Is Compassion the Secret to Building Great Products?

Hi. Welcome to near and Far, and Today, the question is, is the secret to building great products and services cultivating compassion? Well, my next guest thinks so. Dr. Monica Warlein is a research scientist at the Stanford center for Compassion and Altruism Research. Monica, welcome, and thanks for being on the show today.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming. And so tell us, what's the business case for cultivating compassion?

Well, it might seem soft and fuzzy to you, but in fact, if you're trying to innovate quickly and you're telling people to fail fast, you know that people hate to fail, and failing creates suffering. And compassion is defined as a response to suffering to alleviate that suffering. And compassion is key to learning on the job. So in the innovation space, I think compassion is at the heart of failing fast and recovering quickly. And so that's one primary business case for compassion in the innovation space.

Tell us that definition one more time. Compassion is defined as.

As a desire and action to alleviate suffering.

To alleviate suffering. So your desire to alleviate somebody else's suffering.

Yes.

So it actually sounds like what we do in product development. I mean, that's what we. What I tell people in terms of designing good products and services, you've got to figure out what their pain is.

That's right. You may never have used the word compassion, but when you're identifying somebody's pain point and you're trying to create something that alleviates it, that's actually compassionate product design.

Huh? Fantastic. All right, so it makes us better at designing the products. Yes. What else?

Much better at delivering a service. Okay, so service quality hinges on relationships, and relationships deepen. When we actually listen and hear what's going on in someone else's life, we tune into something that might be causing them pain, and we respond in an authentic way. So a second part of the business case for compassion is that it really increases service quality. And then if you're running an organization where you really need people to be engaged and you want to retain those customers, there's a lot of research now that shows that compassion is actually at the heart of employee engagement and customer engagement. So you get people much more deeply involved in their work, which, when they can do it with compassion for the people they work with and for their customers.

What's your favorite example of companies that do this really well? What are the most compassionate companies?

Oh, you know, I think there are a lot of pockets of compassion in almost every company, and I don't actually tend to single out any one company as a Highly compassionate company because I think it's much more than culture. A lot of people focus on organizational culture, but this is really about human to human relationships. So there's a very broad scale study in the financial services industry where compassion matters. And how they studied it was they looked across units in the same organization and actually units vary widely in how compassionate they are. So if you name one organization as a compassionate organization, it's actually sub pockets.

Within, I see sales within teams within.

That are compassionate units that are more compassionate in the financial services industry. Close more deals, keep more customers, and when they experience a downturn, they bounce back faster.

Interesting. So this has actually been studied in that field. And so why is that? Why do these teams that are more compassionate, why do they close more business?

They close more business because I think they listen to their customer more, they hear, like you said, what their customers pain points are and they're able to adapt quickly their service and set of product offerings to meet their customers needs and they respond more quickly to the downturn. They keep their customer engaged even when things are bad, often by sharing what's going on in their side of the equation and again opening up the space for dialogue. Interesting. We know that more compassionate units are also more collaborative.

Interesting. And what's the opposite? What's the other extreme of being not compassionate? What happens to you if you're not compassionate?

Well, we think of there's some research that shows that not compassionate organizations are like ego systems. People become isolated, they drive their own success and they don't think about the success of other people. They might trammel over their customers needs in order to sell more or get ahead. And compassionate organizations are like ecosystems where people realize that they're interdependent, they're tied together, they depend on each other for success. They may measure success in terms of team or group or collective success, or they might define success larger and include more stakeholders.

Do you think that goes up and down the organization? Because I think particularly here in Silicon Valley we have this. Maybe it's a myth. I'm not sure that the person at the top needs to have a big ego, needs to drive hard, needs to push people, and is not often portrayed as someone who's compassionate. Quite opposite. Right. It's someone who has a vision and just needs to push that vision forward. Do you think that might be wrong?

I do, I do. I think it's a myth. I think it's a powerful myth for creating a public Persona. But I think the isolated hero as entrepreneur is really a myth. And most Entrepreneurs need other people to succeed. They need people to get interested in what they're doing. They rely on a network of relationships. And the more that those relationships are strong, the more that their business is lifted up. And when they encounter a problem, they can bounce back. So I think we like to have the standout Persona who is not always compassionate. But some research with top leaders shows that when you get into their inner circle, even if they cultivate that strong Persona on the outside, they may be quite compassionate with their inner circle.

Interesting. Are there particular business leaders that exemplify what compassion should look like at the top?

Someone that we studied a long time ago now in tech was John Chambers at Cisco Systems. He was an interesting leader in technology because he actually believed that you could build a compassionate system. And he gave Cisco a mandate to anywhere in the world. If something difficult happened to an employee, he wanted to know about it within 48 hours, which created a whole network of alerts within the organization to draw attention to the fact that employees were ill or suffering or had a death in their family. And the organization became quite compassionate because people were much more aware of all the suffering that happens at work.

Fascinating. Yeah. And there's some great stories about how he reached out to particular employees when they were suffering. Now, how do we make sure that that still feels authentic, that that's not something that was just mechanized and routinized, but something that actually feels like came from someone's heart?

I think that you know it by the interaction. So many of the people who interacted with him regularly knew he asked for that because he cared about it, not because he thought it was a manipulation to drive business. He really cared about people. I think I just heard a talk from someone at Southwest Airlines, which is another organization that over a long period of time has maintained a kind of culture of heart. And that seemed to come authentically from the founders, and it seems to be carried on in the leadership role modeling. But also these routinizations of it that happen through the organization are quite important for keeping it widespread. So compassionate organizations don't just end up being compassionate at the top.

So it's not just having it in your heart, but it is actually making it part of the processes, part of systems within the organization.

Yeah, that actually, when we talk to people about organizational change, one of the most invisible and unexpected ways that you can change an organization to be more compassionate is by looking at your routines and saying, how could I make each routine a little bit more empathetic or a little bit more compassionate?

I see. Now I'm guessing somebody viewing this is thinking, yeah, but doesn't that come up against quality standards and holding people accountable and looking at okrs and performance metrics to say, hey look, you're not hitting these bars. How can you be compassionate and hold people accountable at the same time?

Yeah, I bet people do have that question. And in fact it's the opposite. When you hold people accountable with a punitive point of view, they will do everything to buck the system. And if you look at, for instance, we're watching a scandal at Wells Fargo unfold right now where people were held accountable to numbers that they couldn't achieve and the leadership of the organization seemed to be unaware or disregarding of how many people were complaining about the fact that the organization was demanding accountability to something that was impossible. If you build true accountability systems that set your goals and hold people to those goals with a sense of what's human, people will develop A, more determination to meet the goal and B, more, more commitment to the organization. So when you do accountability with compassion, we think that actually builds real human investment in meeting the goal instead of a kind of false extrinsic motivation.

Right. I heard this story that at Wells Fargo they wanted every customer to have eight products because eight rhymed with great. And that was why. Whereas in the average bank it's something like 2.2 is the average number of products per bank. But they wanted to drive to 8. And so that, that maybe not what you're saying here is this non human, non realistic goal drove people, would you say, to do these illegal acts.

So there is a very in depth journalist study of the Enron corporate culture which sounds, when you read that study, very familiar to the journalistic reports we've had about this Wells Fargo culture recently, that there were unattainable goals set in the service of creating wealth for a few people and that the elite part of the organization then distanced itself from the front line of the organization and that created quite an immense amount of human suffering in the front line of the organization, while other parts of the organization were buffered from it.

Interesting, because they didn't have that feedback loop. They didn't realize what was, they weren't compassionate. The people at the top couldn't see.

So that's my quintessential example of accountability without real compassion, without real human connection to the conditions of work and what's possible and what motivates people.

Interesting. So how do we do it? How do we cultivate more compassion within ourselves for our customers, for our Co workers. How do we do it?

Well, we like to talk about four steps to creating more compassion in ourselves. The first is noticing more. So when we all get busy, we're all really distracted. Everyone's overloaded. We stop paying attention to the quality of other people's lives. So first, notice more and you'll actually automatically be more compassionate because you'll see that people are in pain. The second thing is to try to slow down enough to interpret more generously. So when a colleague makes a mistake, for instance, your first interpretation if you're under a lot of pressure is stupid. But if you slow down a bit and say, they're trying just like me, they're overloaded just like me, I could understand how they might have made that mistake. That brings out more compassion in the system. The third is to cultivate your empathy. So empathy is the ability to feel concerned for what another person is going through. And if you interpret more generously like, oh, they're trying, and I see they're actually way overloaded right now, I feel concerned for how much they're pushed to the wall. They're probably making other mistakes too. So then that leads to the fourth thing, which is stepping in to take action. In this case, if you have a colleague who's so overloaded that they're making mistakes, you see that the likelihood is they'll continue to do that. You may step in and offer to help. You may have a conversation with them about whether they're aware of the pattern that they're in. You may ask them if something else is going on in their life that's contributing to this that you could help alleviate. So those are the personal steps. Noticing, interpreting generously, feeling more empathy, and then taking some action.

Fantastic. And are there steps to do this for our customers as well, or are they the same steps?

Same steps. Same steps, Same steps. Yeah. If you. When you're under a strong measure of customer time and you have to resolve a problem quickly, you may ignore a lot of extraneous information that the customer is offering you, which is actually usually information about what else is going on in the customer's life that's causing them pain. And if you pay more attention to the conditions of life that the customer is telling you about, you may actually be able to feel more empathy toward them, but also offer them a different range of services or a different range of products that help meet a wider set of needs. So it builds compassion for the customer. Also usually builds your service and product offerings at the same time.

There's something there that so resonates. I remember I was in a meeting once when we were designing a different user flow, when we were looking for different and we were trying to figure out pinpointing the problem that the customer was having. And one of the people in the room, one of the designers or engineers, I can't remember somebody said in the room, when I asked, well, why aren't people going to the next step? The response was, well, the customer's stupid. And right then and there it's like, okay, this meeting's over, right? If we blame the customer for being stupid, we're putting blame in completely the wrong place. We're not being empathetic at all. We are the problem. We designed the product or service. So it sounds like cultivating that empathy as opposed to jumping to the customer is stupid or my co worker is lazy. It's what else might be going on? Why do we jump to that? Why do we, why do we have that hair trigger reaction to put blame elsewhere, do you think?

Well, research shows that we do. Really, really. So psychologists call those appraisals and we do them really, really quick. And we tend to act off of our implicit biases. So there's a lot of talk nowadays in our culture about implicit bias in things like race or gender, but we have implicit bias about all kinds of human behavior. And as a designer, if you have been highly trained to pay attention to a study and pay attention to flow, pay attention to beauty, and then you see a customer doing something that looks to you like a horrendous decision, your implicit bias is that person is wrong, that thing is ugly. Get it away from me. So we tend to use our training, our background experience, our intellectual knowledge and development, whatever field we've been socialized into as a set of background conditions. And when we're under time pressure or put into kind of a box and we have to make a quick decision, we jump to stereotypical point of view about other people that comes from those fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for being here. I think this was really helpful. Noticing pain, slowing down, cultivating empathy, stepping in to take action. All ways to cultivate compassion for our customers and our co workers. Very, very helpful. Dr. Monica Warlein, thank you so much for being here today and thank you for watching. We'll be here again in the next coming weeks with more business book author and thank you for watching near and Far.