INsight/ Know Someone Better
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Manila, 30 November 2023 — The art and skill of getting to know other people.
Story
It happened last week. I enjoyed listening to a talk by David Brooks about his new book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. The topic appealed to me because of its close link to the challenge of becoming trusted leaders that we practice in the Grow3Leaders community. Brooks describes "We're living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating." I agree that this is a challenge.
What made me sit up was when Brooks referred to the research findings of William Ickes, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. What Ickes discovered from his research is that when people meet someone, their capacity to correctly know what the other person is thinking and feeling can score a shockingly low 20%. He called this capacity empathic accuracy, defined as a measure of how accurately one person can infer the thoughts and feelings of another person. With such a low score, clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement in our human ability to get to know other people better. That certainly resonates with my experiences in the workplace and in coaching leaders.
Of course, we don’t have to know everything about each person we meet at work. Yet it’s highly recommended to sharpen our skills for when we need and want to know someone better. Hopefully, our empathic accuracy will over time rise well above 20%, making it possible to rapidly create powerful relationships with team members, bosses, and clients. Moreover, Brooks’ observations touch on qualities that are vital for teamwork and higher performance, that is, to become known as leaders who truly see, value, and understand other people and who make them feel recognized, valued, and understood. Now, that is something that matters greatly in how we show up and communicate every day. How do we get there?
Challenge
The strength of Brooks’ book comes from his journalistic skills and perseverance to unpack an issue that he felt strongly about, and to keep at it for the years it took him to research and write the book. He compellingly makes the case why it is important to make people around us seen, valued, and understood. And he makes it clear that this applies equally to himself and his desires as a human. Where Brooks has underlined WHY the issue is fundamentally important, it complements what we focus on in our leadership coaching—both individually and in our Grow3Leaders community—to learn and practice the WHAT and the HOW of the challenge to know other people in the workplace (and more broadly in life, of course).
In the past two months, the leaders in the Grow3Leaders community have unpacked two essential leadership behaviors that help to act on the challenge Brooks has introduced. The first of these two leadership behaviors is Connect, and the second one is Question. As Brooks suggests, we often take the way we connect with other people for granted, and this is a serious failure when it comes to leaders and leadership. Hence, we have explored how leaders can connect better with their ‘audience’ in a one-to-one conversation, a team meeting, or a larger gathering. We practiced how to overcome the Three Connect Gaps and how to use our curiosity and build our skills to connect with our audience in their language.
The past month was devoted entirely to practicing using the power of questions. While we all use questions as part of our daily work behaviors, we discovered the central importance of this leadership behavior and how to expand our skills toward mastering the art of asking questions in many different situations. We realized that asking questions is, at the heart of it all, an act of creation that we can repeat time after time. This includes questioning ourselves as well as others, in a variety of ways. We practiced overcoming the Three Question Traps and exploring new ways to use questions in building our leadership activities every day and week. Working together on the Connect and Question behaviors, we experienced several Aha moments and some epiphanies that helped to transform how we lead in the workplace.
Question
Brooks writes in his book that we all are prone to overestimate our ability to know what the people around us think and feel. Our empathic accuracy is lower than we think. I agree. Hence, my question for you is HOW you will get to know at least one person better this week. Exploring how to connect and use the power of questions is part of that challenge.
Meanwhile, research continues to help us in getting to know other people better. That includes William Ickes’ 2003 book entitled Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel. Since then, the body of scientific knowledge has expanded dramatically, and so have the disciplines of leadership development, leadership coaching, and positive psychology.
In my view, there has never been a more exciting and important time to grow your leadership than today. What matters is what you do with that. You can decide this week to Know Someone Better and learn what it takes to do that at speed and scale in your team and organization. That will empower your leadership to influence positive changes in your workplace and our world. I look forward to hearing from you with your response to the question.
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