The Empathy Advantage

6Enable Your Empowered Workforce

In his 1980 book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Surgeon Looks at the Human and Spiritual Body, Dr. Paul Brand recounts attending a lecture by Margaret Mead. The anthropologist challenged her audience to identify the earliest signs of civilization, teasing the audience with possibilities – pottery, tools, cultivation. Then she answered her own question, holding aloft a fossilized femur. The bone showed a break that had healed. That healing, Mead asserted, was first evidence of a communal society.

In earlier fiercely competitive and predatory societies, a creature with such a significant injury would be left for dead. For the largest bone in the human body to have healed, Mead explained, someone must have cared for this person, tending the wound, feeding and protecting him for the four or more months it takes for this bone to heal. This act of kindness and caring, Mead might say, is the cornerstone of civil society, the belief that we are stronger together.

Fast‐forward 15,000 years to the Industrial Age and it seems the workplace was too often reduced to a competitive and predatory environment. People were replaceable, if not disposable, parts of a production process, competing for resources (jobs, wages, benefits, the boss's attention, and other seeming advantages). Enter digital transformation and knowledge work, and culture and collaboration became the watchwords for highly effective teams. Yet, as one executive told us recently, the concept ...