An Interview with Claudine “CiCi” Woo, Founder of Quintessence Storytelling
Empathy could be the secret sauce for founders aiming to build successful startups, cultures and products. Empathy has been shown to be correlated with individual success, innovation, and customer satisfaction. But how can startup leaders tap into empathy in themselves, their cultures and brands.
“Empathy is a quality of a person who can understand, or feel from another person's perspective...people can learn how to be empathetic as a leadership trait,” Dr. Claudine Woo, founder of Quintessence Storytelling, tells Spinster.
In addition to being the CEO of Quintessence Storytelling, Claudine is a scientist, storyteller, and startup advisor. After obtaining her PhD from John Hopkins in Epidemiology, Claudine moved to the Bay Area to work in the medical field, eventually selling off her biotech company - a path that sent her further into serial entrepreneurship.
Claudine’s passion for storytelling - an approach she uses to help tech companies to build more empathetic, empowering and engaging human-centered technology - stems from her vast experience in the medical field, observing how mental wellness plays into our societal health.
Passionate about the role technology can play in influencing our startups in everyday moments - Claudine shares with us five innovative ways one can incorporate empathy into the products - and startups - we build.
Build Products. People within companies can create a culture that values and demonstrates empathy, to employees as well as customers. People can also build products that become tools for creating empathy. Examples of such products or tools could be apps that help foster relationship building like Swirl, or a platform such as virtual reality, that is immersive enough to put someone in someone else's (virtual) shoes, whether through 360 video or a game-like training experience.
Design-Thinking. In short, interview 100 people who encounter the issue at hand, and build a prototype based upon their feedback. Let's say someone wanted to design a tool for management to understand why people consider most meetings a waste of time. They could create a short list of questions, interview 100 people at the company (or companies), identify the top 10 reasons people think a meeting would not be needed. Based upon the findings, management could create a filter for the calendaring application that would ask questions related to these top 10 reasons, before a meeting could be calendared. "Could the content of this meeting be shared as an email update?" "Is each person being invited have something to contribute and are they aware of what that is?" etc. Each time a meeting was replaced with an email update, the "hour saved" could be added to a running total that would be visible to employees, so that they could recognize that their request for fewer meetings is being honored.
Optimizing Empathy. This gets to the point that people need to feel seen, heard and valued. At work, many would say that they do not want to be seen. Some go out of their way to ‘fly under the radar’ or even avoid getting awards because they do not wish to be seen. Such people are often very empathetic, and have difficulty with being around others, especially with any emotion. An important part of empathy is how people manage themselves around others, and this often appears as a ‘introvert/extrovert’ dichotomy, in which extroverts happily process by speaking in front of groups, while introverts would prefer not to have to process information in front of others. While people are interested in creating an 'inclusive' culture, it is also important to provide training around personal energy management. With optimized empathy, people harness the power of compassion to create a better experience, at the workplace, and overall.
Belonging. We will also discuss at the event actions that people at companies can take to increase empathy in the workplace. One possibility is the focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. I recently met with the founder of a company that uses Slack simply to help connect employees based upon self-defined interests, and match those from differing backgrounds. Tools such as this can aid people get to know each other better as opposed to unintentionally intimidating workplace events.
Storytelling. Other training, such as reflective listening in combination with standard project management, is something that we offer through Quintessence Storytelling. This type of training reduces the tendency to blame, and instead allows for a way to transition with understanding, and freeing up energy to complete projects.
For examples of companies that have done a great job with this, and those that haven't, Claudine refers us to Maria Ross' new book, The Empathy Edge. For more on this, check out General Assembly’s “Give Your Culture An Empathetic Edge” on Tuesday, October 29th at 6:30PM. During the event attendees are promised to discover how an empathetic culture leads to a market-leading brand, learn how to build a corporate culture that attracts top talent, discuss how to balance meaningful work with real profit, and much more. For those in San Francisco, reserve your FREE ticket here!