Empathy and Communication

Call for room service at the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas and your meal just might be delivered by Fetch or Jett.  They are a pair of autonomous robots that can successfully navigate the 55-floors of the modern City Center hotel to deliver food, toiletries, coffee, or the occasional Aspirin to a guest in need. 
 
And while these robots have become increasingly adept at delivery, they aren’t likely to be staffing the front desk anytime soon.  That’s because bots equipped with artificial intelligence haven’t been as successful at engendering trust or evoking a positive feeling of shared experience.  In fact, a 2019 Pega study revealed that artificially intelligent robots engender feelings of mistrust from humans because they lack the human dimension of empathy.
 
Empathy, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.  It is a decidedly human characteristic, and it also underlies effective communication.  That’s because communication is inherently a human-to-human process, and for communication to be successful, there must be a relatability between the sender and the receiver.
 
Because empathy plays such a pivotal role in effective communication, here are five tips to ensure you are an empathetic communicator:
 
First, understand your audience.  We call it performing an audience audit, and it seeks to answer questions like, what does your audience care about?  How do they see the world?  What has shaped their perception?  What’s top-of-mind?  What gets them excited?  What makes them skeptical or fearful?  And, ultimately, what do they need to hear for your message to resonate? The more you understand your audience, the more you can frame and fashion your information so that it strikes a deeply personal chord.
 
Second, paint the picture.  We’ve written at length in Soundbites about the importance of storytelling to persuasive and effective communication.  Storytelling works, in large part, because of empathy.  Telling vivid stories allows your audience to see a situation for themselves, to experience an event as if they were there, and to feel the same emotion as if it were happening to them.  When your audience internalizes your message, it’s much more likely to elicit the response you’re looking for. 
 
Third, connect.  Eye contact, an acknowledging nod, an understanding smile, asking a sincere question, using people’s names… .  All forms of audience interaction drive connection and create a shared experience that reinforces the bond between speaker and listener.  And as that bond develops, your audience will lower their defenses and more openly listen to you.
 
Fourth, pause.  Pausing during a presentation is an exceptionally important technique, and the power of a well-timed pause comes from empathy.  For example, after explaining a situation or asking an audience-directed question, a pause lets the audience participate and get mentally invested whereas their input would be excluded if you simply raced to the next line in the script.
 
 Finally, be human.  Communication, inevitably, is an interpersonal activity.  As such, communication is most successful when it looks and feels human.  To that end, speakers shouldn’t shy away from showing emotion, being vulnerable, and illustrating that you aren’t purely a data-delivery machine.
 
While Fetch, Jett, and other autonomous robots may streamline the delivery of a forgotten toothbrush, it takes an empathetic speaker to deliver an inspiring message, effect change, and engender a personal reaction.  It takes empathy.