Upstairs Empathy

We’ve all heard that it’s a good idea to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. What their concerns, preferences, fears, joys and overall situation might be like right now. It helps to understand what is happening, to calibrate one’s own behavior and quite generally to in a balanced way conduct human-to-human interactions. 

And yet, there seems to be a both strange and relevant issue around this.

It appears that for many it is a real stretch to practice empathy in this sense in relation to individuals who have higher (actual or at least perceived) social status or are in a position of influence. Associates in relation to partners. Lawyers in relation to potential clients. Take any pair of your choice.

There seems to be this notion that all those worries, needs, joys and other all too human expressions are applicable to „normal“ people, people like us, but somehow not to „them“ as in those with perceptibly higher status (along any metric). „They“ don’t seem to need anything from us.

Thinking about it, that can hardly be correct.

If it were true, everybody more senior or influential than us would be totally blissed out. But that’s at least not my experience. The concerns and worries might be different from ours, but they are there. And if they are there, empathy allows us to get a grip on them, to see them and to act on them. Even if we don’t feel them.

On the flip side, if we fail to have this sort of „upstairs empathy“, the results can be quite negative. It might well stifle or at least diminish our ability to effectively move both within and between organizations. The better we can gear our behavior towards our human counterparts, the better and more appropriately they can act towards us. Having „upstairs empathy“ allows us to exert some (or even a lot of) influence on decisions far beyond our actual pay grade and seniority. 

It allows us to move from a passive role, merely enduring what „they“ seem to be doing to us, into an active posture with agency.

And it serves as a reminder that actually there is no real „them“ or „us“. It keeps the realization fresh that most of those apparent differences lie more in the stories we tell ourselves about the situation than differences in the way humans experience life.

If your opposite is human, empathy is possible. We can practice it on purpose and get better at it, in relation to our peers and those who seem to be further removed. And with it almost everything gets better.