Come Gather Round

Helping Leaders (and others) Forge Emotional Bonds

by Dick Richards

(originally published in Today’s Coach)

In the art of coaching, empathy comes so naturally that it is barely noticed. It flows freely, a strong steady current beneath the surface of whatever turbulent waters we are helping our client pass through. When something comes that naturally, it is often difficult to communicate to others exactly what it is we do so that they too can do it. A clear understanding of empathy grants us the opportunity to help those we coach to develop that most practical and positive facility. This opportunity is particularly vital if we coach leaders, who must inevitably meet the mood of those they lead in such a way as to foster an emotional bond.

The stories of three accomplished leaders - Alice Harris, Matt Catingub, and Beverly O’Neill - along with brief excursions into the hearts of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, illuminate the nature of empathy.

Empathy has two ingredients. The first is the experience of stepping into someone else’s emotional world without getting lost in it. A useful metaphor is watching a movie in which we are able to enter the emotional world of the characters on the screen while remaining firmly in our own seats. We, the audience watching Gone With The Wind, know exactly how Scarlett O’Hara feels when she cries, “As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me! I’m going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again - no, nor any of my folks! If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill! As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” We sense both her despair and her resolve.

We also know how Rhett feels when he tells her, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” He is dismissing her, proud of doing so, and quite pleased for the opportunity to let her know about it.

Entering into the emotional world of another person requires a special kind of imagination - a re-membering, a putting back together, which involves returning to our own past feelings, or calling up feelings that are with us but that we do not readily acknowledge or express. This kind of imagination is not merely an intellectual “remembering” but also a return to the sensations that characterize the feeling: we may cry along with Scarlett and nod our heads in concurrence with Rhett. When we re-member we reconnect with a part of ourselves.

As an audience, we are afforded the opportunity to step into the emotional worlds of Scarlett and Rhett by virtue of watching their lives unfold on-screen. We enter their emotional worlds in our imaginations, sensitive to the changing flow of feeling in each of them and re-membering our own feelings. As we watch, we know it is not our emotional world, we know that our participation in it is temporary, and at the same time we know how they feel.

For some leaders it is easier to imagine the emotional worlds of their followers than it is for others. Alice Harris, known affectionately as Sweet Alice, is one such leader. At sixteen Harris was homeless, with two infant children and no food, and pleading for work in exchange for food and shelter. A woman offered her work, a small salary, and the use of a garage apartment. She asked in return that Harris help others in the future.

Today, some forty years later, Harris is executive director of Parents of Watts, an organization she founded. She oversees more than a dozen programs that provide emergency food and shelter, health seminars, legal and drug counseling, support for unwed mothers, and help to prepare young people for jobs and for college. The programs are housed in eight homes in Los Angeles that Harris owns.

Alice has earned a degree from California State University and was honored in 2002 as the California lieutenant governor’s Woman of the Year. She has been a panelist at Pepperdine University’s annual Call to Leadership, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Black American Political Association of California. Her support is often courted by California politicians. One of her many fans said Harris may be the person most responsible for the relative peace of Watts since the riots of 1965.

When she talks about the people around her, Harris says, “I have worn the shoes of most of the people I have heard. I understand what they are going through. And I also understand that they have no resources. It is a pain that they have that people don’t understand - a hard pain.” Harris is able to imagine the pain of the people she helps because she too once felt that pain. “I have weathered that storm,” she said.

This sense of wearing the shoes of the people they lead echoes from other leaders. Matt Catingub is the pops conductor of the Honolulu Symphony. He was named one of “10 Who Made a Difference” by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2002 for his work in drawing top-notch talent to perform with the orchestra, for his musicianship, showmanship, and recordings, and for beginning the Music and Artists of Hawaii program to provide local musicians opportunities to perform with the symphony. Catingub can imagine the feelings of the musicians he selects for his bands because he has faced the same struggles they face.

The second ingredient of empathy is the ability to communicate to another person that his or her emotions have been understood and accepted. This communication requires a deep and honest caring about how other people feel, as well as avoiding attempts to minimize the importance of any feeling or to change it either by offering advice or judging it.

In the early stages of her career, a single incident taught Beverly O’Neill lessons about empathy that she says she will never forget. In 1994, O’Neill was elected mayor of Long Beach, California, the fifth largest city in the state and the thirty-third largest in the country. Four years later she was reelected, receiving nearly 80 percent of the vote. Long Beach prevents the name of an incumbent mayor from appearing on the ballot for a third term. However, in 2002, O’Neill was reelected as a write-in candidate. She was also elected as a trustee of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and president of the League of California Cities, and has received numerous awards for her work.

O’Neill recalls learning about empathy years before her electoral success, when she had responsibility for the buildings and grounds operations of a college. She had a corps of gardeners and another of custodians who worked for her. One custodian, a man in his fifties, came to her to tell her he was resigning.

“He was so upset, and so emotional,” she said. “He was falling apart. The man started to cry. I was listening but I didn’t know what the issue was. He was a good custodian, but here was this man in tears. He was quitting.”

After much patient listening she began to understand. Gardeners were in charge of anything that was in the dirt; custodians of anything on the sidewalk. The tearful custodian had seen gardeners kicking cigarette butts out of the dirt and onto the sidewalk where they would not have to pick them up. O’Neill says that often, when she tells this story, people laugh. But it wasn’t funny to her at the time.

“That taught me such a message about how relevant and irrelevant things are to different people,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he was so emotional about this issue. But when you visit it daily, and you are involved with it daily, you see it happen daily, and it affects you personally, you get to a breaking point.”

She told him, “I can see how you are feeling about this because you are obviously so upset and so emotional about this issue. It is something that we can take care of.” The custodian stayed at his job.

O’Neill’s lessons? First, she said, “Issues are all relevant to the person that is talking about them.” And beyond that, “You have to be prepared to listen. Sometimes that is all people want - to get something off their chest.”

Not all leaders (nor other people) are as emotionally fearless as Harris, Catingub, and O’Neill. Many are unable or unwilling to step into someone else’s emotional world. Sometimes this is because they are separated from their own emotions. Sometimes it is because they fear getting lost in the emotions of others. We can make empathy easier by helping them to re-member, calling on our client’s recollections of similar situations from their own lives, on how they felt, what they did or did not do - always with the view that emotion is not to be feared. And always with the view that emotions carry important information, and that we need not get lost in the feelings of others while retrieving that information.

We can make empathy easier also by facilitating our client’s efforts to communicate to others who they have heard and accepted their feelings. The standard methods will do - patient listening and questioning, role playing, feedback, and so forth. These methods can easily be focused on communicating understanding of the feelings of others.

By helping clients to re-member and helping them communicate understanding, we enable them to enter into the emotional worlds of others knowing that it is not their world and that their participation in that world is temporary. When we do so, we also help them hear what emotions are saying. If those clients are leaders, we also help them to forge important emotional bonds with others.

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