Bridging the Empathy Gap: Fueling Collaborative Impact in the Social Sector

Most of us enter the social impact space with a fervent desire to change the world. We meticulously build solutions, strategically invest precious resources, and pour our boundless energy into making a tangible difference. Yet, how often do our most earnest efforts fall frustratingly short?

Take a moment to reflect on your own experiences:

• Have you ever spearheaded the development of solutions without first engaging in meaningful, extensive stakeholder input?
• Has the sheer urgency of a pressing need ever led to a loss of impact, as you rushed to implement without thorough understanding?
• Have you invested significant energy and financial resources in a solution that, on paper, should have worked, only to be profoundly disappointed by their real-world outcomes?
• Have you felt the immense pressure to provide clear, definitive answers even when the underlying problem remained murky?
• Has the sheer multitude of possibilities ever left you feeling frozen, unable to decide on a clear path forward?

These common pitfalls not only limit the impact we long to create but also increase the creeping sense of frustration that mounts within our teams and organizations.

Why Does This Persistent Pattern Emerge?

Often, it’s because we fail to truly understand ourselves and the very people we aim to support, operating instead from untested assumptions rather than genuine, deeply rooted connection and insight. When our carefully crafted solutions fail, our typical, almost automatic responses—frustration, a tendency to push even harder, or worse, blaming stakeholders for not engaging—only serve to perpetuate a vicious cycle of ineffectiveness. At the root of this misunderstanding and resulting frustration are empathy gaps and also empathy opportunities. Frustration is positive and powerful because it is a signal that there is an empathy opportunity.

The Power and Peril of Empathy

Empathy is far more than just “feeling for” someone. It is about deeply understanding that your individual perspective is inherently your own, and then intentionally creating the mental and emotional space for another person’s unique experience to exist authentically alongside yours.

The benefits of cultivating empathy are profound and far-reaching:

• Deeper Understanding: Empathy compels us to truly listen and connect—not just superficially, but to gain rich information and invaluable insights. It forces us to critically examine our own deeply held beliefs and, in doing so, to dramatically expand our perspectives.
• Stronger Relationships: By fostering genuine understanding, empathy naturally builds robust bridges between individuals and organizations, dismantling the silos that often hinder progress in the social sector.
• Breaking the Status Quo: Empathy is a catalyst for innovation, allowing us to move far beyond traditional, isolated, and often ineffective problem-solving approaches. It encourages fresh thinking and collaborative solutions, pushing us past the “status quo” in how we address societal problems.

However, it is crucial to acknowledge the harm from empathy when it is misapplied or superficially engaged:

• Superficial Engagement: Empathy can become a mere transactional checkbox. Organizations might say, “Okay, we talked to 20 people, now let’s build!” without truly internalizing or acting upon what they learned. This superficial engagement yields little genuine insight and creates what can feel like tokenistic efforts rather than genuine partnership.
• Harmful Information Gathering: The way information is gained can inadvertently be harmful, extractive, or tokenistic. If community members feel their input is simply being taken without meaningful reciprocal benefit or that their voices are not truly influencing decisions, the process can cause more damage than good. Such approaches often ignore the deeper, rooted systemic issues that perpetuate challenges, focusing on symptoms rather than causes.

Navigating Our Biases and Empathy Gaps

It’s an undeniable truth of the human condition: we all carry personal and professional biases. If we bring our brains to work, we bring our biases to work. These inherent cognitive biases profoundly shape how we perceive the world, and they can create significant empathy gaps. Positionality—our multiple identities and how they shape our experiences of power and privilege—plus our unrecognized biases, all impact trust, vulnerability, and control, thereby creating empathy gaps within the sector.

Empathy gaps are those challenging situations where individuals or groups struggle immensely to understand or genuinely relate to the feelings, thoughts, and lived experiences of others. These gaps can manifest in myriad ways, consistently leading to frustration, miscommunication, escalating conflict, and, perhaps most painfully, missed opportunities for profound connection and collaborative problem-solving.

Acknowledging Your Unknowns

The true key to effectively bridging these pervasive empathy gaps lies in cultivating a deep, unwavering sense of curiosity. Instead of resorting to automatic reactions, we must consciously choose to pause, to truly listen, and to commit to learning.

Here is an example of an empathy gap. Someone who works at a philanthropic foundation might say, “I wish that nonprofit organizations would better understand that we receive more than 200 unsolicited proposals requesting funding every month. This feels overwhelming and we don’t have the staff or financial capacity to support all the growing needs.” Someone who works at a nonprofit organization might say, “I wish that foundations would better understand that we spend numerous hours writing grant proposals only to then, months later, receive a generic email rejection with zero feedback.” You might be able to relate to these statements and have your own frustrations that impact your work in the sector.

Use this opportunity to get more focused on the empathy gaps you see in your own work.

• What are you feeling, seeing, experiencing, and wishing would change?
• What do people not understand about your work?
• Are there areas of frustration? Confusion?
• Where do you feel isolated? Siloed?
• Who/what might be making your work more difficult?

Now, with that specific empathy gap opportunity firmly in mind, it is key to shift from frustration to curiosity. Two key questions will begin your journey of self-inquiry.

1. What if I identify what is uncertain before I respond?
2. What if I assume I might be wrong?

There are numerous uncertainties and assumptions that that reside within our empathy gaps, so go deeper and ask yourself:

• What might I genuinely not understand about this person or organization, and how their experience connects to this empathy gap? What are their unique perspectives, challenges, and motivations?
• What ingrained assumptions might I be making about their intentions, capacities, or constraints? Am I projecting my own experiences onto them? What story am I creating about their actions or inactions?
• Where might I be unintentionally biased due to my positionalities and my proximity to privilege? How might my background shape my perceptions and judgments?
• What do I truly need to learn to bridge this gap? What specific information or insights am I currently lacking?
• What am I genuinely curious about regarding their perspective? What questions, if answered, could lead to profound understanding?

These identified unknowns are not obstacles. They are your precise entry points for initiating truly curious, transformative conversations. We can unlock our collective unknowns to serve as the most potent fuel for truly collaborative and impactful endeavors within the social sector.

In separation, division, misunderstanding, and frustration, there is an opportunity for connection, understanding, and empathy.

Turning Unknowns into Curious Questions

After you have identified what you need to better understand, you can shape curious questions to guide your learning and subsequent connection.

Instead of asking a blunt, often accusatory “why,” question, which can put someone on the defensive, try embracing more open-ended, invitational language, drawing inspiration from empathy activist Rob Volpe, such as, “Tell me more about…” and “Help me understand…” Some of my other favorite questions to guide curious conversations to bridge empathy gaps include:

• “What are the best parts of [this situation/your work], and what are the most challenging parts?”
• “How am I making your work harder? Easier?”
• “What do you need right now to address this challenge?”
• “How do you feel about…?”
• “How might we approach/learn/try…?”
• “I noticed that ____, what do you make of that?”

The Ripple Effect of Curious Conversations

Committing to the practice of curious conversations is not just a good idea. The ripple effect of such intentional engagement is nothing short of profound. These conversations provide the insights necessary to genuinely change how we approach problems and solutions, and they are often eye-opening and heart-stretching. You will inevitably gain startling new perspectives and be compelled to courageously challenge your own long-held thinking, leading to personal and professional growth.

These curious conversations also lead to more inclusive and abundant brainstorming, are essential to co-designing impactful solutions that truly meet the needs of those you support (inside and outside the organization and across the sector), and ultimately save valuable time and money by avoiding missteps. The power of these conversations can even become contagious, fostering a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

Imagine the transformative power if we collectively practiced empathy, allowing its ripples to extend from ourselves to our relationships, within our work and leadership, among collaborative partners, and throughout the entire social sector. Imagine if we could truly embrace the possibility of being wrong and together foster an environment where sharing both successes and failures is encouraged and valued.

Our individual and collective unknowns are not barriers. They are, in fact, the potent fuel for building stronger relationships that cultivate deeper trust and ultimately achieve a far greater and more sustainable impact in the world.

Going to bbcon this year? Join Heather for her session, The Empathy Opportunity: How Our Collective Unknowns Can Fuel Our Collaborative Impact.

Watch Heather’s webinar, Why We Get Stuck and How We Get Unstuck, to learn more about the factors that hold teams back from addressing challenges and emerging with the learning they need to make progress and impact.