Her team was in crises. General Manager NITAYA PIRINYUANG used the value of empathy to turn things around. Now, they’re winning global awards.

Nitaya Pirinyuang is the General Manager of Colony, a fast-growing, highly-celebrated luxury coworking space provider here in KL. She found out about us from VulcanPost (we were featured a few weeks apart — LOL), and was the 5th person to purchase an Empathy Box in the first sale!

“I can’t emphasize how important values are to a team’s success.

They help guide big decisions and filter out the people who don’t resonate.

We at Colony learned this the hard way.

When people see Colony, we generally come across as quite successful.

What they don’t know is that we took a LONG time to get here.

We opened in July 2017, and the team still refers to our first six months as ‘The Dark Ages’.

It’s a time most of us want to erase from our history — it was that bad.

On the outside, we were doing great! We were in the news, the public was talking, investors were happy, finances were up.

But a look inside revealed something different…

Our operations were in a mess. Plans were far from strategic. The base level of success was making sure the Centre didn’t fall apart and the space was filled with warm bodies…whoever we could find!

That kind of environment cultivated a very, very toxic culture.

Our team of less than 8 people had absolutely no sense of ownership at work. A lot of micro-managing was going on—even on my part. As a result, we were in a perpetual state of putting out fires.

When things cooled down a little, the Leadership Team had a good talk and realized the core problem was our People.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 12-year career, it’s that we need to build the right team in order to get to where we want to go.

To solve this problem, we eventually settled on five core company values: gratitude, tenacity, extreme ownership, integrity and empathy.

From then on, anyone who joins our team would need to align with these core values. These would become our ‘North Star’ and guide us — not just in hiring decisions, but management and business development decisions as well.

Out of all the values, I felt that empathy was the hardest to implement…but also the most important.

I personally believe in ‘radical transparency’, but sometimes people sometimes take it as a pass to be an a$$hole. But criticism doesn’t have to be delivered in a mean way — you can be polite, kind, and still get the truth across.

Without empathy, tough conversations can spiral into shouting matches.

It relates to another toxic culture prevalent in a lot of corporate companies — gossip. When you’re not happy with someone, you talk about them behind their backs. At Colony, we have a zero tolerance policy for this behaviour.

But it’s not enough to tell people that behaviour is not okay; we needed our team to understand why it’s not okay. That’s why we decided set up safe spaces — to teach them the skill of having difficult conversations.

We were on the lookout for a tool that could turn the concept of empathy into action. Imagine my delight when I discovered The Empathy Box.

The first session I had with the Box was with Gwen Yi and 2 other colleagues. One of them was a very private person, and usually never shared much about her personal life, but in that one session, I got to hear stories that I’ve never heard in our period of time working together.

I think it showed me where she came from – and how her environment shaped her into the woman she is today. This revelation gave me renewed patience, compassion and understanding toward her.

Since then, we’ve been using the principles of The Empathy Box to guide our facilitation of difficult internal conversations.

At Colony, we focus a lot on the personal growth of our team members. Teaching them the skill of having difficult conversations by themselves — we like to think of it as coaching for future leaders. When you’re a leader, you need to be able to have these kinds of conversations with your team.

Passing on the skills to lead with empathy will help our team members become the best versions of themselves.

Empathy skills broaden your perspective and help you understand others a bit better. This enables you to make better, more informed decisions, which in turn makes you a better leader.

After all, we’re not just here to help make you good workers…

We‘re here to make you good human beings, as well.”

Empathy Stories is a series of interviews with our incredible Empathy Box user community around the world in 2019.

Interviewed and written by Chloe Ling, edited by Gwen Yi.