Empathy is in short supply these days. From the boards of school systems to Congress and the White House, our culture could use a good dose of it.
Empathy combines the ability to listen — really listen — with an understanding of the issues, needs and concerns of others.
Ask experts on leadership what characteristic is most needed in a successful leader, and they will tell you empathy. Charisma and visionary thinking are important, but absent empathy, a leader won’t accomplish much.
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank of Home Depot fame have separately spoken to our students at Woodward Academy about their lives and success. They credit the rise of Home Depot with the fact that customer opinion mattered to them greatly. Under their watch, never a week passed that the two men weren’t in the aisles practicing empathy — donning the orange apron and seeking out customers to ask what they needed and what they thought of their shopping experience.
Would that our elected officials did that. The absence of empathy led to the recent government shutdown, costing our economy billions of dollars. Gerrymandering — the process of creating districts to ensure the election of one party — is partly to blame, as is the lack of interaction elected officials have with each other. In a recent article, Rep. Thomas Scott observed that members of Congress rarely speak to each other anymore.
Educators now recognize the need for developing empathy in students. A new instructional approach called design thinking involves students in addressing complex problems by encouraging collaboration and innovation. The starting place for success is practicing empathy — being certain students understand fully the problems they are attempting to solve.
Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago advocates for empathy as part of the educational process by encouraging the practice of narrative imagination. Narrative imagination helps a person view the world through the lens of someone else to attempt to understand the life circumstances of that person. Through narrative imagination, students break free of the demographic boundaries that define us (race, gender, religion, etc.) to see that we are all essentially bound to each other.
Robert W. Woodruff graduated from Woodward Academy in 1908. He led Coca-Cola to become the global powerhouse that it is today. On our campus stands a life-sized statue of him. At the base of the statue is inscribed one of his favorite sayings: “There is no limit to what a man can achieve or where he can go if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”
Mr. Woodruff famously expressed in his business philosophy that the least important word in the English language is the word “I.” More than a half-century ago, Mr. Woodruff’s practice of empathy made him an internationally celebrated leader. Now schools like Woodward are teaching it. When I would otherwise despair at what I see as our culture’s lack of empathy, I am filled with hope and confidence that today’s students will lead more empathetically than my own generation.
