3 Empathy-Based Methods to Learn About Your Stakeholders (Wise Decision Maker Guide 28)

Greetings Decision maker,

Using empathy to establish a good relationship with your organization’s stakeholders can pave the way to increased productivity and a stronger bottom line. Learning the truth about your key influencers is critical to strengthening your relationships with them. One important thing to keep in mind is that each relationship is dynamic and every meeting will have its share of high and low points. The key is to navigate through these points and have a productive discourse that will enable all parties to resolve issues and reach common ground.

Unfortunately, our instincts on such conversations often lead us astray due to dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas.

To learn more, check out this blog:

Recommendations For You

Recently, the surprising weakness of our socioeconomic structure has been preoccupying me. Regardless of where you put the blame, it’s clear that the US has done the worst among major developed countries in dealing with COVID in terms of numbers of people dead. The misalignment among various political leaders and groupings, and the misalignment between many political leaders and scientists, has been a wake-up call for me about the fundamental fragility of our system. There are many other threats out there beside COVID, and I’m very worried about our ability to handle them. So I’ve decided, together with my business partner and wife Agnes Vishnevkin, to do some preparation for various socioeconomic disruptions.

Those of you who read my work, for example my early March op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch, know that I wrote back then that COVID will be a long-term problem, and we need to prepare for major economic disruptions. Many of you sent me messages thanking me for the warning to get ready by ensuring a couple of months of various supplies, given that late March saw a run on grocery stores. Of course, I did so myself, so I already had that covered.

Here I’m talking about something else. What if COVID gets much, much worse in the Fall? What if it mutates into a strain that’s 10 times more deadly? What if the US Presidential elections prove so inconclusive that there’s major civil unrest? What if a major cyber-hacking attack takes out the US electrical power grid for a week or two?

All of these are scary, high-impact, low-probability events - just like COVID. Previously, I had more trust in our system to deal with them. Now, I have less trust.

So Agnes and I decided to take steps to protect ourselves. Our first step is to learn first aid and create first aid kits for our home, car, and other travel, in case of disruptions in the medical system. To learn first aid, I got the ACEP First Aid Manual, and am going through it. Not light reading, but very useful. I recommend it.

Recent Public Appearances

You might find of interest a number of recent public appearances about my three recent best-selling books:

Virtual presentation (60 mins) for Project Managers Institute, Honolulu Chapter, on helping managers adapt to the reality of COVID and plan for the post-pandemic recovery
Virtual presentation (60 min) for the American Society for Quality, Los Angeles, on how to make the most high-quality decisions in business settings
Article for Richtopia on the dangers of mental health challenges for executives

What’s Up With Me

Finally, I’ve gotten the chance to relax, after finishing the strategic pivot project for the $1.4 billion startup to help it deal with COVID. These last two weeks, I’ve “only” had to do five virtual presentations, each about an hour. So I spent a lot of time gardening with Agnes. We gathered over a pound of raspberries from our bushes recently. It took over an hour to gather the raspberries. More importantly, it took about five years of cultivating and replanting to get from having two large raspberry bushes covering 10 square yards to our current raspberry patch, covering over 100 square yards. The sweet rewards of hard work and patience!

Help Me Serve Your Needs

When was the last time you had difficulty learning the truth about your stakeholders’ needs and problems? Is there anything in the article/video/podcast that will help you to get your stakeholders to open up to you? Which next steps will you take based on this article/video/podcast?

Look forward to your feedback! I strive to improve my ability to help you avoid decision disasters and maximize success, so any feedback you can provide on this content - or anything else - will help me serve your needs better.

Decisively Yours,

Gleb

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