The Weekly Reflektion 43/2024

Reflekt will organise a breakfast seminar Wednesday 27th November. In the seminar we will consider what the offshore petroleum industry can learn from the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. 

The seminar will be held at the Quality Hotel Pond in Forus from 0800 to 1000. A light breakfast will be served beforehand. There is plenty of free parking at and around the hotel. Please let us know if you would like to attend.

As a manager, you often have to have to try to understand why an employee acted incorrectly or took a strange decision. Do not just write it off as a mistake. The ability to put yourself in their position will help you understand why they did what they did, and potentially prevent it happening again.  

Do you demonstrate empathy?

During the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, a psychiatrist named Douglas McGlashan Kelley wanted to know what it was that led the people on trial to support Nazi policies including the atrocities committed at the concentration camps.He found that they were not psychopaths or insane, they were just ordinary people, however they seemed lacking inempathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others and is an important quality to ensure a decent society.Most of us experience empathy when we see someone in trouble, either physically or mentally, however there are ways to suppress these feelings. One tactic used is the separation ofone group of people from the group representing the ‘norm’. The norm could be skin colour, religion, sexuality, or even political leaning. Once a group is formed, and the internal relationships in the group become strong, those outside the group are alienated and after a while they no longer warrant sympathy or empathy. Their needs become less important than the needs of the norm group. This is noticeable in debates on immigration where immigrants are often characterised not as people in need, but scoundrels, criminals or mentally ill. We are often told they are coming to take ‘our’ jobs and collect our benefits, including for unemployment. We are even led to believe that individuals are both taking our jobs and collecting our benefits.

This can also happen when the management of a company regard themselves as separate from the workers. Sometimes this is illustrated in the mandate given to an investigation team after an incident for example, ’find out what the people involved did wrong, find out where they failed’. An empathetic management who doesn’t feel separated from the operation, would probably start with asking how the action, or inaction of the management could have contributed to the incident. Finding out how the management failed would be a specific point in the investigation mandate.

The actions of the people involved in an incident may seem strange and unexplainable given the outcome, but the investigation team must empathise and try to understand what the involved people were thinking, and why they did what they did, and why they thought it was the right thing to do at the time. Most people try to do the best job they can and take decisions rationally with the information they have at hand at the time. It is the management and the investigations teams’ job to understand why and identify measures to prevent it happening again.

Thanks to Robin Horsfall for triggering this reflection.