Empathy is the Engine of Innovation
“We live in a secularized, mechanized and depersonalized world,” writes Gary Hamel in a piece for the Harvard Business Review. “And that’s a problem—because if you want to innovate, you need to be inspired, your colleagues need to be inspired, and ultimately, your customers need to be inspired.”
Innovation is arguably the descriptor most frequently applied to the companies generally viewed as successful – especially in the tech space – like Facebook, Google and Apple, which has practically made their brand name synonymous with the word. But, for many companies, reaching the revered status of those big names remains elusive for one simple reason: innovation, Hamel argues, must truly come from a place of empathy. In other words, innovation starts with the heart, and not with the head.
To illustrate this point, Hamel describes the challenges faced by his brother, the CEO of a Michigan-based healthcare system. The CEO found that patient satisfaction scores at his hospitals were lagging well below national averages, between the 25th and 50th percentiles, despite placing higher in all other rubrics. It became clear to the CEO that his staff was not reaching employees on an emotional level, so he implemented a new system designed to do just that.
“The CEO’s message was simple, unexpected, and daunting,” Humel recalls. “None of us aspire to work in an organization that frequently lets down its customers. We’re going to raise our scores by touching the hearts of our patients — by making sure they know not only how well we care for them, but how much we care about them. We’re going to learn to be more loving. To do that, he said, I want to challenge you to bring your heart to work in new and creative ways.”
After staff began to personalize their service – making a point to speak warmly and openly with patients – they reached their goal of hitting the 95th percentile of patient satisfaction in only 90 days, with scores rising across the board, even on items that weren’t the main focus of the CEO’s plan, like response time and pain management.
The lesson, says Hamel: “empathy is the engine of innovation.”
It’s a lesson Hamel believes should be applied to companies across industry.
“Listen to the speech of a typical CEO,” he writes, “or scroll through an employee-oriented website, and notice the words that keep cropping up – words like execution, solution, advantage, focus, differentiation and superiority. There’s nothing wrong with these words, but they’re not the ones that inspire human hearts.”
Rather than think of ways to cater to a disenchanted customer base, the focus should be simply on re-enchanting them.
“The best innovations — both socially and economically — come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love,” Hamel believes. “These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing.”
Read Hamel’s full essay at the Harvard Business Review here.
