4 Ways to Increase the Sensitivity of Your Team’s Empathy for Your Customers

The Parallel process begins with empathy – an absolute necessity in leaders today. But not just empathizing with how people feel, empathizing with where they want to go. The questions that leaders need to ask are: What are their employees’ and team’s goals? What are their priorities? Aligning your goals with the goals of those around you makes you feel as though you’re all moving toward a shared end goal that you’re all vested in contributing to. When groups of people are vested in helping each other reach their goals, everyone lives a more meaningful life.

Here are 4 actions you can start taking today to increase the sensitivity of your team’s empathy:

1. Make your organization’s empathy inclusive by making empathy a pillar of your organization’s culture to be practiced & perfected:

1. in the achievement of all organizational goals & priorities
2. for all customers who the goals & priorities are designed to benefit  

2. Focus on understanding the priorities of everyone involved
   
   Take your list of the customers from 1b above, and focus your team on understanding where each customer wants to go. Learn what’s important to them.

3. Stay sensitive to shifting environments and priorities
   
   Keep everyone’s antenna up at all times, always sensing for changes in the priorities of your customers. What was important to them yesterday isn’t necessarily what is important to them today.

4. Share intelligence learned from empathy in a central, easy-to-use ‘empathy database’
   
   Keep your empathy database live, active and shareable so that everyone in your organization can access and share the current priorities of all customers.

You can start taking these 4 actions to immediately dial up the sensitivity of your team’s empathy. Everyone will become vested in helping your customers reach their goals and everyone will live a more meaningful life. 

You can also try our software Parallel which automates these actions and has an empathy database as a core feature. In Parallel, everyone on your team can share and access realtime intel on customers. Visit workinginparallel.com to learn more and use it free.

Next week, I’ll be breaking down the second step of our process so that you can use your team’s heightened sense of empathy to help everyone in your organization and in your life feel excited to succeed.