Sitting across the table from me in our conference room were two entrepreneurs. They walked into our firm with a new product, an excellent product in fact, looking for a strategy and guidance to successfully market it.
Let me paint a picture for you. These entrepreneurs are bootstrapping their launch. They’re taking a gigantic leap that requires tapping into their savings to finance each move. They’re emotionally invested in their idea, and at the same time, they’ve tested the waters enough to build some confidence that more than just feelings back their gut reactions. They’re all in, standing on the ledge, ready to jump. All they want is someone to jump with them.
They talked, and I listened. As they spoke, their words expressed emotions familiar to every entrepreneur I’ve ever worked with: excitement, fear, passion, and apprehension. These feelings are easy to recognize because they’re so familiar. I’ve personally wrestled with these same emotions. Understanding how it feels to stand in their shoes allowed me to connect with them on a different level, and move past trying to lock in a transaction. My approach to their challenges was colored by a lens of empathy.
Empathy is the key to moving from transactional to relational business connections.
Empathy. It’s a popular concept in business circles these days. As discussions have shifted to developing winning business cultures and teams, the concept of empathy has been included in the conversations. To be completely transparent, a decade ago I thought empathy sounded soft. It turns out I didn’t understand it. I hadn’t considered its significant place in business and I was painfully unaware of its real power. My focus was on the transaction.
An excellent place to start in understanding empathy is to simply look it up in a thesaurus. Similar words include appreciation, rapport, and compassion. One definition refers to it as being on the same wavelength. We all want that. Antonyms include indifference, apathy, and misunderstanding. Simply put, how in tune are you with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of the person on the other side of the table?
Our ability to tune in and understand our customers allows us to move past business relationships that are only transactional. Empathy, and working hard to understand what it feels like to be the customer, creates an environment where relational business connections can be created. It’s these relational connections that stand the test of time, and as I shared in my last article, move us past merely being vendors.
Empathy doesn’t end with our customers. It extends to our teams, our leaders, and our staff. If we can take the time to understand the lives of the people we work with, our workplaces can also become more relational, and as a result, more productive. As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
The Takeaway
Whether it’s your customer or a member of your team, step into their shoes and work harder to understand them to unlock the massive power of empathy.
