Happiness for All — Part 2
The Power of Empathy
My first post on Toyota’s goal of producing happiness was about the power of giving. This post is about the power of empathy.
Empathy is often considered to be a soft, nurturing emotion connected with compassion and love. Empathy also relates to how supervisors treat those they supervise (and visa-versa) and how companies treat one another. And empathy is at the heart of a very timely business question: How did Toyota, built on lean, just in time logistics, manage the supply chain shortages of the COVID-19 pandemic?
To get to the answer, I’m going to begin by first reviewing what civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said about empathy and love. I’ll then explore the value of empathy in the workplace, and end with an analysis of how empathy enabled Toyota to navigate supply chain shortages.
Empathy and Love
Martin Luther King (MLK) Jr. believed in the power of direct action and non-violence to advance civil rights, social justice, and nuclear nonproliferation. For his words and actions, his birthday is celebrated across the United States and also in Hiroshima, Japan.
In MLK’s December 4, 1957 Sermon to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches, he focused on the rationale for non-violence. A Baptist minister, MLK’s speech was based on the New Testament’s call to love your enemies. Similar teachings exist in most other religions, including the Golden Rule (e.g. in the Abrahamic religions) and the Inverted Golden Rule (e.g. in the Confucian Analects).
What does the word “love” mean in the phrase “love your enemies”?
MLK’s answer was as follows:
“…. There are three words in the Greek New Testament for love. First, there is eros. In platonic philosophy eros means the yearning of the soul for the realm of the gods. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love.
Second, there is philae. It means intimate affection between personal friends. Philae denotes a sort of reciprocal love. The person loves because he is loved.
When we speak of loving those who would oppose us, we refer neither to eros nor philae. We speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate. It means understanding, creative, redeeming goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is the love of God operating in the human heart. When we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. … ”
Agape and the motivation for the Golden Rules arise from empathy for other people — from realizing that we are like them and imagining how we would feel from their perspective. Empathy is the wellspring of compassion, and the most vital safeguard of human relationships. It is also a powerful antidote to social division.
Empathy in the Workplace
Empathy plays an important role in the workplace too, particularly when it comes to building a successful and meaningful relationship between supervisors and those they supervise.
Much attention is paid to the art of supervising employees, including the highly effective technique of setting objectives and measuring key results. However, much less attention is paid to how feedback is delivered.
Well-intentioned supervisors frequently provide feedback in the form of carrots and sticks, or to use the Japanese metaphor, candy and whip. This is a natural tendency — one often learned from our parents. If we do something well, we earn praise, and if we misbehave, we earn a stern rebuke. But many supervisors (and parents) don’t realize that there is significant evidence that this approach is counterproductive.
The idea of using rewards and punishments to modify someone else’s behavior is long-standing. In the 1940s and 1950s, this idea was furnished a pseudo-scientific patina through seemingly insightful analogies to electro-mechanical feedback systems and the work of the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, who erroneously extrapolated from the success of operant conditioning in rats.
Modern behavioral psychologists have found that while rewards and punishments do motivate people in the short term, human beings exhibit poor long-term response when extrinsic rewards and punishments are handed out by other people. In fact, this approach often builds resentment towards being controlled and paradoxically causes people to perform more poorly even when rewarded. This even happens to young children, who lose interest more quickly in intrinsically enjoyable activities when given extrinsic rewards by an adult.
Thanks to new research, we now know that the best long-term results occur if supervisors give feedback through empathy and ecologically valid consequences.
In a management context, empathy means supervisors shifting their perspective to that of those they supervise, imagining things from their side of the table (including physically joining them on that side), and acting from that perspective. It is not about being meek. MLK was not being meek when he proposed agape as the principle behind the non-violent approach to direct action. He was proposing a form of societal feedback that worked.
Ecologically valid consequences require that supervisors stop judging those they supervise and instead let the actual consequences of a supervised person’s actions, not the supervisor’s opinion, determine the feedback. This is the great advantage of startups, where the impact of each employee’s actions is easily seen. The challenge is to make this work in big companies as well.
Empathizing instead of judging, while letting the real world judge, is what great teachers and mentors do. When I joined Toyota seven years ago, I learned that striving for ecologically valid feedback is also related to Toyota’s historic philosophy urging managers to “go to the genba” (the place of problems) rather than managing by remote control from their offices.
This has been particularly true since Akio Toyoda became Toyota’s president 12 years ago. In response to the challenges of the Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy and the 2009–2011 Toyota Vehicle Recalls, Akio emphasized his desire to, “be the company president that was closest to the genba,” and most strongly encouraged others to do the same. He urged team members to ascertain what is happening in the real world, and then give feedback transparently with facts, because in front of facts, there is no hierarchy. In parallel, all employees were encouraged to practice their own assessment and feedback through hansei and kaizen (self-reflection and continuous improvement). He wanted team members to feel like owners, like in a startup, directly seeing the impact of their actions, and directly taking responsibility for them.
The existence of these practices in Toyota is no accident. They stem from Japanese (and more generally, Confucian) culture where mentors and mentees (senpai and kohai) are intimately invested and feel responsible for one another. The pair are not equal, but they face the challenges of the world together with deep loyalty.
Many Westerners learn a taste of this in movies about, and practice in, the martial arts. But this culture is much deeper than mere hierarchy and respect. It extends to something called amae where both mentors and mentees strongly feel both philae and agape for one another, regardless of hierarchy.
Strong proponents of this approach are also found in the West. W. Edwards Deming, for example, reinforced these traditions by advocating against Skinnerian performance feedback as he helped Japan transform into a powerful producer of high-quality products. Dr. Ross Greene pioneered similar ideas for helping children (particularly those with difficult behavior issues) in a technique called Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS). I have found that CPS works not only for my children, but as a general best way to manage students and team members. In my experience, the only limit to its effectiveness has been my own patience.
Empathy and the Supply Chain
Now, let’s return to Toyota’s experience in the COVID-19 pandemic. When the semiconductor supply crisis first hit the auto industry, early media reports speculated that Toyota’s just in time system would fail and that larger inventories were necessary to buffer against supplier shortages. However, after a few months it was evident that Toyota, while not immune, suffered less than many others from supplier shortages.
Why was this? It turns out that for extended time difficulties like COVID-19, inventory levels are quickly depleted whether or not just in time is used. The key differentiator was that Toyota treated its suppliers with empathy and worked to help them overcome their obstacles, in the same way a good supervisor would support those supervised experiencing difficulty in their job.
When supply chain problems arose, rather than viewing suppliers as adversaries on the other side of the table and applying “us vs. you” pressure (as is typical in the West), Toyota managers went to the genba of supplier factories, got on their side of the table, and helped them solve problems. This didn’t mean giving in. It meant acting with empathy in accordance with the reality that OEMs and suppliers are in the same boat.
Toyota thinks not only of our employees (which are called “team members”), but also our suppliers and partners, as family. We hold our Toyota team members, suppliers and partners to extraordinarily high standards of quality and efficiency. But at the same time we consider their problems to be our problems. We recognize our interdependence. In psychological terminology, Toyota team members are urged to be “other oriented” — to think in terms of “You,” not “I”. This applies not only to supervisors when interacting with those they supervise, but those supervised when considering the perspective of their supervisors. And it is how we strive to treat people on other teams and our business partners.
The Japanese phrase that explains this best is “onaji kama no meshi wo kuu” meaning “eat rice out of the same pot”. This is reflected in one of Toyota’s principles since its founding: “Always strive to build a home-like atmosphere at work that is warm and friendly.” This is the essence of good management between people and between companies. I believe it is a deeply important idea for the improvement of human society, and is greatly responsible for Toyota’s success.
From the Power of Empathy to Happiness
In closing, let’s consider one of the most intractable problems of mankind — the problem of lasting peace. Peace requires first imagining one’s adversary as oneself, and cultivating agape.
For example, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (JFK) said:
“… So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
JFK followed this speech with the signing and ratification of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
What works between countries also works between business partners. The best-selling 1981 book Getting to Yes emphasized empathizing with your counterpart as the key enabler of a successful negotiation. Both sides must understand the true motivations and concerns of the other side and collaboratively find a win-win solution.
The same power of empathy that leads to peace and success in business partnerships can be used both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
Tying this back to my last blog post, our social instincts towards altruism and our abilities to empathize are strongly synergistic. The reason to give to others is not only because it makes us happy to give, but because it makes those we help happy too, which in turn makes us even happier when we imagine things from their perspective.
A virtuous circle, indeed!
Thanks to Alex Alexanian, Chanel Hong, Andrew Saidel, Heishiro Toyoda, Andrew Overton, Wendy Rosen, and Tomoki Yoshida for their assistance.
Gill
