Horrible bosses: Can training help?
Horrible bosses: Can training help?
Lack of empathy from managers has a range of negative effects, but there are plenty of ways to tackle this.
AI Experiment time! Listen to a podcast version of this newsletter, generated by the new NotebookLM tool from Google (more detail below).
Have you ever worked for a horrible boss? Someone who can’t control their emotions, doesn’t pick up on social cues, or can’t tell how others are feeling?
If you’ve ever worked for a manager like this, you’ll know what an impact it can have: not just at work, but at home. Per our ‘Building Better Managers’ report:
managers who can’t ‘maintain emotional control’ have a negative impact on psychological safety and readiness to change; fail to promote organizational commitment in employees; and report lower financial performance from their teams.
managers who lack ‘social sensitivity’ see lower team performance and satisfaction; and worsened decision making in social settings.
managers who lack ‘empathy’ are 34% less innovative; have a negative effect on organizational performance in terms of profit and growth; and their employees experience more physical ailments.
This summary is backed up by recent reporting from The Economist. The ‘agreeableness’ of leaders, strongly associated with empathy, correlates with ethical behavior, workplace trust and psychological safety (Blake et al, 2022); when bosses are agreeable, their employees tend to rate their organizational culture higher on employee-rating website Glassdoor (O’Reilly et al, 2023).
Does it matter what sector you work in?
Naturally, there is some variation from sector-to-sector. In our research with managers across the healthcare and financial services industries, it became apparent that those who work in a hospital need higher levels of compassion than those who work in an office. It’s why we’ve just launched a version of our content library specifically for managers in healthcare.
But this is a question of degree, rather than whether empathy, self-awareness and social sensitivity are required for high performance.
As The Economist points out:
‘There is a basic level of decency, civility and courtesy to which everyone is entitled and from which all organisations benefit.’
Can training transform the horrible boss?
For those of us tasked with management development, the question then becomes: can we do anything about this? If someone lacks empathy, can they be helped?
According to both the BBC and The New York Times, the answer is ‘yes’. Techniques like mindfulness, asking questions, and paying close attention to what others are saying all contribute to increased empathy. When you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, there’s really no way not to experience what that is like.
And this is the approach taken by the Mind Tools Content team earlier this year when they developed our ‘Empathy’ Skill Bite.
We’ve written about Skill Bites before but, for those who are not familiar with this series, each course starts with an assessment and then delivers practical techniques, every week, that the user can apply to their context.
Because the sessions are delivered via email, the courses are experienced in the flow of work. And because users are prompted to record a personal commitment within the tool, the opportunity to transfer their learning into real-world application is high.
In the case of our ‘Empathy’ Skill Bite, the self-assessment we open with is based on the widely recognized Empathy Quotient questionnaire (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). Techniques that users are prompted to apply include mindfulness and focused attempts to pick up on emotional cues.
Are we just kidding ourselves?
Of course, how do we know that what we’re doing is working? During the development of this Skill Bite, we regularly returned to this question: Are we helping users increase their empathy, or just teaching them how to fake it?
There is good evidence that this isn’t the case. The Empathy Quotient scale that we use to measure empathy has good test-retest reliability, meaning that someone who takes the test twice without doing anything different would be expected to score about the same. Results typically fall into a normal bell curve, and reliability and validity are high.
Second, while empathy may come more naturally to some more than others, our ultimate goal is really to improve the performance of managers at work. If they demonstrate empathetic behaviors, they should see both an increase in their individual performance as well as that of their team.
How else can we improve the empathy of managers?
In the coming months, you’ll see a suite of new products and services from Mind Tools that are focused on building the 12 management capabilities identified in our ‘Building Better Managers’ report, and which are measured by our Manager Skills Assessment.
For example, in just over two weeks we’re running our first virtual workshop, titled: The Empathy Edge: Drive Innovation & Growth Through Connection (Thursday 17 October, 10:00 – 12:00 BST). Places are open now if you’re interested in coming along.
And while we know that there are some managers who will have no interest in increasing their empathy (probably the ones who would most benefit from doing so), the majority of people in general fall somewhere in the middle of the Empathy Quotient scale: pretty good, with room to improve.
If you’re responsible for management development in your organization, get in touch to find out how we can help.
Email custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter to arrange a chat with myself or my co-author, Ross Dickie.
🎧 On the podcast
This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross D and I re-visit our L&D mailbag to answer your questions. Including:
What is L&D actually doing well with Large Language Models? (via Gill Chester)
What’s the top 3 least likely L&D jobs to be replaced by AI? (via Alan Hiddleston)
How can learning teams partner better with the rest of the org? (via Sarah Danzl)
What has been the most popular content on MindTools this year, and why...? (via Adam Lacey)
What lessons from Centauri's Shadow can L&D professionals take forward into the autumn to boost their skills? (via Matthew Batten)
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
Usually in this ‘Deep dive’ section, we try to distil academic research into useful insights that you can apply. We do this partly because we’re interested nerds, but also because we know how impenetrable academic writing can be.
And that’s more-or-less what the new NotebookLM tool is trying to do.
Take a piece of content and plug it into NotebookLM, and it will offer you:
A summary
An audio version, featuring two ‘podcast hosts’ in conversation
Suggested questions
An opportunity to ‘chat’ with the source.
And that’s exactly what I did with this newsletter, creating this audio file.
The strength of this approach is that the two robot ‘hosts’ sound human, have an easy-going style, and even make cultural references that are related to the content (in this case, Dilbert cartoons).
This comment, though, struck me as weird:
‘Remember that boss I had who would, like, walk right past you in the hallway like you were invisible?’
It’s immediately relatable but, of course, this never happened to the host. They didn’t have this experience, because they don’t exist.
Some of the details, like research coming ‘from Glassdoor’ are also slightly wrong.
And towards the end, the conversation leaves the content above and goes off on quite a generic tangent.
I’m not quite sure what to make of it, or how far to trust what they’re saying. For example, if I feed them a bunch of crackpot theories, they’ll report these back to me as gospel.
I’d be intrigued to hear what you think, so hit ‘reply’ to this email and let me know if you listen to the audio.
👹 Missing links
🤖 Are we developing new skills or being augmented?
I was intrigued by this LinkedIn post from our friend Nick Shackleton-Jones, discussing an experiment by Boston Consulting Group. In it, he observes that AI tools are helping improve human capability. But they do this by ‘augmenting’ us, rather than increasing our skills. Of course, lots of tools augment our abilities. Scissors cut paper better than my hands can do. But Nick’s question is: are these tools actually reducing our capabilities? For example, our ability to think, reason, and make decisions?
📰 Misinformation about misinformation is rampant
Here’s an interesting finding: In 2016, US visits to a list of 500 ‘untrustworthy’ news sites accounted for only 6% of visits to news site generally. According to this blog from Tim Harford, the discussion about misinformation is increasingly divorced from the prevalance of it, and legitimate news sources actually amplify misinformation by discussing it so much.
💬 The problem with the AI chat interface
Chat interfaces are everywhere just now. The NotebookLM product I referenced above is just one of them. ChatGPT, of course, is the most famous. But as Benedict Evans points out, chat interfaces require that the user know what questions to ask. In this post, he quotes Steve Jobs: ‘It's not the customer's job to know what they want, nor to work out what to do with a new technology.’ Is there still a place for more directed online experiences?
👋 And finally…
Practice your empathy now by experiencing this Teams invite, through the eyes of Rick Grimes.
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
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