Perspective Taking or Empathy
In any difficult conversation, and especially so when the stakes are high or we are under pressure, we tend to focus on our wants and needs—to see the situation through our lenses—and fail to take the time to see it from the perspective of the people with whom we are interacting. Any good photographer knows that if you change your perspective, you are likely to create something great and unexpected, and the same holds true for life and leadership. Take a different perspective and the outcome is likely to be better.
At one point in my career, I supervised a squad of 20 FBI agents and analysts investigating a significant public corruption network. The work was 24 hours a day, stressful, and exhausting. Over the course of a couple years, the stress began to show. Different agents argued with each other constantly, and they told me about it on a regular basis. My response, too often, was to tell them what I would do in their situation.
In this situation, I had essentially three options: to see the issue from my point-of-view, to take their perspective, or to be empathetic to their frustrations. In this case, I failed to do what any good leader should do, which is to remove my point-of-view from the equation, i.e. to take the first option off the table. Showing genuine empathy would have helped, but the better option here would have been to see the issue from their perspective and to invite them to see the issue from the perspective of whoever it was they were arguing with that week. Employing and promoting perspective taking would have helped to bring my squad back together with much less effort than I ultimately expended.
A study by Adam Galinsky and colleagues, in looking at negotiations, found “perspective takers were able to uncover underlying interests to generate creative solutions when a prima facie deal was not possible…and crafted more efficient deals with greater collective and individual gain than did empathizers.” To find creative solutions and to effectively solve difficult situations, we need to step out of our own heads and get into the heads of others—to see and understand the situation from their perspective—and only then can we begin to propose options that will be acceptable and mutually beneficial.
Another study by Benjamin Blatt MD and colleagues looked at the effect of perspective taking in the health care field, where they looked at patient satisfaction relative to interactions with healthcare providers. They found that when care providers were trained in perspective taking, customer satisfaction improved significantly. Importantly, they found these results were consistent in studies conducted at different institutions and across different racial groups. Physicians, like many professions, are trained to see the world through their specialized lenses; yet it also matters how the patient feels about the interaction. Being heard by the physician and the physician recognizing the patient’s perspective leads to increased trust and better health outcomes.
So, at this point, you may be wondering how perspective taking differs from empathy. Perspective taking involves a more cognitive approach—really thinking about how someone sees things and what options are important to them; empathy is more of an emotional approach—making the effort to feel and recognize how they are experiencing the situation. They work differently in different situations, but the key to both is breaking away from your perspective and taking the time to listen and make sense of how they are seeing and experiencing the situation.
In my example above, and in relation to physicians, empathy would lead to positive outcomes, but perspective taking would be more effective. A 2018 meta-analysis of perspective taking and empathy research found that perspective taking had greater benefits in the context of manager-employee relations and “when collaborating on tasks with jointly determined outputs, such as decision making or creative problem solving.”
Conversely, when you are working with your team to improve team cohesion and culture, you want to promote empathy and affective feeling. Empathy works best laterally—that is, in situations where team members are essentially equals. Empathy also works better in situations that are inherently competitive, where there are potential negative outcomes for one party. Injecting empathy into such a situation improves outcomes and cooperation.
When we are under pressure, even if we know there are better responses, our subconscious thinking takes over, pushing us to see the world from our perspective and to look for what is best for us. In terms of outcomes, however, that way of thinking is not always best for us. A concerted effort to practice and to employ perspective taking and empathy will have better results, and I know for sure that all those years ago with my squad, had I done it better, I (and my squad) would have experienced a lot less stress and would have achieved even greater things.
