Empathy: A powerful business tool

Satya Nadella, the brilliant Microsoft CEO, often narrates how he almost did not get a job in Microsoft. The manager of the company, Richard Tait, asked him in an interview: “Imagine you see a baby laying on the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” Nadella quickly replied: “You call 911.”

As the interviewer walked Nadella out of his office, he put his arm around Nadella and said: “You need some empathy. If a baby is laying on the street crying, you pick up the baby.”

Nadella got the job nonetheless, but since then he understood the importance of empathy in work and in his personal life. Empathy is the ability to share others’ feelings and experiences. It is deeper than sympathy because it is feeling with others, not feeling for others.

For Osho, empathy is a non-violent communication not known to many people. In empathy you participate in others’ being, transmit your energy to others. The next question would be, can one acquire empathy? Yes, it is an innate trait lying dormant in everyone, but it has to be cultivated. It is not a refresh button you can suddenly turn on when there is a need. The road to empathy goes through yourself. Empathy can be developed if you first own your mistakes, if you learn to forgive yourself, if you understand that nobody is perfect.

Once you come to that deeper realisation, you don’t judge as quickly, you listen better and you can amplify people’s strengths, not focus on their weaknesses. In a big company that is always working with highly technical issu-es, people get bogged down by long static working hours, constant brain-work with no physical activity. In this scenario, the leader has to feel one with his employees. It will create trust in the employees and they will be recharged to take the work to a new level. Amrit Sadhana is editor of Osho Times International. NEW NOV. 24.

The Home Minister, Mr. Y. B. Chavan, told the Rajya Sabha today that Government had no proposal to declare the ‘Shiv Sena’ unlawful.

The Home Minister was replying to Mr. A.D. Mani and several others who had expressed concern over the “anti-national” activities of the Shiv Sena.

Mr. Chavan said that instead of banning the organisation public opinion should be created about its harmful activities. The Shiv Sena was a reactionary movement, certainly, doing harm to national integrity and he had said so publicly.

He said some people motivated by wrong ideology took advantage of certain genuine grievances of Maharashtrians. Unskilled labour in Maharashtra had a feeling that they were not getting a proper share in employment opportunities and that feeling was being exploited by some people. — PTI-UNI. DELHI,