Minter Dial

9:15 am - How To Bring Empathy Circles Into a Business Context 

Speaker: Minter Dial  (15 min) To Video, Summary, AI, Outline, Full Transcripts

Bio: Minter Dial is a professional speaker, award-winning author (books include "Heartificial Empathy" and "Making Empathy Count") and documentary filmmaker. 

Abstract:  In business, one of the biggest issues is poor communications, which tends to be exacerbated by time pressures. Over the last several years, I've been using Empathy Circles with executives within the context of a seminar or training to show the power of active listening. In this session, I'll present how I use the EC in my training and specifically how to integrate the learnings into the business.  

OTTER.AI Summary 

Minter Dial discussed his experience with the empathy circle, a practice he has conducted over 200 times, often in business seminars. He emphasized the importance of empathy in business, noting that 73% of participants believe they have above-average empathy, which he finds implausible. Dial highlighted the need for self-awareness and active listening, using exercises like the Yanny/Laurel illusion to illustrate different perspectives. He detailed a 30-minute empathy circle exercise, where participants practice listening and reformulation in groups. Dial also stressed that empathy requires time and energy and advocated for empathy both within and outside the workplace.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/4E55FsqrP-NWTtGRvQeMtGbIyHo?view=transcript


Action Items


Outline

Introduction and Background of Minter Dial


Empathy in Business and AI


Understanding Empathy and Perspective


Debriefing and Results of the Empathy Circle


Challenges and Practical Tips for Empathy in Business


Case Study: Empathy at Redken


Characteristics of an Empathic Leader


Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/4E55FsqrP-NWTtGRvQeMtGbIyHo?view=transcript

Speaker 1  

Like to reintroduce Minter. Minter. We've got our fingers crossed that you're,


Well, in any event, Big Ben is, is in my background. Welcome and hello from London, England, where I'm calling in from, so I don't know to what extent you heard what I said before, but I'm going to just presume nothing happens, and we'll start. I'll start from a scratch, if you will, and share my screen. So I let's get that up and running. It's full. There we go. So I practice the empathy circle now for about 10 years, and I've probably done over 200 empathy circles in my life. Oftentimes, what I'm trying to do is introduce empathy into the world of business, which is where I came from. 

I worked in well, for 25 years. I was working in big businesses. I've also started up four companies, so I've had the chance to exercise empathy within a business context, as well as at home. Of course, I've written a couple of books on the topic of empathy, but specifically what I wanted to talk to you about was the practice of the empathy circle that I use in the middle of a business seminar. And this is a business seminar I've been running for about two years now. I am considered an expert for a group called the APM. And the APM have a what they do is I, they bring me in once a month to, or more than that, to a group of 20 to 25 entrepreneurs, and I talk about them about how to try to create a more empathic culture in business. 

And I also then try to blow their minds and talk about notions of the humanization of AI and the specific ideas and state of the art of encoding AI with empathy, which is quite a fascinating space and a very evolving space. And then in that, I'm looking at what exactly is empathy, because that's what you need to do if you want to encode it. And what does it say about our society that we would like to delegate empathy into AI, so much I, you know, I try to say, stimulate ideas as I talk about this, to this group. 

There are 400 of these clubs around the world. And I've done sessions in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, the Middle East Turkey, also in Africa, and all the other Francophone company countries in Europe and and it's a it's a fascinating thing, because these are people who are, are absolutely operational individuals, all CEOs running companies from anywhere from 1 million to usually the largest is around about 100 million euros in size. So when I start out, one of the things I like to do is ask them what, what is their level of of empathy before having explained it or anything? This does two things. First of all, it gets them thinking about actually, what is empathy and how often they have misinterpretations, or what it is, or at least different interpretations.

 And the second thing is to make them aware of their need for empathy. Specifically, what I do is I ask them, after that, to what extent do you believe you're empathic? And in this is a survey I've done over 1000 times, which shows that around about 73% of people believe that they have an above average level of empathy. And of course, I'm not a mathematician or a statistician, but that would seem to be implausible, and the idea here is to show that well, if you actually want to improve your empathy, you need to have self awareness. And if you think you're already truly the best empathic well, then you don't have the incentive, the motivation, to actually want to improve. I also asked them about them whether they have above average listening skills, which, as Edwin knows, is really the central piece this empathy circle and active listening and most people will tend to think again, oh, I'm really good at listening. I bring them through a I try to bring them in in an E casual way. So I I bring them in and talk about this notion of perspective. Of course, you have your perspective. 

But is it the same perspective as everyone? Are we at the bottom, or are we at the top of this building? I told them, I take them through this image, which everyone's probably seen. Do you see? What do you see? People see images differently. I tell them about this famous dress. People see different colors. Then I bring them through the Yanny Laurel, which i What i. I didn't put the sound button, but it basically, some people hear Yani, and other people hear of the exact same word, Laurel. You can check it out on this thing. But the point being that we see different images, we we see different colors. We see we hear different things, and this contaminant what's being said on the other side. So I then will like to talk about the art of reformulation. 

And in business, pretty much everybody went through sales training somewhere which talks about the art of reformulation. Oh yeah, I know what that is, but very few of them actually still practice it. It's something that's sort of almost contained only in sales. So I bring them through what that is, what, what is the art wide reformulation, and this is part of the introduction into the empathy circle. So finally, we get to the empathy circle and understand that this is in a full day from 930 to 530 and I want to have, I'm obviously bringing them content around empathy as well at the very end, about empathy and AI, but I have a number of exercises, and I do this exercise, the empathy circle in that day, and I only do a 30 minute exercise, which, of course, is not optimal, but it's it's already difficult to, Let's say, tax these individuals who are supremely busy. CEOs always running after time and and also running after listening. But the idea then is to make them experience I tell them, I take them through what it is, and I want them to Edwin Rutsch  

oh, I think we have more time. Ruth, let them we have, actually, till the top of the hour. Now, these others went shorter. Oh, go

in any event, um, this is the the idea. I bring them through, and I tell them experience it, and then I make them go around and in groups of three or four only, where they have to choose a scribe, someone's going to keep notes of what's being said. And the time keeper only do this for 30 minutes, which essentially gives them and I tell them to do it in bursts of three minutes. So that's the exercise. That's how I've adapted it to make it work for them, which means that there's basically 10 times people are speaking and feeling hurt and so on. And get that around with the three people or the four each has gotten a couple of times at least to experience that.

 Then I debrief. And and like in everything in business, we need to have. So I will ask them to talk about specifically what was useful in the content that was around this question, which I'll show in a moment, and then the second piece of the debrief, which, of course, is the most interesting one, which is about the format. What did they experience in this moment. 

And I give them this question, which is, how could empathy drive my business, and how to create a more empathic culture in my business? That's that's what they talk about for the 30 minutes. These are the things that typically come out in terms of the results, if you will, the outcomes they talk about, the the awareness, how, how or their listening skills are. It's even sufficient in 30 minutes for that to happen. How often they want to like I think it was Edwin was saying, you know, want to interrupt someone else. They're already starting to think about what they're already talk, you know what? The how they want to respond. 

There's also another thing which I'd like to add, Edwin, to your introduction of empathy, is empathy as a speaker, because we often the issue often, is that when you're the CEO, everyone is expecting you to have empathy. But sometimes there should be the opportunity speaker to have empathy for the listener, and also for the employees, to have empathy for the boss, even though they're the ones earning the big bucks. We talk about the bonds that are created even in the 30 minutes, the special feeling of actually being heard by somebody who's focusing on what is saying? How the reformulation helps me to actually get to the bottom of what I'm trying to say. It's amazing how often people words that comes out of their mouth aren't actually the ones that most represent what they meant.

 And in this process of reformulation, they come up with that and also this collective intelligence in 30 minutes, they're submit systematically surprised by how much they get out of it, as opposed to having done this individually with a blind, you know, blank sheet of paper on this question, there are a few things that I like to impose or tell them about when trying to bring empathy into the business. Yes, the first is empathy does use an important resource. It's not necessarily free, unlike what I think some people tend to believe, it requires your energy, your concentration, and the other one, which is supremely important in business, which is your time. 

Of course, it can save time. It can do many things for you, but you also need to be able to apply yourself and be ready to have that resource, that allocation of concentration and tension and time for the person or the persons you're listening to. I also tend to suggest that they have permission not to try to be empathic all the time with everybody in every situation. We have to stop being dogmatic about this and allow them to know that they are also imperfect beings and not expect to be perfectly empathic. As an author of a book, and those of you who also have written might also get those feelings sometimes when my wife, for example, says, Well, that wasn't very empathic. 

Of you mentor. I thought you knew all about it. Well, yeah, but it's very difficult to be empathic all the time. And then as getting into the self awareness in the organization, how empathic are they already? They I encourage them to start practicing empathy outside, especially at home, but also with strangers. And then when it comes to the work piece, if they're not a very empathic organization like the one I work for for 16 years, maybe focus where you want to drive your empathy according to strategic priorities in your organization, which helps focus the mind in business and make you a little bit more clean to practice empathy in business. I'm just going to finish for the last three minutes that I have talking about red can, where I was a CEO for a few years. I don't know if any of you know it. It's a hairdresser brand selling hair color and shampoos, and I had an extraordinary experience there. So when I talk about bringing empathy into the culture, I talk a lot about this inside out model, which means that you need to start modeling the behavior in the very core piece of your business.

 So that starts with you, Mr. And Mrs. CEO, your executive team, and then modeling that out throughout, rippling out throughout the organization, and your your channel, let's say of distribution, where you have in the beginning of the business, and then outside you might have your cost you know, business to business customers, your distributors. Then finally, the the clients, the end customers, who are using it. 

So try to have a culture that has consistency and coherence from the inside out. And I frequently talk about trying to align what you're trying to do inside your company with what you're trying to do outside the company. People get very focused on what they're trying to do outside, because that's where the money is getting the customers happy, but you should start with that, having that culture internally with your own employees, before expecting them to be empathic with your customers. And I'm going to finish with this pi model. The the in French, it's p, which is the magpie, but it's also the PI in English, p, i, e, which stands for Personal, internal, external, and it's consistent with my inside out model. Need to start with empathy personally. 

And one of the things that frequently comes out of my my seminars is the opportunity to be more empathic at home with my children, with my spouse, and because that's also about being consistent, being coherent as an individual, and then internally with your inside your company, and then externally towards your external stakeholders. And I talk about we, we you were talking about Meryl Streep. Was that Felicia talking about Meryl Streep? Or someone was talking about but that was Edwin, but the idea of reading fiction, these are different ideas as to how to improve your empathic skills. Practice active listening at home and try to get over this thing called the communication of the by the bias of close communication, where you tend to forget to listen to people you know for a long time because you think you already know what they're already saying. Chat with strangers when you're having difficulties with someone, think about identifying frequently. Promote the idea of practicing meditation and needing to be present, which is, again, is a resource you need to use sometimes in order to be able to be empathic. These are the characteristics of being an empathic leader. Leader. T

his is from a survey in business solver. But the way I used to do it when I was at Redken and CEO is being fair and firm. And very often people mistake empathy as being weak and and. And being rolling over. I think I think of empathy as being fair and firm in what I what I believe. It's not about being rolling over. That's it. And these are my books. And most recently, I did a collaborative book called Making empathy count, which was done with a woman called Lena renzewicz. And my other book is called artificial empathy. And of course, in the center of you lead is this notion of an empathic leader. You see now my ringer is on, I'm finished.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai