Empathy Trumps Expertise
Mike Abrams, Executive Vice President of the Iowa Medical Society
Dr. Mike Maves is a former faculty member in the ENT department at University of Iowa. While he was at UI, he earned his MBA at the Tippie School of Business. He now leads the AMA as the Executive Vice President/CEO.
Dr. Maves invited me and my fellow state CEOs to an outstanding program at the Kellogg School of Business a few months ago. I am in the process of reviewing my notes and preparing a presentation for senior IMS management on some of the principles we learned at the weekend workshop.
One of the concepts that both surprised me and, in retrospect, kind of affirms my instincts, is the concept of how we communicate in times of crisis. This has implications not only for how Exxon communicates when their Valdez tanker spills oil in Prince William Sound (a crisis now 20 years old, but even today when you play word association games the word "Exxon" will earn the quick response "Valdez"). It also has implications for how we communicate bad news to employees, patients, and the public.
Dan Diermeier, Ph.D., explained that your credibility, and the degree to which people trust what you say, is based on some combination of four factors:
- 15% to 20% is based on your dedication and commitment.
- 15% to 20% is based on your expertise and your competence.
- 15% to 20% is based on your honesty and openness.
- A full 50% is based on your sense of empathy and caring.
Dr. Diermeier has extensive experience training people in crisis communications, and he observed that physicians and lawyers are most likely to spend disproportionate time in the "expertise/competence" realm, presumably because they sense that people want their expertise. If this science is credible, we should all spend more time empathizing with the situation.
It reminds me of a Writers Workshop I attended a few summers ago at University of Iowa. The instructor explained that there is not a plot in the history of writing that will succeed if the reader does not care about the characters. She urged students to spend considerable effort developing characters that readers will love, hate, or otherwise be invested in, thus fueling an interesting plot.
In the past several years, legislation has been adopted in a number of states (including Iowa, thanks to aggressive IMS lobbying) that allows physicians to communicate apologies to patients when bad clinical outcomes are experienced. These "I'm Sorry" laws really make sense if it allows the physician to empathize with the patients without fear of legal ramifications.