How much empathy is too much for the role of a scrum master?
This is more of a discussion topic as opposed to something I’m trying to solve right away.
Some background: I’m an extremely empathetic person in my personal life, sometimes so drastic that it impacts my health. If someone is super stressed out, I’m super stressed out. If someone is sad, I’m also sad, etc.
I’ve managed not to take my empathy to the extreme in my accountability as a SM, but sometimes the two do bleed over.
So, hence my question in terms of the work, how much is too much? Is there such a thing?
Thanks all
I think there’s a couple of things here.
Firstly, there’s a difference between empathy and sympathy.
There’s lots of definitions out there but as part of my ICF-accredited coaching course, the ones we used were:
– empathy is being able to understand something from another person’s perspective
– sympathy is when you agree with that position, and become emotionally invested
So in that context, you are both empathic – in that you can see their perspective – and sympathetic – in that you become emotionally invested, to the extent that you lose objectivity.
The second thing is what happens when we get emotionally invested.
No matter what the emotion, the brain tends to withdraw resources (things like glucose) from the cognitive centre of the brain (the prefrontal context) towards the emotional centre, where we “pattern match” and act on instinct more. As a result, our IQ actually drops a bit. We are less creative, and therefore less able to support other effectively.
So – at a point. “climbing inside the bottle” with those we aim to serve as leaders can be a bit of a problem, and we do need to keep an eye on our own emotional state, and how we regulate that.
Some key things I find are
– a walk-and-talk is usually better for challenging subjects; we can’t get overly emotional, walk, and talk at the same time. (try it!)
– think HALT – am I hungry, angry, late or tired; if you are under going these stressors – or other stressors – then its harder to stay “out of the bottle”
– doing an ICF-accredited transformative coaching course really helped; we did months of practice coaching “in the coaching dojo” that helped to separate the context of the conversation from how someone relates to that context. Your brain retrains accordingly.
That’s not saying sympathy is a bad trait, just that it can start to limit your professional effectiveness as a coach if it starts to dominate, and that doesn’t serve your teams or organisations well….