Misery Loves Company: Empathy in Incident Management

We humans have become quite accustomed to our technologies working for us all the time. It doesn’t matter if a service is available 99.9% of the time or even 99.999% of the time. That .001% of downtime couldn’t come at a worse moment.

I work in Information Technology. Our industry is famous for building technologies that people rely on 100% of the time but are only available a high percentage of that time. How high? It depends, but generally, not high enough.

This article is about that gap. I’ve seen teams work wonders to close that gap. I’ve led teams to rebuild reputations of chronic outages into reputations of notable stability. Yet still, nothing is 100%. While I strive to close that gap as much as possible, I recognize the asymptote. We continuously approach perfection but never attain it.

Therefore, let’s have a good way of dealing with that ever-present gap, no matter how small it is.

At this point, I could launch into a discussion about the best practices of incident management, but I’ve already done that. Instead, I’d like to teach one all-important leadership skill: empathy.

Empathy

Empathy is walking a mile in another person’s shoes. It’s treating someone the way you want to be treated. It’s about listening to understand, then demonstrating that understanding. What does that have to do with broken technology? Everything.

Experience is a blessing and a curse

After 23 years of working in Information Technology, I’ve dealt with countless outages. Some of them were real doozies. Because of my tenure, I can remain calm in the storm. That’s a good thing for leading the tech teams doing the restoration, but it’s lousy for conveying empathy to my customers.

For my customers, this may be the worst possible outage at the worst possible time with catastrophic consequences. For me, it’s just another Tuesday afternoon. That doesn’t mean I’m not working hard to deal with it, but it does mean that I’m not nearly as emotionally impacted as my customer is.

This emotional gap may very well be bigger and more impactful than the availability gap.

Closing the gap

What does a customer really want? Well, for starters, they want the technology to work. Yes, but that’s not all. Misery loves company. Your customer is miserable, and they want you to share in that misery. Not because they are spiteful, but because sharing pain makes it easier to bear. They want to have the feeling that “We’re in this together,” and “We’re all over it” instead of “What have you done to me, you insensitive clod?!”

If you close the emotional gap, your customer will give you a chance to close the availability gap.

This is what is required:

1. Information Technology leaders need to design highly available systems.
2. We also need to be calm and responsive when our systems inevitability fail at the worst possible time.
3. Finally, we need to be emotionally intelligent with our customers to feel their pain and express a shared understanding.

This may seem like a tall order. Most people pursue careers in Information Technology because they are better at dealing with technology than dealing with people. But alas, those technologies all have human customers. It’s the leader’s job to make sure they are well taken care of too.

Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast🎙️