I was volunteering as the public address announcer for the team my son plays on at his local High School.
Armed with a cobbled-together sound system, a prescribed playlist, a microphone, and a few corny dad-jokes, we try to provide a little light humor throughout the competition of a High School game. Most games are a lot of fun. But the off-field activity of this last game was not.
Parents from the visiting team began heckling when we did not announce their children’s names each time they scored: we never have for any visiting team for a variety of reasons.
On a spring evening in the beautiful low country of South Carolina, in a sport where very few players will go on to play in college, parents began rebuking the volunteer Dad running the music and making some announcements.
Why?
We struggle with empathy as a culture. We are in a civic landscape where if someone is not 100% right or good, then they are immediately painted as 100% wrong or bad.
There seems to be little in between, little grace extended, little camaraderie, or lightheartedness.
The core of our disdain for our neighbors, even the ones who are volunteering their time and effort has to do with shame.
Shame is a two-way activity; as I deliver shame, I am able to build myself up while concurringly tearing you down.
In her important book The Gift Of Imperfection, author Brene Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
Brown says that shame needs three ingredients to “grow out of control in our lives”; secrecy, silence, and judgment.
In a description that hits too close to home, Brown describes shame as “that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.”
Shame typically enters our practical vocabulary when accountability has been breached. Either we fall short, or someone we know or work with falls short of expectations and immediately we armor up, batten the hatch, and began launching shame grenades in an effort to cover up the discrepancy.
Someone missed this mark (even if it is us) and we go to war to protect our reputation and standing among our network. Shame is an effective short-term tool with blistering short-term results.
Unfortunately, for shame’s sake, we live in a long-term world where relationships and connections are vital to human flourishing.
Shame tears down with no plans or strategy to rebuild. Shame embeds itself like a tapeworm looking to grow and shut down the entire system. The seeds of shame produce a lifetime of shameful fruit.
Accountability is vital to life. Without accountability to drinking water or eating food, the human body shrivels and wastes away. The human body has been designed with an accountability feedback loop alerting the mind to present starvations.
Accountability is vital to organizational life. Without accountability to finance, product development, team leadership, marketing or sales, the organizational body shrivels and wastes away. The organizational body must be designed with similar accountability feedback loops that alert the leadership to present starvations.
The mind doesn’t blame the body when the body doesn’t have enough to feed on. The mind simply responds with what the body needs as efficiently as possible.
Accountability is a healthy process that has been badly battered through the delivery system of shame.
A different delivery system is needed that will allow healthy accountability to be dispensed over a healthy and sustained duration.
That long form delivery system is encouragement and empathy.
To lead with encouragement is to literally inspire with courage.
When we respond to a team member with encouragement, we lend them courage so their courage grows feasting off the courage we share.
In order to lend courage, we must first be able to understand where the discouragement is coming from.
Empathy is a powerful tool in understanding the challenge or discouragement of another person. Empathy is to feel what another person feels, or even more intensely to feel the suffering of another person.
We all have joys and we all have sufferings, empathy is when we actively make a hard choice to keep our shame grenades locked away, and instead begin to proactively share courage with another person precisely at the point they feel or show weakness.
How do you balance the truth of accountability with the courage of empathy? There is no balance, we may feel free to use both in endless quantities with a blank check. Accountability can only be effective for the long term when empathy is the delivery mechanism.
Even though my response to the heckling parents was primarily internal, it was equally as shameful as I created a dirty list in my own mind of what I would have said had an opportunity developed.
It did not. They went home probably embarrassed by their actions. I went home embarrassed by my more private response.
We have a choice on what to share and how to share it.
