Practice Vertical Empathy - April 2024
Ross Peters
May 24, 2024
Our patience is out, our ample indignation, at one time held like a good card hand to our chests, is now face up on the table. We have become our own heat waves of impatience, frustration, and all too often, hyper-certainty (with a healthy dose of righteousness). The glue that can hold communities and organizations together had dried and corroded in the relentless heat of cultural turmoil.
Every day, we witness the cost of these human heat waves. I have been seeking the right terminology for this observation, and so far I have only come up with this thought – we are seeing a broad-based breakdown in empathy, more specifically, what I am calling vertical empathy. Vertical empathy brings together three levels of empathy – emotional, cognitive, and compassionate – in the context of the workplace where there are hierarchical structures and power differentials. Without real vertical empathy, leaders cease to empathize with those that report to them and, just as importantly, the reverse – those that are reporting to someone else cease to empathize with the person or group to whom they report or with leadership in general. We can’t help create a generation of healthy adults if we are unable to model healthy human relationships and functional, productive dialogue. As adults, we must grow up.
Definitely not a scientific term, vertical empathy is my only way to capture a concept that is vital for our schools. A requisite school culture ingredient, vertical empathy is becoming scarcer in schools. With vertical empathy, the stage is set for schools and the students within them to flourish. Without it, relationships between different, yet all vital, groups within the school will drift apart or even worse, consciously separate. Learning suffers, and students pay the price. (Several years ago in INC Magazine in an article by Paul L. Gunn, Jr., I read about three key areas of empathy: emotional, cognitive, and compassionate. Take a look, it is short and clarifying even though his topic is not at all directed at schools specifically (it is on businesses and customers).
It is not that we can’t empathize, we just don’t, and to be frank, there are a number of points of view coursing through our national character with which we should not, as human beings and citizens, empathize. As a result, communication is corroding in many schools.
Empathy is a requisite factor in all successful communication. The pandemic has, and our political and politicized divides have, too often subtracted vertical empathy at the very moments when it is most necessary.
There are no easy solutions here; however, we must address this particular challenge in order to place our schools in a position to determine the best ways forward. Kids deserve healthy adults in their lives – ones who can both empathize with others and hear thoughtful dissenting voices. Until a school’s adult community is able to do this, we will pervert the most important work we do – create deep, engaging learning experiences for students so that they might grow into the adults the world needs.
A great education in the end is always within the gravitational pull of HOPE. Only healthy adults and adult relationships can create a school focused on helping our students with the muscles to bring hope to life in the world in which they will serve, lead, and love.
So we need to build empathy and notably vertical empathy in order to serve our students to the best of our ability.