ACCEPTANCE AND EMPATHY

These are two interesting words, acceptance and empathy. If we can take one dictionary’s definition, acceptance is receiving what is offered, with approbation, satisfaction, or acquiescence, and empathy is the imaginative projection
of one’s own consciousness into another being. The opposite of both, the word reject, is to refuse to hear or receive to throw out. The servant always accepts and empathizes, never rejects. The servant as leader always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough. A college president once said, “An educator may be rejected by students and must not object to this. But one may never, under any circumstances, regardless of what they do, reject a single student.” We have known this a long time in the family. For a family to be a family, no one can ever be rejected. Robert Frost in his poem “The Death of the Hired Man” states the problem in a conversation on the farmhouse porch between the farmer and his wife about the shiftless hired man, Silas, who has come back to their place to die. The farmer is irritated about this because Silas was lured away from his farm in the middle of the last haying season. The wife says that theirs is the only home he has. They are then drawn into a discussion of what a home is. The husband gives his view: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” The wife sees it differently. What is a home? She says, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Because of the vagaries of human nature, the halt, the lame, half-made creatures that we all are, the great leader (whether it is the mother in her home or the head of a vast organization) would say what the wife said about home in Robert Frost’s poem. The interest in and affection for one’s followers which a leader has and it is a mark of true greatness when it is genuine is clearly something the followers “haven’t to deserve.” Great leaders, including “little” people, may have gruff, demanding, uncompromising exteriors. But deep down inside the great ones have empathy and an unqualified acceptance of the persons of those who go with their leadership.

Acceptance of the person, though, requires a tolerance of imperfection. Anybody could lead perfect people if there were any. But there aren’t any perfect people. And the parents who try to raise perfect children are certain to raise neurotics. It is part of the enigma of human nature that the “typical” person immature, stumbling, inept, lazy is capable of great dedication and heroism if wisely led. Many otherwise able people are disqualified to lead because they cannot work with and through the half-people who are all there are. The secret of institution building is to be able to weld a team of such people by lifting them up to grow taller than they would otherwise be. People grow taller when those who lead them empathize and when they are accepted for what they are, even though their performance may be judged critically in terms of what they are capable of doing. Leaders who empathize and who fully accept those who go with them on this basis are more likely to be trusted.