Are you an empathetic person? Have people told you to be more empathetic and look from their viewpoint? Did you ever blame yourself for somebody’s wrongdoing and try to find a reason for that? Well, if your answer to the first and third questions was “Yes!” then the world must be at least two times tougher for you.
Oh, the mighty “empathy”… The new favorite word that the “self-love and growth” people like to use. They often see empathy as the most important trait of being human. “As humans, we are different than other animals because we have complex thoughts and empathy. So we need to do better guys!”. And there comes, the superiority complex! I for one don’t believe we are better and more complex than animals just because we are cursed with thoughts and we use them to understand each other. Sure we can think about our existence and all that “deep” things but can you catch salmons with your mouth as a bear does? I’d be mad impressed if you could because in my opinion catching a fish that way is much more complex than thinking. I guess a bear would say the opposite and view thinking as impressive. But wait… If we view the things we normally wouldn’t be able to do as “complex” why do some people say that thinking is what makes us complex?
I will be writing about the relationship between success (in means of wealth) and empathy so I guess it’s crucial to explain empathy first. The dictionary term for empathy is “the ability to imagine what it must be like to be in someone’s situation” and a more psychologically correct term for empathy would be “ a complex capability enabling individuals to understand and feel the emotional states of others, resulting in compassionate behavior” and that “ Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others.”. Just by reading the definitions we could see that empathy might not be suitable for the CEOs and founders of big companies. Imagine a billionaire sipping his grape juice in one of his million-dollar houses’ pool feeling empathetic for some dude that he pays less than minimum wage to. Would he be paying that little and making his employees work nonstop if he were an empath?
People who are not as empathetic are called “apathetic”. With a quick search on the net, we can find that many politicians and CEOs who are known as strong and successful are also viewed as apathetic. By this finding, we can assume that the ability to control comes from not paying attention to the emotions of the ones you rule. If a CEO was concerned about their employees’ wellbeing their first and most primal intention would have probably been to hire more human resources managers. Let’s say that a company pays their office workers 10 $ an hour, their delivery employees 5$ an hour and HR managers 15$ an hour. Did you get where I’m going with this example? In the beginning, the company has 20 office workers, 30 deliverymen and has a policy that states that every 10 employees get to have an HR manager. Right now they are paying their office workers a total of 200$ an hour, their deliverymen a total of 150$ an hour, and their HR managers a total of 75$ an hour. As time goes on the company grows and now it has 100 office workers,200 deliverymen, and 30 HR managers. The totals that are given are 1000$/h for office workers, 1000$/h for deliverymen, and 450$/h for HR managers. Compared to the other employees the HR managers’ total might not look that high but let’s not forget that the HR employees’ numbers are lesser than other employees too. But if we gave every 30 people an HR manager, the number of HR managers would drop to 10 and in total we’d be paying our HR 150$/h. With a 300$/h difference in the HR budget, we could hire 30 more office workers or 60 more deliverymen and increase our income. Our HR managers are not making money for us, their job is to help our employees with their problems at the workplace. However, our office workers and deliverymen are the ones that make money for us and even a %30 increase in their numbers might affect our stock rate positively. This system might look morally wrong and overall a harsh thing to do to your employees but please don’t forget that right now we are an apathetic CEO and don’t care about our employees’ wellbeing. Think from their perspective and feel empathy for an apathetic CEO who buys handbags that cost five times your salary.
In the previous paragraph my focus was on companies that had a lot of employees but now let’s think as a CEO of a company that is in an industry where you don’t need many employees but you need qualified ones. Let us assume that you are the CEO of a tech company. You sell codes to other companies and have 5 computer engineers working for you for 50$ an hour. Those 5 employees are one of the best in their field and other companies are willing to pay them 70$/h but you don’t have the budget to increase their pay. How would you make your employees stick with you? The only thing to do that comes to my mind is to increase their satisfaction in their workplace. Making them feel appreciated, arranging their working environment to make it more relaxing, scheduling more flexible office hours, etc., and giving them the comfort that no other company would be our only option. I believe an empathetic CEO would be a better fit for this company rather than an apathetic one because an empathetic CEO would be able to guess and understand their employees’ needs and demands better.
In conclusion, I gave examples regarding companies but I think the things that I wrote can (and are) achieved in many other workplaces. I believe that both empathetic and apathetic people can be successful when given the right industry to work in. Furthermore, I believe people should discover themselves and accept themselves as who they are. After accepting themselves, they should think about careers in which their traits would bring success.
