The Empathy Edge by Maria Ross

Author:Maria Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989025802
Publisher: Maria Ross
Published: 2019-07-24T23:59:46+00:00

7

HABITS AND TRAITS OF EMPATHETIC CULTURES

How to Create an Empathetic Environment Where Your People Can Thrive

People become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

Let’s circle back to Lisa Reynolds, vice-president of talent management for CHRISTUS Health. Compassion has long been a core value for the organization, and Reynolds partners with hiring teams to bring on and develop people who operate from a place of empathy, love, and concern.

“It’s just who they are,” says Reynolds. “We look for that in our people and simply place them in a work environment where those traits will help them succeed. They make our culture more empathetic, not the other way around, and we want to hire those people to ensure we always put our patients first.”

She shared a moving story about a CHRISTUS Health neonatal nurse named Melanie, someone whose innate empathy never goes off the clock—an ideal employee for the company.

“Melanie got a call saying that her mother was dying, so she had to go back home to the Philippines,” Reynolds explains. “While she was there, her mother passed away. On the day of her mother’s funeral, she was crossing the street to go into the chapel and she heard a commotion. She immediately recognized the noises as a woman in distress, going into labor in a pedicab.”

Instead of heading into her own mother’s funeral, Melanie immediately ran to the pedicab and helped to deliver the baby right there on the spot. Trained in neonatal care, she saw that both the mom and baby were in distress—the mom hemorrhaging, the baby blue in the face—and insisted that the pedicab driver get everyone to a lying-in center (akin to a physician clinic).

“The husband and Melanie take the mom and baby to the lying-in center, where the staff gets Mom stable,” Reynolds continues. “Melanie gets the baby into an incubator right away because she knows what to do. The baby begins breathing and she makes sure everybody’s stable before she goes back to her mom’s funeral, already in progress.”

Are you teary yet? Hang tight, because Melanie’s not done being amazing.

“After the funeral, she’s thinking about this family—when you go through something like that, you get close to them—and she found out this was their eighth child and they were very poor,” Reynolds says. “So, she bought some clothes and supplies and took them back to the lying-in center to give them to the family. They placed the baby in her arms and told her they’d named her after Melanie’s mother.”

Melanie had the seeds of compassion inside her before she signed on at CHRISTUS Health, and her ability to see other perspectives and recognize needs meant she fit perfectly within the company’s existing culture. But being hired and trained by an organization with empathy at its core enabled her to use her skills to save the lives of strangers in the midst of her own personal tragedy.

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