Simon Sinek argues that organizations teach technical skills but skip the human ones: listening, feedback, difficult conversations, empathy. A manager worried about an employee's declining performance asks "Are you okay? I'm worried about you" instead of issuing a warning. These skills are teachable, but we're all bad at them.
Chapters
Companies tend to do a very good job of teaching their employees the job they need to do. How to work the fryer, how to work the oven, whatever it is, how to talk to a customer. There's a lot of opportunity to do better in teaching people how to listen, how to give and receive back, which we talked about. How to have a difficult conversation, that's a hard one. These are human skills. How to have empathy, how to replace judgment with curiosity. These are all teachable, learnable skills. And it's one of the annoying things about being human, which is cats don't have to work very hard to be cats. They're just really naturally good at it. And humans have to work really hard to be good at being human. We are not naturally good at it. And this is why relationships, whether it's romantic relationships, friendships or work relationships, are clunky and messy and difficult. And if you have a bad night's sleep or something bad happened at home, all that stress comes to work. And so starting with empathy is a great, is a great, great entry point. And I'll give you an example of empathy at work. You know, here's pretty normal situation. Hey, your performance is down for the third week in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your performance, I don't know what's going to happen. Fairly normal. Let's replace not.
The most effective.
Not the most effective. Let's replace that with empathy. Right? Hey, your performance is down for the third week in a row. We've had this convers before. Are you okay? I'm worried about you. What's going on? Very different. And you may not get an answer immediately, especially if something's vulnerable they may not want to share immediately. But that feeling that somebody actually cares about me as a human being, not just as a performance machine goes a long.
