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We tend to greatly underestimate the importance and impact of emotions in business (and personal) settings, a dangerous judgment error called the empathy gap. To address this problem, we need to deploy emotional intelligence, which refers to understanding and managing your own emotions. You also need to rely on social intelligence, meaning the ability to understand and influence other people’s emotions and relationships.
To understand the empathy gap, consider the concept of cognitive biases. Cognitive biases refer to a variety of unconscious mental errors that result from problems in memory, perception, attention, and other mistakes. They occur when our brain tries to simplify the complex world around us and can result in bad decisions. Cognitive biases such as the empathy gap can seriously harm our business relationships and efforts to motivate and engage employees.
An everyday example of an empathy gap is that too many leaders still assume that financial incentives are the only effective employee motivators. In reality, research shows that’s not the case.
Once an employee earns enough to support a middle-class lifestyle, other motivations become more important. These include personal recognition, tribal belonging, or a sense of purpose in the workplace. Different employees are motivated by different motivators.
Case in point: A B2B software solutions company saw a gradual decline in sales and customer satisfaction. It wanted its software engineers to market its services through creating thought leadership. That included writing blogs, doing conference presentations, and similar activities.
The company tried offering its engineers more money but these financial incentives failed. At that point, the company’s leadership sought outside help.
After many interviews and hours of observation, the consultant found that the software engineers didn’t care much for marketing. They were primarily emotionally engaged with solving technical problems.
Already earning satisfactory salaries, additional financial compensation did not improve their emotional motivation. When presented with this information, the vice president of sales asked, with some surprise: “Engineers have emotions?”
When he said that, everyone in the room laughed. It was not the disparaging, mocking laughter for saying something obviously wrong. Instead, it was the laugh of silent agreement. An absence of social intelligence towards software engineers was clearly evident in that interaction.
History shows a number of similar situations when non-technical leaders were trying to motivate and engage technical staff. It’s a surprisingly common response.
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It’s important to understand that the C-suite did not include people with a software engineering background. The CEO served as a chief sales officer at another firm and was hired just months before to help the company improve declining sales.
He replaced most senior executives with his own team, who also did not have much software consulting experience. They had a strong sales and marketing background.
Salespeople tend to be quite extroverted and emotionally open. By contrast, software engineers generally are introverted and avoid public emotional expression.
The tendency to overlook the influence of emotions on people’s behavior is known as the empathy gap. The empathy gap is one of many dangerous errors known as cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact decision-making in all life areas, from business to relationships. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors, such as by constraining our choices by focusing on the top available options, for example by using this comparison website.
It was clarified to the C-suite that since engineers rarely display strong emotions, it’s easy to overlook them and assume that they only follow rational incentives, such as money. In reality, research shows that money is not an effective motivator for more complex technical roles.
Forgetting that software engineers are driven primarily by emotional incentives made it difficult to motivate them effectively. Examining what actually motivated engineers, two promising emotional drivers were found:
To address the motive of personal reputation in the industry, the company changed its messaging to software engineers about selling their services. It stopped focusing on simply increasing revenue.
Instead, the company emphasized how individual software engineers could gain recognition by attaining thought-leader status. It positioned writing expert blogs and presenting at industry conferences as reputation building for the individual engineer, rather than content marketing for the company.
To address the desire for social status from peers within the company, several steps were taken.
The weekly company newsletter began highlighting programmers who got hits on their blogs and presentations at industry conferences. The ”Employees of the Month” criteria were also modified to promote these accomplishments. The promotion process also emphasized thought leadership content creation.
Over the next year, engineers increased their conference presentations by 22%. They also achieved 40% more hits on their blogs, through a combination of more frequent posts and increased participation by engineers.
These changes can be attributed to the effective integration of emotional and social intelligence into the messaging toward employees in efforts to counter the empathy gap.
Are your company’s motivations well-aligned with emotional drivers? What might be some misalignments? Your next steps are to evaluate these alignments and decide what might be done to create better alignment.
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Leaders must recognize that solely financial incentives cannot provide sustained motivation for employees. Instead, many employees, such as software engineers, are driven by emotional factors. Leaders often disregard the influence of emotions, which is a cognitive bias called the empathy gap. Companies must adopt research-based strategies to align their internal culture with emotional drivers, by ensuring that their leaders exhibit emotional and social intelligence. Providing emotional incentives helps in improving employee motivation and productivity.
This article was originally published on the Psychology Today.
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Gleb, also known as the "Disaster Avoidance Expert," is a cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist on a mission to shield people from harmful cognitive biases through his cutting-edge expertise in risk management, social and emotional intelligence, disaster avoidance and decision-making.
