Empathy, Salary, and “Functional Skills” in the Late Capitalism Era
Every day, one of my PR colleagues at The Henry Ford assembles “Daily Clips,” an email sent out to a large cohort of our staff that includes links to newsworthy and/or thought-provoking articles related to our cultural heritage institution, the Detroit metropolitan area, and the United States. Last week, she included a Crain’s Detroit Business article headlined “Nonprofits prioritizing leadership over fundraising skills in tight labor market” (note this is behind a paywall). The article begins, “In a sign of the times, leadership traits like empathy, compassion and the ability to inspire employee loyalty are trumping the need for a full slate of functional skills in nonprofit CEO searches.”
This sentence caught my attention right away, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Are empathy, compassion, and the ability to inspire employee loyalty not functional skills? I first needed to refresh my understanding of “functional skills.”
My first Google result for a search on “functional skills definition” was a pretty terrible (but apparently wildly successful, given its Google placement) article on Indeed.com, inarguably written solely for SEO purposes. According to that article, “Functional skills are the core English, mathematics and information and communication technology (ICT) skills people need to solve problems in their work and private lives.”
This was probably cribbed from the Cambridge Dictionary, which defines functional skills (from a UK perspective) as “basic reading, writing, mathematics, and computer skills that a person needs in order to be able to live and work in society.”
But those were the most narrow (and, I might add, the most unsatisfying) definitions that I found. I searched on.
The University of Dayton defines functional skills as “competencies that are transferable to many different work settings,” and includes the abilities to empathize and provide care right in their handy-dandy list.
Law Insider, a resource for lawyers drafting contracts (which one would think would make them particularly careful about defining terms), provides this definition: “Functional Skills means those skills which enable an individual to communicate, interact with others and to perform tasks which have practical utility and meaning at home, in the community or on the job.”
Collins Dictionary doesn’t outright define the phrase “functional skills,” but offers the poetic comment, “Functional things are useful rather than decorative.” Right on, Collins. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Another stalwart from a pre-Google age, Merriam-Webster, also neglects to define the whole phrase, but instead offers a couple of helpful definitions for “functional”: “used to contribute to the development or maintenance of a larger whole” / “also : designed or developed chiefly from the point of view of use.”
For the purposes of argument, let’s set aside the ignoble Indeed.com ploy to climb to the summit of Mount Google Search, as well as the Cambridge definition they pilfered. The other definitions talk about performance, competencies, usefulness, enablement. This sure sounds to me like it aligns with “empathy, compassion, and the ability to inspire employee loyalty.”
But my purpose here isn’t to skewer the Crain’s author for poor word choice. In fact, I don’t even think she chose poor wording. I think that sentence, exactly as it’s written, reflects the way we think about empathy in the workplace in general, and for C-suite-level leaders of organizations specifically. It’s a nice-to-have. It’s an optional attribute. It’s by far not as important as the bottom line, innovating, creating a vision and driving towards it. That’s why we think of Steve Jobs as a “visionary,” not a jerk, right? Though by almost every conceivable definition (save the ones that give a pass to players on America’s favorite sports team, the Titans of Industry), he was indeed a jerk.
Perhaps you could even make an argument that driving towards a vision while being an jerk is worth that tradeoff, if the vision results in the iPhone, or Google search, or Amazon free overnight delivery, or Lululemon yoga pants, or vegan pad thai on your doorstep in 30 minutes from Doordash. But the Crain’s article is about nonprofits.
As a primer for those who don’t work at them and/or interact with them, nonprofits are not the places where the next Xbox will be developed, or where the on-site beer fridge opens at 5:00 PM sharp, or where the staff will sell off their stock shares to become overnight millionaires, or even (in many cases) where you will be reimbursed for a college class, even when it’s relevant to your job. Nonprofits are places where staff work for far less money and more generally meager benefits than they could in the for-profit world — because they believe in an organization’s mission, and, if they’re lucky, see an opportunity to make a concrete change in the world.
You would think the least we could ask for from nonprofit executives is empathy and compassion towards staff who have almost by definition made sacrifices to work at any given nonprofit. While I understand why the Crain’s headline contrasts the new emphasis on “leadership” with a prior emphasis on “fundraising”— nonprofits that don’t fundraise don’t remain in existence — I wonder if we don’t have our priorities backwards. Do donors really want to give to organizations where the staff don’t feel leadership understands or cares about them? Really? [Along the same lines, it gets under my skin when I hear an organization say their customers are the most important thing to them, perhaps (if you’re lucky) followed by their staff. It’s always seemed obvious to me that your staff should be most important to any business, as you’ll never have happy customers without happy staff.]
Beyond all this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the complete comparative nonsense of salaries in America. I suppose in a way it’s no less ridiculous that an accountant at a well-heeled corporation on Wall Street might make ten times as much as a self-employed accountant in a small town than that shoes will cost you ten (or more) times as much if you buy a brand-name pair in an upscale store versus a fairly similar pair on the sale rack at Wal-Mart.
But (for now) we’re saddled with these joys of Late Capitalism. So how do we make our nonsensical salary hierarchies work for us, and what the heck does this have to do with empathy as a functional skill?
I’ve developed a line of thinking about salaries over my career, largely based on my inclination toward servant leadership (which is in and of itself a leadership philosophy centered around people, not vision or drive or accomplishments). Because staff are hired and/or promoted into jobs for a variety of reasons (talent is one — but so are gender, race, being in the right place at the right time, perceptions or misperceptions, having a supportive manager/champion/mentor, and the list goes on), your salary is not intrinsically a reflection of your value to an organization. (If any highly compensated folks want to fight me on this, I’ll refer you to lesson number two.)
Instead, I like to think of salary as a measure of your obligation to an organization. If you’re making double what the people who report to you are making, and your boss is making double what you’re making, responsibility and ownership increases at the same rate the salaries do. The higher up the (salary) chain you go, the more you need to own responsibility for the organization’s toughest and most persistent problems. If you’re a servant leader, in fact, you’re likely spending a lot more time working on solving the problems facing staff at all levels below you in the hierarchy than you are accumulating credit for the things that are going well.
And this is where we get back to empathy. Even with talk of a looming recession, we still seem to be in the middle of the much-discussed “Great Resignation.” Workers at all levels are looking for a different kind of workplace, one that feels more like their ideal job. A Pew Research Center survey found that among those who quit their jobs in 2021, the most common reasons cited were low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and “feeling disrespected” at work.
I would tend to guess that “feeling disrespected” covers a wide gamut of issues, but I’d also guess most of the workers who gave that as their reason for quitting did not feel like the leadership at their organization respected them. If they did, would they have left? How much can empathetic leadership make up for shortfalls in pay, opportunities for advancement, and the other reasons for leaving cited by the Pew respondents? I’d wager the answer to that question is not “completely,” but neither is it “not at all.” So does that tip the scales toward considering empathy as good (or better) a measure of nonprofit leaders as fundraising — or anything else?
I do hope the Crain’s article is correct, and that our view of what nonprofit leadership is and should be is changing, placing much more value on empathy and compassion. America’s been through a lot these last few years, and the obvious need for empathetic leadership is hard to miss. But that need has quite truthfully always been there — at any given time, any worker could be dealing with a family issue, a crisis of physical or mental health, or a million other things, and be desperately in need of understanding both within and outside the workplace. Failing in empathy now may affect a larger number of workers all at the same time, but this same failure has affected smaller numbers one by one in the past — because the leaders we pay the very most were not always judged on their ability to be empathetic. Outside of the larger crisis we currently find ourselves in, we may not have even realized that they weren’t all as empathetic as we need them to be.
Moving forward, we need to ensure that empathy and responsibility to staff are at the top of any nonprofit leadership job description, and are taken into consideration as part of the skillset on which those leaders are evaluated and compensated. I’m not so foolish as to think that the American economic pendulum won’t eventually rebound away from its current upswing toward worker power, as it has so many times in the past — but for now, workers do have some power to vote with their feet. Those institutions — especially nonprofits — without leaders able to win their workforce over through empathy and compassion may not make it in this new era.
