Final

Project: Empathy
MBA 577: Got Creativity? Stuart School of Business

What is Empathy? Empathy is the ability to understand another persons feelings, or to put yourself in someone elses shoes. Although the ability is not innate and may be more prominent in some individuals than in others, it is a skill that can learned and developed. The concept of empathy was first identified in the late 19th century by German philosophers Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps, who named the term Einfhlung or aesthetic sympathy, referring to the human ability to recognize and respond to subtle changes in facial expressions, body positioning and tone of voice. Empathy is closely related to the concept of sympathy, which is defined as feeling pity and concern for someone elses situation or misfortune. Empathy is personal emotion, manifesting only when an individual has directly experienced a situation on their own. Sympathy is a group or shared emotion, where an individual can express feelings toward a common or familiar situation. Empathy is not an innate ability and, at its extreme, a total lack of empathy can be a characteristic of psychological disorders such as psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder. Empathy abilities usually start to develop as early as the age of one when infants begin to recognize that other beings have goals different from their own. Intuitive empathy can be encouraged and grown in children by introducing play and games that focus on the communication of feelings and actions amongst groups of their peers. One specific program, Roots of Empathy seeks to increase empathy and decrease aggressive behavior in children by bringing an infant into the classroom and asking the children to observe and identify conclusions about the babys feelings. Why is Empathy Important to Business? Empathy is important to many human interactions by allowing people to create bonds of trust, give us insight on what others are feeling and informs our decisions all are vital business skills. Telecommuting and multi-office coordination and communications skills will become second nature to management professionals of the future; understanding the person you are working with will become increasingly more complex as office dynamics change. Many professionals already work from a home or mobile office it will be important for business school graduates to adapt to whatever office environment they encounter and forge relationships with coworkers in potentially non- traditional office situations.

Empathy has been described as the ability to identify and understand other peoples situation, feelings and motives; it is no surprise that empathy is linked to positive business results like increased sales, the performance of product development teams and with enhanced performance in an increasingly diverse workforce. Daniel Pink says in his book A Whole New Mind that right-brained, interpersonal employees will logically become the most successful managers. Three forces, abundance, Asia and automation, are shaping the shift away from the traditional office environment. Pink also argues that there are six personality traits that future successful employees will manage effectively to compete in the new marketplace empathy is a vital component as it allows you to imagine yourself in someone elses shoes and create better business relationships. These are assets that cannot be outsourced. Bruna Martonuzzi, an educator, author and consultant in the field of emotional intelligence and business leadership, points to 10 tips to help business people incorporate empathy into their work lifestyle: Listen truly listen to people Dont interrupt others Tune in to non-verbal communication Practice the 93% rule 93% of communication is tone of voice and body language 5. Use peoples names and try to remember them 6. Be fully present when you are meeting with people stay off the phone, internet, etc. 7. Smile at people 8. Encourage others, especially s hy people, when they speak up 9. Give genuine recognition and praise 10.Take a personal interest in others MBA Curriculum Manifestation Teaching empathy in an MBA curriculum requires shifting focus away from analyzing data purely and considering the human aspects of business decisions. How could this manifest in an MBA curriculum? 1. 2. 3. 4.

Experience Rather than Reading Most of the learning in business schools is done through textbooks and case studies. While the team agrees that these are invaluable tools for imparting fundamental knowledge, they are challenging because they present a level of abstraction that makes the content within them difficult to connect to or relate with. Under our proposal, students would spend more time in the field talking with customers, workers, and managers and use this insight more heavily than they currently do. Although occasionally Stuart students are asked to visit a store or go to a factory, rarely do they spend a significant amount of time doing actual ethnographic research, recording stories, or developing narratives. To prepare for this, Stuart should require a seminar on user research as one of the first required classes, similar to the Observing Users class at the Institute of Design. Students would become familiar with interviewing guidelines, shadowing, correct data collection, data analysis, and data collection tools like cameras and voice recorders. For instance, in operations, students might spend time observing workers on the production line and interviewing them on their breaks, then use that datain addition to the hard numeric datato develop creative solutions to improve efficiency and worker satisfaction. Some of the key empathy building techniques that should be incorporated into the experience learning approach that we are suggesting for Stuarts MBA program include user/customer observation, ethnographic interviewing, role playing and or body storming, scenario building and storyboarding. These hands- on methods will allow students to understand the business environment from a new, more in-depth perspective. For example, in a body storming exercise, the students each take on the role of a social actor, that is, a person, object, technology or force in a service or operational environment, in order to better understand the relationships and interactions between the different actors. Operations students could use this technique to approach a production problem to find out where the bottlenecks and breakdowns in communication happen across the process. Curriculum Integration All Stuarts core classes would be required to combine empathy within the curriculum. Examples include:

Marketing students could work with a local business to research the businesss customers (and non-customers) to gain insight beyond demographics and learn why people do or do not choose to patronize the business. Economics students would do a section on behavioral economics, which looks at the human side of decision-making that makes markets less-than- perfectly efficient. This could require a write-up on a way that a group of people do not make rational decisions, and then suggestions on how to change their behavior. Statistics students could work on a project that not only analyzes a certain data set, but researches insight into why the main group behaves the way they do, and the reasoning for the outliers. This research would be first- hand, for instance, average spending at the cafeteria. Organizational behavior students would spend time within an organization talking with and shadowing employees to diagnose issues and decide how the organizations effectiveness could be improved. The Common Project

To help solidify the concepts learned during the MBA program in an empathetic way, we propose a thesis project in the last semester called The Common Project whereby students can work individually or in a group with a faculty advisor on a project of their choosing that covers all of the core MBA topics. The project would require students to do original research on a particular business problem, and would require elements of empathy (e.g. ethnographic observation and interviewing). Any recommendations proposed must consider human effects and externalities in addition to profitability and effectiveness. The Common Project would be presented and defended to a panel of faculty that would judge its various characteristics, including the degree to which it utilizes techniques for empathy. Additional Considerations Broadly changing and requiring any curriculum requires faculty buy-in and cooperation. As such, empathy being integrated into the curriculum has to be sold to members of the faculty who would be responsible for execution. It has been demonstrated in this paper that design, creativity, and empathy are integral parts to contemporary business, and considered vital skills for future managers to

understand and appreciate. Faculty, however, must also accept this notion to build a consensus and move the curriculum in a new direction. Explanation of Experience For the experiential portion of our final project, we chose to take a workshop approach to engage the audience. We will start by performing a quick role playing exercise to introduce the differences between an empathetic and a non- empathetic approach to a conversation. Next, we will ask the class to adopt a particular character in their own role-play exercises. We will break into teams of three, with one person taking on the role of the main character and the other two taking on competing versions of another character, i.e. the empathetic version versus the non-empathetic version. Each participant will be given a character prompt with details on who they are and how they should approach the situation. The teams will be given 5-7 minutes to think about how their assigned character would react in the given situation. After the allotted time we will call each group, one-by-one, to act out their scenario. When each team has finished, we will ask them to reflect on their experience of the two different approaches to the difficult conversation. Through completing these exercises we hope that our participants get a sense of, not only the importance of practicing empathy in all situations, but some empathy-building tactics that they can incorporate into future conversations. Conclusion There are many different ways to approach every situation involving personal relationships. An important aspect of any relationship, whether business or personal, is to be able to be empathetic to your friends, colleagues and customers in order to understand what they are thinking and feeling. It may not be necessary or possible for the listener to agree with them, but more so to understand where they are coming from in order for business to flow smoothly. This should be creatively worked into graduate level business courses so the managers of the future meet the demands of the new economy. Empathy can be a personality trait that does not come naturally to everyone; therefore, it is also necessary to incorporate this as a concept within corporate training.

Sources: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Empathy_vs_Sympathy http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sympathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots_of_Empathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/186011/empathy http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_75.htm Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind. Peguin Group, New York, 2005.