Twenty years ago, when I was training as a volunteer on the San Jose Suicide and Crisis Hotline, I learned a very strange lesson. The first step to gauging how suicidal the caller is (and most of the calls to Suicide and Crisis didn’t involve suicide or crisis), is checking in with your own emotions. Over and over, they drilled one core question into us: “How am I feeling right now?” Because the emotions of the person on the other end of the line have an almost psychic effect on our own.

When I started volunteering, I saw this effect in action, and it was uncanny. The script on the Hotline went something like this:

“Hello, you have reached the Suicide and Crisis Hotline right now. My name is Eugene. What should I call you?”

Here’s the thing. When I checked in with my feelings right then, i.e. even before the other person answered, I already had some preliminary sense of how serious the call was going to be, and that sense was usually right. Perhaps it was in the pattern of the other person’s breathing. Perhaps voodoo telepathy. I don’t know. But I’ve seen this effect in play often since, both in person and remote, though in person it’s greatly magnified as there are far more cues for my subconscious to latch onto.

To be clear, I am not saying I made a judgement of how suicidal the caller was just by listening to them breathe for a second or two. That would be, at best, irresponsible. Those first few seconds were merely my first data point, to be confirmed through direct questions later in the call. But, boy, I tell you, having that initial data point made my job a million times easier.

The lessons I learned in Suicide and Crisis have served me well in my nearly 20-year career as an engineering manager. In this article, I’d like to cover how they have applied, and some of the tools I’ve used to facilitate cohesive remote teams even before Covid.

Empathy and the challenge of working from home

Empathy is defined in the dictionary as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Empathy relies on communication, and since communication is 80% nonverbal, empathy can also be defined as the ability to pick up on and internalize the nonverbal cues that the other person is projecting. Those might be auditory, like the sound of breathing, visual, like body posture or facial expressions, or even tactile or olfactory.

Video conferencing largely restricts this bandwidth, though, arguably, not as much as, say, trying to tell what the other person is feeling via nothing more than a plastic handset pressed tightly into your ear. Still, we’re missing body posture, having to deal with lag, bandwidth issues, at-home distractions, and so on and on.

According to a Berkeley Haas/Microsoft study published in Nature in 2021, (link), working from home has caused employees to feel more siloed, engage in less synchronous interactions, and overall attend fewer meetings.

For managers, this poses a particular challenge. In previous articles, me and the other Empathic Insights Collective writers have extensively covered the importance of empathy in business settings, but how should a manager practice empathy over a 14” screen, especially given the decreased communication frequency?

Stick to basics

This is where that lesson from Suicide and Crisis comes in very handy. How are you feeling, talking to your direct in a 1:1? Do you feel bored? They probably do too. What can you do to liven up the meeting?

Do you feel anxious? Antsy? That’s likely coming from your direct, but even if not, there’s a good chance they’re feeling that too, through you. What can you do to put them at ease? How about shifting the conversation to more personal matters? Ask them about their weekend. Tell them about yours. Ask them about their hobbies, or just take the bull by the horns and ask them about their concerns, something along the lines of, “I feel a sense of stress coming from you. Am I off-base?”

This harkens back to another Suicide and Crisis lesson: it’s okay to go out on a limb and name a feeling. If the other person isn’t experiencing that emotion, they’ll tell you. If they are, it’s much more likely that they’ll talk about it, and then you can have one of those real conversations that builds lasting trust.

A note about diversity

One important caveat that’s worth mentioning is that diversity, whether it be race or gender, introduces all sorts of wildcards into this way of experiencing empathy. For example, while the foundation of human experience, the way we’re hard-wired to display emotion, remains basically the same, (we cry when we’re sad, we smile when we’re happy), cultural and gender mores introduce subtle or not-so-subtle deviations that can trip up an unaware manager.

 To be honest, even the preceding paragraph may wind up being offensive to some, though I absolutely don’t intend it that way. Hopefully, you’ve built up enough trust with your directs for them to tell you when you’ve said something offensive, for you to whole-heartedly apologize, and then to keep the conversation moving forward. (The same applies here, dear reader: if I’ve caused offense, please explain how. I will apologize and we’ll move on.)

Growth mindset is your key asset when dealing with those not of your race or gender. (Really, it’s a key asset when dealing with anyone at all, but especially important when your cultural or gender assumptions are likely to lead you astray. 

Make it a point of learning something new about your direct at every meeting, be that the unique challenges they’re experiencing, cultural tidbits not found in common knowledge, or something about their home life they’re willing to share.

Empathic management from afar

So, the number one rule of empathic management, as we’ve discussed, is checking with your own feelings, and trusting what you feel enough to act in response.

With that said, what other tools can a manager employ to manage effectively? Well, a lot of these are obvious. Frequent touchpoints are critical, and include both 1:1s and team ceremonies, like standups. Ideally, all of these involve video, though I know in some companies folks only jump on video if they have a major role in the meeting. The intent is to have as much bandwidth to your team as you can manage and, equally importantly, making sure that they have bandwidth to each other.

If your travel budget allows, I also highly recommend regular site visits. A week every quarter is a pretty good cadence. It’s the best team morale money you’ll ever spend in terms of its impact on team productivity and engagement.

The importance of genuine curiosity

I hope I don’t need to convince you of the importance of genuine connection with your directs. I’m not talking about being their best friend or confidante. I’m talking about a foundation of trust, one especially critical in remote settings, and one that becomes invaluable when the team faces external or internal pressure. Your number one priority as a manager should be building that trust with every direct.

Trust comes from a sense of a genuine connection, which forms through genuine interactions, which occur only in the face of either genuine curiosity about the other person, or extreme shared danger. Since a team bungee-jumping event is probably out of the question, this leaves us with curiosity. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about status reporting, though sometimes an energetic technical discussion can build trust as well as a personal one. (A coworker and I used to argue for hours in the hallways of Microsoft about system design, and then go for beers afterwards. We’re still friends nearly twenty years later.) The best way I’ve found to operate in a productive trust-building discussion with a direct is to forget I’m their manager. I can put on a coworker or even a friend hat, letting them drive the direction of the conversation. The manager hat can always come back on later, if it’s needed. The point is to show that I’m interested in them, and am there to help them in whatever way I can. Speaking of helping them…

Career growth discussions

The last thing I want to discuss, especially in the context of remote management, is the importance of regular – and I mean weekly or at most monthly – career growth discussions. I have a role guideline spreadsheet I use for those that allows us to track their progression to the next level at small, incremental steps. This spreadsheet is also used during annual reviews as their log of completed work, greatly simplifying my own preparation for the talent review meeting.

What does this regular career check in do to foster trust? Well, especially in remote settings, ICs can easily get overwhelmed with the day-to-day. They forget about their careers and worry their managers have too. This, then, leads to a creeping disillusionment with their work, and ultimately, to attrition. 

By providing them with a constant and evolving roadmap of their career, you’re firmly establishing yourself, and through you, your company, as deeply involved in their success. This fosters trust, and greater engagement and productivity.

It’s important, of course, to follow through on whatever is coming up in those discussions. Have the two of you identified a growth area for them? Work with them on that growth area weekly until it’s been resolved. Have they met all the requirements for the next level? Well, time for you to write that promo doc. The spreadsheet isn’t going to do any good if it remains purely theoretical, disconnected from their day-to-day. It’s your job to connect it.

What about you?

What tools do you use to manage remotely? Chime in in the discussion area below, or message me privately if you’d like to discuss further!