Byron: Hi, my name is Byron Hebert and this is another Tool Time update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and The Entrepreneur’s Playbook. We’ve been talking about Birkman and how we use it in our organization to direct probably our more important asset, our people. And how we use it for coaching, and team development, and things like that. And so we’ve been going over the 11 components and we’ve got another one we want to talk about today, which is Empathy.

Empathy is an interesting one because it’s how we deal with emotion in the workplace, or at home, or anywhere else, and how people deal with that, and whether they have a low emotion usual style or a high emotion usual style. You can imagine someone with a low emotion usual style is not going to want a lot of emotion in their communication with people; they’re going to want the facts, and the figures, and the key things on a business level, or a non-emotional level. Someone with a high usual style in their emotion, in their empathy, will be more emotional. They will be more emotional in the way they communicate and the way they come across. Again, this is, just because your usual style is what you see, may not be their needs. You may see someone with a low emotion usual style, which means they don’t want a lot of emotion in their communication, but a high need for an emotional style.

Which means that they want to use you as a sounding board and you be a little bit more emotional and empathetic when they have an issue like that.

So, again, not good or bad; high or low is just the way we are hardwired. But typically, you want to know this about someone and your workstyle, when you’re working with them. So, again, we use that to make sure that we keep them in their usual style by meeting their needs and keeping them out of their stress behavior, which is destructive for the organization and to them. So, Empathy: another one of the 11 components of the Birkman profile examination. My name is Byron Hebert; this has been another Tool Time update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and the Entrepreneur’s Playbook.