The Most Important Overlooked Trait For Startups

I'm a guy who has a lot of empathy. It's true. So perhaps that's one reason why I think it must be an important thing to have. To me, empathy is the ability to exercise emotional imagination. The ability to recreate (or at least attempt to) someone else's state within your own mind. It's being able to 'walk a mile in another man's shoes'.

I grew up mostly around my mum, my sister and my four female cousins, as well as going to an all girls school that was slightly co-educational for grades 1-4 (the four years I attended). I'm sure women are more empathetic than men so I grew up in an environment that was heavy on feeling words and which placed a high value on thinking about how other people felt.

That aside I also take after my mother and her father, both of whom clearly exhibit more empathy than the other side of my family. So on genetics and environment I tick the empathy boxes.

Add to that that I've spent a significant portion of my life (around 25%) living and travelling in countries with cultures very different to Australia's. If you want to develop the ability to imagine what another person's life is like then travelling is the most direct way to do it.

It's easier to imagine being in prison, living under dictatorship or growing up with extreme wealth if you've spent time with people who are currently doing that whilst also being in their environment.

Meeting other people with an open-mind and listening to what they tell you requires empathy and strengthens it.

For the record I've spent time unguarded, alone inside the walls of South American prisons (as a visitor, not a resident), I've got friends who've lived under the dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba and I also have a friend who thinks as much about the next luxury car they buy as they do about what to have for lunch.

And they all have a lot in common. They all make decisions I can understand given their context, they all make decisions I couldn't/wouldn't make and they are all doing the best they can with the tools, ideas and beliefs they have.

So why is empathy such an important thing to have?

When you are building a start-up or creating anything in this world - be it wealth, relationships or anything involving other people (and what, truly doesn't involve other people in some way?) there's an element of trade that occurs.

Trade truly is what separates our species from all others. In any trade the idea is that both sides benefit and become stronger than their competitors for the exchange.

In practice this isn't always the case but it's the fact that we recognise the potential benefits that make us different from, say, dogs.

To trade, exchange, collaborate and form alliances we're required to demonstrate to the other party how they'll benefit. Generally this is obvious but not always. The process of doing this is what I'd consider "sales".

And make no mistake, trade needn't be in tangible or material things. Trade is driven by the desire for status, identity and ego.

Even the biggest multi-billion dollar deals all boil down to naturally inducing chemical highs within our body and mind. Empathy is about understanding what other people value, what their drives are and what makes them tick and this is massively important when in any kind of trade, sales or negotiation process.

To be a masterful trader, salesperson or negotiator you must possess good empathy either instinctively or consciously.

The benefit of having empathy is it makes it much easier to focus on the most important part of working with other people - knowing what's in it for them.

In start-ups this means thinking of what investors, employees, users, co-founders and advisors want and using that as your starting point and not an after-thought.

It's also worth noting that there are several paths to giving someone what they want. For example, money is one way to show appreciation and value but you could also take other actions that elevate their status among their peers like blogging about how great they are (sincerely).

With empathy you'll be able to recognise what someone's deeper needs and motivations are and be able to cut through the noise and communicate directly with that part of them.

It's why bad salesmen focus on features and good salesmen focus on benefits. A benefit shows you recognise and value a person's needs whereas a feature is essentially meaningless when taken out of context.

Great actors, politicians and salespeople have to gauge where their audience is and meet them there. They then need to take that audience to the place they want to end up. You need the person's trust to do that and you develop trust by showing empathy.

But empathy by itself does not a great businessman make. In fact, empathy alone is negatively correlated with wealth (although I would argue that wealth leads to a lack of empathy rather than a lack of empathy leading to wealth but even I wouldn't deny that the person without empathy will find it easier to swindle, lie, cheat and steal to make money).

After all, when I read the biography of Steve Jobs I was struck by how little he recognised or cared about other people. He seemed to have very little empathy.

So for empathy to be a useful trait for a start-up founder to have it needs to be coupled with a detachment from what people think they want and an attachment to what they truly need.

Steve Jobs may not have cared what people thought or felt but he did care about what they wanted and needed deep down. He cared about what they actually valued not what they claimed to care about. He was interested in 'pushing the human race forward' not in 'inviting the human race to consider if they'd like to move forward'.

You have to be driven by paying attention to what people do and not what people say and you have to be inner directed in your actions not driven by how you'll appear to outsiders.

A Short Story

I remember once in college when after a formal black tie event we were drinking in a friend's room. One of the girls had a bit too much to drink and she fell over and hit her head on the fireplace.

She was taken to the hospital and was fortunate enough to only need bed rest and several headache tablets. She made a full recovery in a few days.

What was interesting to me was that there were many people who wanted to be seen to be handling and leading the situation but very few of them were still there sitting with her in the hospital waiting room.

They were interested more in their social status than in the welfare of the person. What did I do? I stepped back and realised that my desire to feel helpful made me want to jump in and take charge.

But when I analysed the situation the best thing I could do was not get in the way of other people in a better position to help. They were close friends to her, they were more sober, they had a car nearby to take her to the hospital with and they were their first.

The key is in forgetting what feels like the right thing to do and focusing on what the most useful thing is for the situation. Too few people have that ability I feel. In soccer this is like having a great scoring opportunity and instead passing to a teammate who is in an even better position to score.

But life isn't as black and white as soccer (which might explain the popularity of all sports - their simplicity) and people are driven by status not by objectively better results. This is why leaders look better when they win wars and not when they prevent them. And looking better leads to more votes than doing better.

InThe End...

So empathy needs to be coupled with pragmatism and an honest understanding of who we really are as human beings.

It's about caring about people and understanding their hopes, fears and struggles but it's just as much about understanding people are resilient and driven by biologically hard-wired desires. That's neither good nor bad but merely is.

Use empathy to understand people and a pragmatic understanding of what people truly want deep down and you'll have the wisdom, foresight and cunning required to hack together a startup.