What Joan is saying is that delivering a launch on schedule is more valuable than employee development, and team health. By not mentioning the negative aspects of hitting the date, she's supporting his actions. In Joan’s organization, hitting dates is more important than long-term team health. Employee happiness needs to take second place after achieving goals.
Amazon is famous for having this type of culture. Hitting dates and achieving bold projects regardless of human impact was (in my experience) a fairly common behavior. You drive culture from the top down, and while Jeff B is brilliant, he was never known for his empathy.
I still had many great leaders, and we maintained an excellent work-life balance. It was simply a bit of an uphill battle at Amazon. I repeatedly had to hide my work-life balance efforts when I knew they wouldn’t be appreciated. As much as I was convinced that teams would achieve more if they worked at a measured pace, it was usually an unpopular thing to emphasize.
Neglecting to value positive behaviors
Manager Jason - "I know Megan is an awesome team member. She is a positive influence, remembers birthdays, communicates project status with other teams, and so on. But we can't be biased during review time, and Megan's deliveries aren't as good as her co-workers."
By neglecting to reward employees for positive behavior, we implicitly devalue those behaviors. It’s not that I’m claiming we should only care about how we behave at work, or how we improve team culture. But if we don’t include those behaviors in performance calculations, we’re saying that those behaviors have no value. If we value behaviors, we need to reward them. By rewarding these behaviors, we create a culture which values and creates more of those behaviors.
Again, this doesn’t mean we discount completing work. The company hired us to complete work. But we complete work in a team. And doing the work ourselves is a single instance of task output. Long term team success requires a lot more, including improving retention of team members, and team member motivation. This means we should also care about those who make our team a better place to work.
Accidental culture
Culture isn’t created or spread through documentation. A new team member arrives in a group. How do they know what is valued and not? Do they read the company values wiki page? Of course not. They enter the group and look around at how others behave, what is rewarded, and what is punished.
Culture is a feedback loop. You don't start at square zero and create a culture like you make a tray of muffins. You create a culture through every action you take.
And you can’t skip having a culture because the culture of a team / organization / company is the collection of behaviors you reward and punish. You either create culture deliberately, or accidentally. You can either decide to build a very specific type of culture, or you end up with the average behavior of the people at your workplace.
Here’s a discussion I had once with an engineer on the team.
Engineer Sam - "Dave, I had this awesome team in the past where everyone got cake on their birthday. We also had these cool social events where we'd go out to play pool and stuff after work. I really miss that. Can you schedule more social events?”
Me - "I love it. Sounds great. Except I personally dislike scheduling parties. And I clearly haven't done a good job at this so far, per your observations. However, I do love having a fun team culture. I hereby grant you the budget to buy cakes on everyone's birthday, and we can get you a nice healthy budget for team events."
Engineer Sam - "Um.. but you're the manager."
Me - "I'm the manager, but party planner is not on the list of tasks that only the manager can do. I'm honestly thrilled you care about these types of events, and I hope you can make our team's events awesome."
Yes, sometimes I do try voluntelling people to do things they ask for. Because I find it funny, and occasionally people do actually run with it. More often, they drop it. Because it’s so much easier to want things rather than do things.
As culture is the average behavior of the people in the workplace, this means that the culture of a workplace is the responsibility of everyone on the team. When someone says, "I don't like the culture of this team", they need to realize that they have the tools to fix the problem. And in fact, they’re a part of the problem; either through inaction, or their current behavior.
This accidental culture is also why it’s critical to hire not just for skills, but for personality / leadership skills / culture. If you interview only for functional skills, you run the risk of creating a toxic team culture. Of course, if you hire only looking at interpersonal skills, you run the risk of having a very fun team which accomplishes nothing.
Also as a side note, it’s very risky to put “culture fit” on an interview loop. I had to strongly push against that at Amazon. The idea of “culture fit” is frequently interpreted as “someone who will work well in our team’s culture” — which is a recipe for monoculture. What you want is something closer to “team improving” or “good team member”, which are healthier criteria.
Actions for a culture of empathy
If you don’t want an accidental culture, how do you take action to create a culture? Specifically, a culture which values empathy?
We need to start with asking about the aspects of culture which make a place feel like a great place to work. These are things like connections with your co-workers, so they feel more like friends than strangers. Encouragement when you do something well. Feeling safe when you make mistakes.
This type of culture is created when we deal with each other with empathy. When we reward and punish positive treatment of others, we create a feedback loop where we have more empathy for our co-workers.
Here’s a quick example. When I joined Facebook, they had a really cool ramp up process where you work on whatever small tasks you want. Usually, tiny bugs or features. This helps you learn their systems while contributing value. I asked a co-worker about how teams would accept me, a new hire, messing around in their code base.
I said something like, “At Amazon, if someone wanted to contribute code to our team’s code base, we’d be nervous about it. We’d hesitate to accept their contributions. We’d insist on a very specific code style, QA test coverage, and so on. It’s often hard to contribute code to another team.”
Their response was revealing. “Working across teams is highly valued here. Everyone knows that we move faster if we can contribute across code bases, so there’s a strong cultural incentive to do whatever you can to make it easier for someone else to contribute to your system. Including being flexible on your expectations.”
Which was fascinating. Because both companies had the same general value system. They both valued operational excellence, and cross-team work, and accomplishing projects for their company. Except Amazon culturally valued ownership more, and Facebook valued collaboration more. And their values came across in how individuals worked together.
As a caveat, this was my personal experience at both companies. Your experience may be different, of course.
There is an infinite list of ways to build empathy at the workplace, but I limited my list to nine because it's such a nice round number, and more would take too long to read. The below are some actions you can take, in no particular order.