Leah Reich - Being an empathetic company
”Empathy has morphed into a sort of catch-all for our collective desire to give a shit” When one of Leah’s bosses made her cry she was taught that under no circumstances was she allowed to cry at work and that the office was no place for emotions. It’s out of this premise that she talks about the importance of empathy at work in order to be able to look at things from different perspectives. This gets even more relevant when we’re nowadays expected to bring our whole selves to the office. At its most basic, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This ability is well needed if we effectively and meaningfully are to understand people that are shaped out of other norms, cultural preferences and experiences other than our own. Leah also talks about how empathy within a company is not merely the process of identify a need and fix it with a new product or service. It runs deeper than that. Empathy can give you a completely new regard for others, and by being truly empathetic at work, open up a world for better understanding. One concrete proposal from Leah to better our ability to practice empathy in our workplace is to engage in a feedback session with someone you’d struggled with. By that, you are forced to listen and understand that person and take that understanding and do something with it. Leah, PhD in sociology, consider herself as a perspective counselor.
