“I feel your pain” will help you feel success in 2018

Some of you may remember a famous line that helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992: “I feel your pain”. (Better yet, many of you probably remember Darrell Hammond’s hilarious impersonation of Bill Clinton saying that line during skits on Saturday Night Live.) Today, we’ve coined a buzzword to capture the “I feel your pain” sentiment: empathy. You hear and read “empathy” a lot more in business circles than you did just a few years ago.

Empathy can be challenging to understand and even harder to instill in your organizations. It can be seen as wimpy or wishy-washy or something that HR should worry about. Often, it’s confused with “sympathy”. But, think of the “I feel your pain” sentiment or put yourself in other’s shoes and see situations from their perspectives … in short, that’s feeling empathy.

And in that respect, empathy is something your organization should understand and engrain throughout your culture. What does empathy have to do with your business, you ask? As someone who was slow to acknowledge it, I am now here to say it has a lot to do with the credit union business. In fact, it may have more to do with the future success of your credit union than any other single subject!

Following is a six-pack of ways to introduce and incorporate empathy into your organizations:

1. Put yourself in your members’ shoes: stop designing new delivery channels based on your processes and/or technology and start designing them based on how your members want to interact with you. By empathizing with them and truly understanding their positive and negative feelings about you, you will be able to feel their pain and deliver the types of experiences that will keep your members engaged and loyal for many years to come. That’s empathy.
2. Don’t forget about your employees: walk in their shoes and listen to their ideas about improving the employee and member cultures at your credit union. Who sees it better or hears more from members than your employees? Yet, how often do you ask them for their input and perspective? Whether its surveys, focus groups, or the old-fashioned suggestion box, have a way to feel their pain and capture their perspectives.
3. Instill it in all coaching efforts: the number one quality of effective coaches is empathy. That may be hard to believe but its true – when a coach empathizes with an employee and sees the experience from their point of view, they become a much better coach. Another way to put this is coaches need to truly personalize their coaching by understanding how each individual is feeling. What are their frustrations? Where do they feel confident? Don’t assume it … put yourself in their shoes and feel it.
4. It’ll improve teamwork: teams that don’t play well together or departments that don’t support each other are often infected with little or no empathy for each other. When your back office and frontline don’t walk in each other’s shoes, they have a hard time delivering the type of support needed to substantiate your desired member experience. Getting all employees to feel each other’s pain goes a long way to minimizing this issue and helping establish the cross-functional alignment that will drive your future success.
5. The executive team needs it, too: one of the primary reasons for dysfunction among executives is a lack of trust and lack of trust is rooted in a lack of empathy. When executives put themselves in each other’s’ shoes they begin to understand each other’s’ issues, challenges, and pains. This increased understanding leads to a much more empathetic partnership and greatly diminishes the competitiveness and territorialism that too often pervades executive teams.
6. Hire for it/train for it: typically, financial institutions hire for previous banking experience and train on operations and procedures. Fortunately, that paradigm has shifted to now include hiring for personality and training on soft skills. But the shift needs to go further to incorporate empathy. Test for and select candidates that demonstrate the propensity for a high degree of empathy and include empathy skills in all training (for new-hires and existing employees). Getting empathetic employees will go a long way to establishing a culture rich in empathy.

Hopefully, you’ve got the point by now that empathy is going to be the key to your success in 2018. Don’t believe me? Try improving the six areas above without a primary focus on empathy. You’ll quickly discover that your successes will be muted, at best, and fail miserably, at worse. Empathy will be the glue that holds your initiatives together so be prepared to invest in becoming much more empathetic.

If your credit union is suffering from Empathy Deficit Disorder, my firm is here to help you walk in the shoes of others. We work with organizations just like yours that are implementing empathy into their strategic and tactical plans and feeling the right kinds of “pains”. We can be reached at www.fi-strategies.com or 636-578-3280.