Podcast Episodes Archive - Red Slice | Speaker, Author, Leadership Trainer

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Vivian Acquah: How DEI Manages Risks, Lowers Costs, and Opens Eyes

We have talked a lot on this show about the benefits of a diverse and inclusive culture and how it leads to outstanding business results. But did you also know how DEI helps your company manage risk and future-proof against churn, productivity loss, and potentially falling behind in the market?

Today, you will hear one of the best definitions of DEI and how it enhances your organization. And the definition will leave you hungry for dessert!

Vivian Acquah shares a very clear – and delicious – definition of DEI, how the strategies and mindsets ensure your organization manages risk effectively, the financial costs you pay when you actively shy away from DEI, and an amazing look at how she uses virtual reality to help leaders truly understand what many in their organizations experience on a daily basis.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

While the term DEI has been vilified recently, DEI is just like the best carrot cake – every aspect of the ingredients, the cooking temperature, and all of the elements make it great.
Company loyalty is no longer guaranteed just because you pay your employees.
Partnering with, not powering over, your employees gives you better, stronger, and longer-term results.
What motivates you may not be what motivates your employees. We all have different motivators.

“What I see happening now with the companies that are walking away, they are making a lot of short-term decisions that are going to impact them in the long run.” — Vivian Acquah

Episode References:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go by Julie Winkel Giulioni and Beverly Kaye
TEDx: I’ve Lived as a Man and as a Woman: Here’s What I Learned – Paula Stone Williams

From Our Partner:

SparkEffect partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their greatest asset: their people. Through their tailored assessments and expert coaching at every level, SparkEffect helps organizations manage change, sustain growth, and chart a path to a brighter future.

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

About Vivian Acquah, Certified DEI Trainer

Vivian Acquah CDE®, is a respected DEI executive known for creating inclusive workplace environments. Her strategic approach blends analysis and practical tools to address systemic barriers to equity and equality. Passionate about DEI education, she uses innovative methods like virtual reality for immersive and transformational learning. With engaging training, she drives cultural transformation and boosts employee engagement.

Her name, which translates to ‘water,’ symbolizes her role as an extinguisher of DEI-related fires. Vivian provides tangible strategies for embracing inclusive changes, benefiting high-profile clients such as Heineken, LinkedIn, Google, Indeed, Deloitte, TIBCO, Cargill, Swift, Acrolinx, KLM, and Zalando.

Connect with Vivian:

Amplify DEI: amplifydei.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vivianacquah

Instagram: instagram.com/vivalavivenl

Threads: threads.net/@vivalavivenl

Enjoy this deal!

Amplify DEI Cards Conversation starters for your team or other group to start down the DEI journey: https://cards.amplifydei.com/amplify-dei-cards-bundle/

Get 10% off when you use code EMPATHY at checkout

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Vivian Acquah 02:57
Thank you, Maria, for having me, and it’s such an honor to be here and to having this conversation in these times.

Maria Ross 03:05
Oh my gosh, we need to. And you are, you know, as we talked about, we heard in your bio just now, you’re a respected dei executive. You’ve worked for some really big brands who understand the power and the ROI of Dei, and that is the narrative and the story we are trying to continue to get out there and help people understand that dei is not about excluding groups. It’s actually about including more groups. So, yeah, yeah. So let’s start before we get into our conversation around dei as a risk management strategy, as something that if you don’t think about it, it can cost you financially before we get into all that good stuff. Just really quickly. Can you tell us how you got into this work? Kind of what’s your story? Why are you so passionate about this?

Vivian Acquah 03:53
I’m passionate because of the fact that I, well, I’m in the Netherlands, born and raised Ghanaian woman, and I have encountered different exclusion, different ways of being excluded, but the one that was a tipping point was me telling my damn managers that I was pregnant five weeks. Didn’t say to my family or friends. I told my managers first, and the reception of my news was very poor. I wasn’t met with empathy, and for me personally, it felt like I cheated on them by becoming pregnant, and that’s also when the bullying started. So it could have impacted my child, because my it impacted my well being at the time. And luckily, I had a midwife who warned me, like, what are you doing? And this is not the role that you want to be on, because it’s very stressful working under such high pressure and also dealing with being bullied. And I made a decision to go on early maternity leave, which is possible in the Netherlands, and once the moment that my child was born, that was when I realized I need to do something for him. So I need. To work on creating a virtual soil for inclusion so that my child can read the my child and his generation can reap the benefits from him. Orlando is now 11, so I’m I’m very lucky and happy to say that he didn’t, he wasn’t impacted by it, but I look into his eyes every day and see the reason why I’m advocating for this, and it’s not an easy journey, especially at the moment, right now, it’s not an easy journey. But still, he’s the reason why I’m doing this work.

Maria Ross 05:29
I love it. Well, I empathize with you. My son is about to turn 11 next month, and that is actually how I got started in all this empathy work, was I was really frustrated by the models of leadership he was seeing in the world when he was two and a half. And that drives my work as well, is we’ve got to help people understand that empathetic leadership is the way to go, and not just because it’s the right thing to do, but it actually has really great ROI for your business. So I’m trying to make the business case for leaders to say, hey, this isn’t what you think it is. It’s not being weak, it’s not being submissive. You can actually be confidently empathetic, and you can make really tough business decisions, but do it with compassion and humanity and empathy. So we are simpatico, I love it, and your son, I love it. We’ll have to, maybe we’ll connect

Vivian Acquah 06:19
ourselves, right? So they’re the same aging like, wow, this is serendipity moment here. We didn’t notice people. We didn’t notice we

Maria Ross 06:27
didn’t know this before we started recording. So we you and I talk, and we’ve had a lot of different dei experts on this show over the last four or five years talking about different aspects of Dei, the impact to the business, the benefits to the business, the downsides of ignoring it, which is something that I’m really trying to get out there to leaders and organizations right now. So before we get into that, I would like you to level, set us of this conversation and tell us what your definition of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or philosophy from a business perspective, what is the definition of that? I’ll make

Vivian Acquah 07:04
it very simple for those of you who are listening to me and don’t know the way that I talk. I always make it simple as your business, your organization, is creating the best carrot cake, and you want the different stakeholders that you collaborate with, you want them to walk away with the best taste of that particular carrot cake, right? So whether it’s your suppliers, whether it’s your employees, whether it’s your shareholders, you want people to walk away that they are winning and that they have tasted the best carrot cake ever. So when it comes to diversity, it’s the different ingredients that people that the different ingredients your company has to offer. So the employees having the different skill sets that they have, but also the different backgrounds, the unique and the diverse thoughts that they have to amplify your business, then comes equity part. That’s when you level up your ingredients, so you give the people the different tools that they need so that they can be the best person or can be the best employee that they add. So let’s say in a the best, one of the best carrot cakes that I have had is a cheesecake. Carrot Cake, oh yeah, where somebody has the element of the cheesecake, or somebody has the element of maybe rum in raisins, right? Or somebody has the elements of the carrot, right? Everybody shines in within their own category because of that, because they are given particular tools for them to shine. So it’s not equity, it’s not equality, but it’s equity, giving everybody the individual to so to shine a light on myself, I’m neuro divergent, I’m dyslexic, and for me personally, if I have to read, you know, some of the scientific long texts, I need a text to speech to be able to consume the information. But also, when I read books, I accompany it with audiobooks so that I can consume the information. Can read fast, because otherwise the words will come in blurry again, and then the inclusion part is the best part, because now that you have the cake batter, you don’t have the definite cake right. And some people like cake batter. I’m not one of them, but let’s go on towards the inclusion. The inclusion is where, together with the team, you set the right temperature. So oftentimes the leaders, of course, the leaders, ignite the fire of the oven, but however, the oven is set the right temperature is set together with the people, because my definition of inclusion may differ from your definition of inclusion and may differ from somebody else within the team member. So how do we demystify that? We have a conversation about what’s needed for you to be part of this team. How can we help you? How can I, as a leader, support you to thrive in the workplace? We I don’t know where things got lost in translation, but often times when I come in, there is a relationship, a team building that needs to be done for people to disclose. What they want and how they feel included and what they need to feel psychologically safe. And if we don’t have those conversations or those dialogs with each other, then how can we collaborate effectively? How can we connect with each other on an empathetic level as well?

Maria Ross 10:16
Right? This is the one of the best definitions of dei I’ve ever heard. I love this carrot cake analogy. I can’t wait for my listeners to hear this, but I love this idea, because when we look at the individual words and what they mean, I don’t think anyone can argue that those are good things to acknowledge and to have. But what’s happened is that term dei has been politicized. It’s been branded as a as a thing that threatens, let’s be real cisgender white males in the workplace. And I love the folks that I’ve had on this show. And what I try to talk about too is that when you have an organization committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, that’s good for you, too, Mr. White male, like you get to feel you get to have equity. You get to have opportunity. It’s not at the expense of excluding you. It’s to bring everyone in under the same tent. It

Vivian Acquah 11:13
is, however, sometimes the way things are narrated, right? I don’t know what other people are saying, but I did have different conversation with white men who felt like they were being excluded, or they were being dismissed, or they were being not being able part of the inclusion. And what I try to say is we are expanding the table so that different people with insights can sit at the table and have conversations where things are going to be discussed about them, right? Why not include them? Why not talk about them? Because you don’t have my lived experience. I don’t have your lived a series. But yet again, we are here together to talk about empathy, but also talk about inclusion from different angles. Because why it’s a win win for all stakeholders. That’s how I feel, and I’m not, you know, dismissing what other people are doing at the moment, right now, when it comes to Okay, we are going to narrate everything that’s for us. I am, however, want to amplify like the way that I interpret inclusion and the way that I interpret diversity, equity and inclusion is creating space so that different people can try, because in the past, society has excluded people. Look at AI, for instance, look at the way some people are not being included. Even with the images creation, some people are

Maria Ross 12:32
not being Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for making that distinction. Yeah. Now you know, we’ve talked a lot on this show about the fact that you know, data and research show us that when you have a diverse, inclusive team or workforce, you end up making better business decisions, because you have the ability for there to be people that see things differently and may recognize risks that you can’t see or discover opportunities that you’ve overlooked. So especially

Vivian Acquah 13:04
that part say more about that. For instance, I want to highlight, for instance, Rihanna. She is an entrepreneur, or she’s known as the musical artist, but the way that Brianna has expanded her reach within the fashion industry, but also in the makeup industry, where now Rihanna is a household brand for a lot of people worldwide, the way she tapped into diversity, as in diverse body sizes, providing clothes for diverse body size and making it sexy as well. But also makeup, which brand in worldwide has all the shades. Have the majority of the shades of the world, and she was one of the few that has them.

Maria Ross 13:46
Yeah, and that’s a huge market opportunity for her. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So talk to us about, I know one of the things that caught my eye where I finally was like, I’ve got to get you on. Now, really got to get you on was you did a post around dei as risk management. Tell us about that. How is creating a culture committed to dei a form of risk management? Well,

Vivian Acquah 14:10
I wrote that post because it speaks to the language of a lot of leaders. Right? The majority of the leaders don’t want risk to creep into their business, because every time that road creeps into their business or their organization, that means that, it means that they have to invest in a lot of legal costs, or maybe have to invest in a lawsuit, or maybe pay out in the person or the plaintiff, right? And I want to address it from their angle, and see as when your company doesn’t have a fire alarm, so when your company doesn’t have dei active, then that means that the moment that a match hitches hits your company, your company is on fire without you even knowing, whilst Diversity, Equity and Inclusion done right, not a performative way, but done right, done in a way that benefits everybody within the organization. Education. You have something in place to prevent lawsuits. You have something in place to attract talent. You have something in place to become a better place, to work right? You have something in place to retain talent, to retain knowledge, and even when the knowledge, or even when the person is going to a different job within the company, it’s still a win, because now you don’t have to, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on training. You don’t have to onboard that person and to learn more about the companies and the hows and the whats and the whys that person is already a knowledge bank and is expanding that knowledge by going to a different company. But yet, what I see happening now with the companies that are working away, they are doing a lot of short term decisions that are going to impact them on the longer run. Because what I see happening now is the upcoming three and a half years or four years, it’s a business case, or what to do or what not to do,

Maria Ross 16:04
yeah, what do you believe are the financial costs of ignoring dei right now? In the longer

Vivian Acquah 16:10
run, fear stifles and for people that are working in a company that doesn’t have the an authentic dei policy or practices initiatives in place, you would see that they will not work with any pleasure. So the employee engagement will go down more sick leaves as well. But also they are not loyal to your company, or they won’t go the extra mile towards your company, right? And it’s also creates a way in for them not to stay longer within the company. At the moment, right now, a lot of people are complaining about Gen Z and all the different generations. But what about the loyalty the other way around? How are you going to show your employees the love whilst you are seeking love from your employees as well? Or you want your employees to commit love to you as well, and that is as an organization, right? Don’t get me the wrong way. This is as an organization, and oftentimes there is a discrepancy, of you show your loyalty to me because I pay you. Those days are over. This is not the time, given the fact that there are remote jobs, people can become an entrepreneur or set up their own businesses, right? And, yeah, with everything that is in place right now, with all the technology that is in place, not everybody’s dependent on working for a corporate not everybody’s on working for the same company anymore, and that means that from time to time, they will switch. And what does that mean for the longevity of your organization or your department? Yeah, because when you do that tango with, let’s say somebody leaving the your department, that means more strain on the people that are existing there. And if that person who leaves is a, let’s say a cheerleader or somebody who’s very social. It can also the energy, can that spark, can also touch other people to walk away from that as well. Right? What I see now happening is leadership going towards traditional leadership that should be extinct as the dinosaurs,

Maria Ross 18:20
100% I always talk about that are the leadership paradigm has changed, and the old paradigm is dying because we recognize that partnering with versus powering over gets you better, stronger, longer term results. Yeah, and it doesn’t mean, you know, I’ve had military leaders on this show who say there is a place for command and control, but it’s in the heat of battle. It’s not every day. What they do is they actually lean into empathy. Because you have to be able to convince, in a military setting, someone to give their life for you. Exactly. That’s the incentive. What are how are you going to incent someone to lay down their life for you. You do that through empathy. You do that through creating an environment of trust where you understand that individual and what motivates them. Yeah, it’s not the long term play is not command and control. That’s just when it’s specifically and tactically needed in the heat of the world. Crisis

Vivian Acquah 19:19
should not be a battlefield. It should never be a battlefield unless you’re, you know, you’re literally working for the military or for the Navy. That’s a different occasion. But the workplace was never meant to be a battlefield and to be run in a way that it’s the meaning, it’s dehumanizing, yeah,

Maria Ross 19:40
absolutely. Well, and also we know that the corporate structures of today were based on models from the military. That is how we created structures and hierarchies within commerce, within corporate America. So, but yeah, we’ve gotta it’s evolved. And I always say this on the show, you know, I have some empathy for the leaders who are like. Wait, I’ve been doing this for 30 and 40 years, and that’s how I got to be successful. And now all of a sudden, you’re telling me the rules are changing. Yeah, kinda so, you know, hopefully people like you, people like me, are helping support those leaders in making the transition. But it doesn’t mean the transition is going away.

Vivian Acquah 20:17
Think of it, and this is where I will step in, into my mother role, right as in a mom, our kids don’t come with manuals. Every year you they change the narrative, they change the guidelines, where you have to apply and tweak and apply your growth mindset and tweak the guidelines a little bit for what’s applicable for that particular year. My son is now a teenager, and different rules, different challenges, apply to current day. Whereas if I would use the old manuscript the way that I use it when he was a baby, that’s not gonna work. And that’s also something that I wanna say, I wanna give back to the leaders that think about, if you have a child or your uncle or aunt, or you have a child nearby, think about the way that you connect with that child at a different age, in a way that they become older. And think then also about your employees. Employees go to different phases in life, and what I’m trying to say, support them through those different phases in life, but also create that psychological safety. And that can be done when you activate your empathy muscles and also spread it, share it with other people, so that they can learn to become empathetic self leaders as well.

Maria Ross 21:31
Yeah, I always tell leaders I work with that that empathy is the fuel for helping your dei initiatives take root so that you can actually experience the benefits that we’re talking about here, the benefits on the bottom line, because otherwise, without the empathy and the understanding of being willing and able to see someone else’s point of view, you don’t harness the value of the diverse viewpoints. You just all disagree with each other, right? And you all act like I don’t understand how you know I don’t understand that person. But you mentioned something earlier that I didn’t want to lose sight of. And it’s this idea of, you know, we were talking about it earlier, and we got into sort of the military discussion, but this idea of understanding what the incentive is for your employees and understanding based on their differences, there’s going to be different motivators, there’s going to be different incentives. And I couldn’t help but remember, and I want to put this in the show notes the book, the fabulous book, drive by Daniel Pink, which is all about The Surprising Truth. I think it’s the subtitle, The Surprising Truth of what motivates us. Yeah, and it’s about understanding that unless you what motivates you might not motivate somebody else. So I think you were mentioning earlier, for some bosses, they think, well, it’s motivating enough that I’m paying you a paycheck. That’s not how everyone’s wired, not that they don’t want to get paid, but they are more motivated, in some cases, by recognition or inclusion, or more responsibilities, right, accessibility, all of these things. So it’s about being a leader who can find that particular motivator for that employee and that or that group of employees, and definitely then unlock their potential, unlock their motivation to do more for the organization.

Vivian Acquah 23:15
Yeah, while you were talking, I was also thinking about, I think it’s Beverly. I don’t know her last name anymore, but help them grow or watch them go. There is a book about that that talks about whether Are you going to connect with them, and are you going to unlock their potential or watch them go? Yeah, you stay in age in Europe, and I know in the US as well, with the fact that with everything happening with the colleges and also universities, but also there is a there are challenges with funding and with grants for the next generation. Whereas I’m wondering, how are they going to find the talent if they are not going to create space for that talent to grow, and that is going to be an interesting business case in the upcoming five to 10 years, as in, where are we going to find the talent? Because we are dismissing people when they are old. We are dismissing people when they are young. We are dismissing people when they have a different cultural background. We have dismissing people who might be neurodivergent, or have who have a who have something different, like my hair is different, or maybe a different gender identity as well. And I’m just like, aren’t these all people who are talented and can add value to your company by sharing different insights and also mitigating risk, because the fact that you are maybe not aware of how the black community is collaborating, for instance, at the moment right now, where target is suffering from what’s happening at the moment, right now. But also another example is John Deere, last year or previous years, they walked away from dei and recently their shareholders said, Well, no, no. No, no, no, because it’s good for our money. So let’s activate it this year. Right now, it says something that, wow,

25:07
788, companies

Vivian Acquah 25:08
are still activating their inclusion initiative. Maybe they are rebranding it because they don’t want to be targeted by certain people or Exactly, yeah,

25:18
but

Vivian Acquah 25:20
and long and they want inclusion, and inclusion means for all. Inclusion means everybody gets something out of it, or gets to benefit from the success of the company and for the success the individual success, right? So why are we focusing only on one out of the eight companies that are walking away because of certain pressure from outside. It’s not fair, right?

Maria Ross 25:42
Well, that’s the thing. Is, we need to shine a light on the companies like the Costcos who are like, No, we actually understand this is good for our business to operate this way. Yeah, yeah. So shining a light, okay, so kind of our last piece of our conversation that I’m so intrigued is that you have seen examples of using virtual reality to unlock empathy in people and in leaders. What the heck is going on tell us all about that?

Vivian Acquah 26:09
Well, virtual reality is a tool to expand your lenses in a different way, right? Because there are so many movies about discrimination, there are so many books and so many podcasts and so many documents about what it is to deal with discrimination or what the impact might be, but until you have walked a mile in my shoes, literally can walk on my shoes, then you will understand my impact will impact you, as well as a leader and with The virtual reality, what we do is we use realistic scenarios where we connect people with experiences that happen in the workplace so as exclusion, microaggression or good intention, bad impact, so that they can get a sense out of what’s happening. And why is it important for me as a leader, for a self leader, to understand that I am accountable, I have to play an accountability part in this, to create space where it’s psychological safe, but also understand that when when I step on somebody’s toes, I’m not the one who should be offended, but I should listen. I should activate empathy and understand that I heard them. I might also feel hurt by them, you know, telling me that I heard them, but I heard them. And create space to say sorry, or create space to be supportive. Because oftentimes we sit at the sideline just because we know Peter or we know Yan or we know Susan or we know Cinderella, we dismiss whatever it is that they have done, because we personally know that person and cannot imagine that that person can do something that can harm another human being. But then again, we are human. I can harm people. You can harm people. Everybody can harm people. And the moment that you understand that this is the impact when you lose somebody because of it needs of workplace behavior or incivility, or you lose somebody because of unconscious bias, which can be mitigated. That’s where a lot of value can be generated as well. So a lot of aha moments come close, but also it’s a way to immediately tap into people, their intrinsic motivation, whilst, if I wouldn’t use it, it would take much longer to tap into that. Are you actually using

Maria Ross 28:31
it with clients right now? Yeah, okay, and what is explain the experience to us? Is it a scenario? Are they wearing goggles? Like, how? What? Yeah. How does it work? Yeah.

Vivian Acquah 28:40
So first of all, we start with how you say it, aligning everybody with the same terminology, right? So I’ll bring in my carrot cake analogy in but I’ll also share different other aspects of what’s the risk when dei is not active, right? So I expand my presentation with the risk, and how can we mitigate that risk? Then they’ll go through a scenario. One of the scenarios we have is power and privilege, and also combined with a me too, scenario where people can put the goggles, half of the group will put on the goggles, and half of the group will be an observer, because there’s a lot happening on non verbal communication, and I want people also to be attentive to what they see, how they see their colleague respond, and what are the little things that you can respond to, even though somebody has not shared anything with you, right? Right? So they put on the goggles they go through that experience and that conspiracy, let’s say, within one experience, I’ve counted like 30 different things that are happening that are connected to exclusion, and for some people, it’s it’s confronting themselves with bias, unconscious bias, without me playing a role into that particular scenario, because they do it to themselves, right? And it’s an eye opener. It’s like, within five minutes, they see a lot, they experience a lot. But. But the magic doesn’t end there, because they went through everybody will go through the same scenario, and everybody will do a debrief and understand that. But I saw something different. No, I experienced something different. Or this connects me to my past, or this connects me to my loved one, or disconnect me to my child, who’s going through that at the moment right now, where I’m able to tap into people that intrinsic motivation and also connect it with what can we do better? Or what can you do better? Because now that you have succeeded, not have you experienced the impact. What can you do better today to make the world a little bit better tomorrow? Oh

Maria Ross 30:37
my gosh, I love this so much, because I am just imagining, you get so many people who are just like, I just never thought of it that way. I never, yeah, I heard it, and I, you know, to whatever extent I believed the person or I didn’t believe it, but oh my gosh, that’s really difficult. That’s really hard. Are you just completely moved when you are working with leaders. That experience that, I mean, that’s got to be pretty emotional for

Vivian Acquah 31:06
some people. It has mended my connection with leaders, because in the past, you know, due to what I’ve experienced in the past, let’s say that I’ve put them, I objectified them. I recently read a book about the anatomy of peace, and it talks about objectifying people as seeing them as objects instead of as people. But with this particular with this particular training, I know that leaders are human, but oftentimes they talk from a space where there is some kind of human disconnect with people, not only but sometimes there is a disconnect, and with this, I’m able to connect the team with each other and understand that the the leader also has feelings, yes, and the team members also have feeling when you connect each other, when you connect the dots and connect people, and also create an atmosphere where team building can happen. Yeah, that’s what magic can happen.

Maria Ross 32:02
I love this. I have a role play I do in one of my leadership trainings that there was this element of that that happened, that I actually didn’t design into it. It sort of happened serendipitously. One of the role plays in my trainings is delivering a difficult performance review, and I give each it’s sort of two actors and an observer, and I give each actor their backstory, but they don’t know what the other person’s backstory is like a murder mystery party, and it’s meant to be a manager and a direct report. And the manager is giving the direct report a difficult performance review. They’ve had some trouble with their performance. What I didn’t predict is that one time I did this in a cross level training group, so there were, like, VPs in the group, and then individual contributors that were, you know, in their 20s and 30s, yeah, and what happened was, when they paired up, because they’re just given, like, do you want to be a or b, the younger person actually took on the role of the manager, and the seasoned exec took on the role of the person getting the difficult performance review. And what happened was they both walked away, and this is why I always say empathy flows both ways. It’s not just the responsibility of the leader, but it’s helping your people build empathy so they understand you too, right? Yeah. And what happened was they were both so impacted by it, and even though it was just, I just gave them some parameters, and then they got creative with how they ran the role play. The the younger person said, Wow, I didn’t realize how how hard it is to give someone negative feedback, like how difficult that is emotionally, how it makes you feel, whatever. And then the seasoned executive said, I forgot what it’s like to get feedback from someone, which that’s a whole other issue if they’re not getting feedback at the upper levels, but whatever.

Vivian Acquah 33:55
But that’s a whole nother thing, because people don’t understand that the different stakeholders in this particular scenario. They all want to be connected. They all want to be loved in a way. They all want to be part of the team. Yeah, and sometimes leadership can leaders can feel lonely because of the fact that they distance themselves from the team, or they distance themselves so that they can lead, but we need to be able to connect more.

Maria Ross 34:20
Yeah, absolutely. So I love that. What a great and I also it’s also making me think of a TEDx talk I saw that really impacted me. And I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. It was a transgender woman who had actually been in their you know, prior to their transition, had been a male CEO of a very Christian organization, I think Paula stone and she talked about how, with great humor and insight and wit, talked about I experienced firsthand when I finally embraced who I am and I began to live my life as. Woman that I am. I experienced being shut down in a meeting. I experienced being talked over. I experienced, and she said, I actually never saw that before when I was in the world as a male leader, and so they, you know, she got to experience that herself. Yeah, you know, we don’t. I like you know, your method of doing it is a little bit less permanent, right? But being able to give people a taste of that like, no, people are not making this up. This is really what their experience is, and we need to believe them. Yeah,

Vivian Acquah 35:32
yeah. We oftentimes don’t believe them, because it never happened to us, but when, and there are so many things that we don’t know until we know, right? Because one of the things that way that I have more empathy for people who have accessibility challenges. I broke my ankle two years ago, and I’m still recovering from that, but being in a wheelchair being dismissed just because people think that I can’t talk. Mind you, it’s my ankle that is broken my mouth or my eyes or my ears, right? And the other thing is also that I never realized how much power comes from my ankle until you have to open an office door, some doors, doors, they weigh a ton, and I’m just like, here I am somewhat able bodied, but still feeling that I need to put pressure on my ankle, that it feels like I’m weight lifting just to open a door. Yeah, this should not

Maria Ross 36:32
be the case. Absolutely not. And that’s what you know. That’s what makes me so angry that you know, at least as of this recording, they’re clawing away some accessibility laws in the US. And I’m like, what people need to function. They need access to things like this is not about cutting costs. This is about giving people access so they can contribute and be part of society and be part of an organization. So I’m with you where that could be a whole other episode

Vivian Acquah 37:01
about paralyzing the system at the moment, right now. Yeah, but I do have to say, and this is my lens from from the outside looking in some government practices, let’s say that their processes are not ideal, as the way that a company does that right? So oftentimes a company needs to earn their revenue or needs to earn their money by selling their services the government, then now ahead, they always get money. They always get money. So no matter what, I’m not justifying what certain people are doing, but I do understand that we need to look into our government processes with a corporate lens into how can we save it, and how can we do that in a sustainable way without hurting and dehumanizing people? That’s why I

Maria Ross 37:55
love that. Well, we might have to have another conversation, Vivian, because this has been just delightful, and I’m so glad you shared your insights. Thank you so much for your time and your gems today that you shared, we will have all your links in the show notes. And before I get to that, I also want to quickly talk about your amplify dei cards, because you have a special offer for our listeners. So tell us what those are, and we’ll put a link in the show notes, as well as the code to redeem them for 10% off. Yes,

Vivian Acquah 38:25
I mentioned something about people not having the conversations that are necessary, right? So these amplified dei cards are conversation startups about creating your own inclusion recipe for your team, or even you can do this among friends or family, where you start ignite your own individual journey, right? So there are two card decks, and the code is empathy. So when you use the code empathy, and it’s valid till end of 2025 you get a 10% discount to activate those conversation starters within the team, because oftentimes people don’t know where to start. And I have given people the I’ve created this card that’s very simple. You’ll also see a savviness around me playing around with food, because some cards contain jalapeno, as in spicy or paprika, mouth. And I do have a phone, a as in a hot and some cards also, or the cards also contain the intensity that, or that was the intensity level, but category level, as in unaware and action. So they can be play around, used to play, but phenomenally, used to create your own dei recipe, right? Individually.

Maria Ross 39:38
I love that as maybe an action item for our folks listening is check out the cards if you want to just start somewhere with your team or your organization, or, like you said, maybe your family and your group of friends, because sometimes we just need some sort of guardrail around how to start those conversations. So I will put the link in the show notes, and as vivid mentioned, use code empathy for 10% off until the end. Of 2025, so as we wrap up, we’ll have all your other links in the show notes so people can connect with you. But for anyone on the go, where’s a good place that they can find out more about your work, the easiest will

Vivian Acquah 40:10
be LinkedIn. So when you look me up Vivian Acquah, look me up not to miss the girl with the purple and pink hair, then you’re

Maria Ross 40:19
right. And as I tell all my listeners, when folks give their LinkedIn is make sure you put a note that says that you heard her on the show so she doesn’t think you’re trying to sell her something. Vivian, thank you for the time. I really appreciate you. Likewise,

Vivian Acquah 40:32
Marie, and it was a joy for talking about this particular subject. So I’m looking forward to the future. I

Maria Ross 40:39
love it. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate and review or share it with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

James Coan: Closing the Perception Gap that Tears Us Apart

Given the country’s political divide, we often hear that conversations are the key to empathy and connection. Which is true. But that also doesn’t scale very well. One way to combat this is to correct dangerous political misperceptions and help us find more overlap. In fact, a Hidden Tribes study shows that 85% of Americans are more similar than we think.

Today, James Coan explains the Perception Gap and how it forces us to see each other as threats rather than with compassion. This applies to the workplace as much as politics. He talks about why conversations are great, but indirect interceptions also help close this gap and bring us together. This includes More Like US’s work in education, journalism, and the arts to portray each other in a more accurate light. James also shares some advice for creatives and creators on how they can help. The work is intriguing and frankly, makes a lot of sense – and it can be used by corporate leaders as well. This conversation could not be more important right now, so please learn more about their work and take a listen.

To access the episode transcript, please search for the episode title at www.TheEmpathyEdge.com

Key Takeaways:

Books, movies, and other media that feature characters who are “not like us” are not there to convert your children; they are there to expose people to different experiences and lives for better understanding.
We’re never going to be able to tap into the conversations and the empathy of listening to one another until we realize that we’re closer than we think we are.
People who feel threatened, especially to their safety and security, are more open to authoritarian tendencies. By focusing on the desire for atypical leadership, people are able to work better together rather than fight.

“Every day Americans tend to be more similar ideologically than fellow Americans tend to realize. An average Democrat or Republican will agree on more and are less extreme than people realize.” — James Coan

Episode References:

From Our Partner:

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About James Coan, Co-Founder and Executive Director, More Like US

James Coan is Co-Founder and Executive Director of More Like US, which corrects dangerous political misperceptions of each other, at scale. He previously served as DC Alliance Co-chair and Mid-Atlantic Regional Lead for Braver Angels, one of the largest organizations dedicated to reducing political divides, and previously co-led social media and Ambassador outreach nationally. He has been involved closely in the field since shortly after the 2016 election, with a main interest of achieving goals at scale. He brings 10+ years of strategy consulting experience and worked at a think tank after receiving a degree in public policy from Princeton.

Connect with James Coan

More Like US: https://www.morelikeus.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-coan-6465b15/

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

James Coan 02:42

Well, thank you, Maria. It’s great to be here. So

Maria Ross 02:45

tell us a little bit about your story and how you even got here. What brought you to this passion and this calling of the work that you’re doing right now?

James Coan 02:53

Yeah, so I know there’s a lot of business leaders here. I was an energy consultant for more than a decade. In 2016 I felt that my country was tearing itself apart. Wasn’t sure what was wrong or what I could do about it, and so it began this now, eight some odd year journey, I was doing a lot of volunteer work to try to reduce political divides at scale. About three years ago, I realized the only way forward was to create a separate organization more like us. I’ll be happy to talk more about that. Yeah, absolutely. And

Maria Ross 03:26

I know you were involved as a volunteer for braver angels, and we’ve actually had Monica Guzman on the show before, and I’ll link to her episode in the show notes, but tell us a little bit about the organization you were you’re spearheading now? Yes,

James Coan 03:41

so more like us. We correct dangerous political misperceptions of each other at scale, there’s a finding known as the perception gap that we’re more similar, and we tend to realize across the political spectrum, and we find ways of increasing trust across the political spectrum, and also decreasing an overblown sense of threat that Americans often have of one another, right?

Maria Ross 04:09

I mean, this could not be more relevant. We’ve talked about, you know, we talk about empathy from all angles on this show, and we’ve done a few episodes on having, you know, political conversations trying to bridge that political divide. And it’s really interesting that you said, you know, you started coming to this work in 2016 because that’s actually when I came at this work of, you know, thinking about, I had a two and a half year old son at the time, and I was reading him books about empathy and sharing and compassion, but the leaders in the headlines were doing anything but, and kind of like you, I was like, Well, what can I do about that? After I got over my dismay and being disheartened about it, I thought there have to be people and companies and leaders who are winning with empathy. So I guess, in a way, my works about challenging the misperceptions people have about what empathy is and what it isn’t. Because. I think that stops a lot of people from embracing their empathy, and where it kind of intersects with politics is I talk about empathy is not about agreeing with someone. It’s about trying to understand their context and their point of view and finding common ground from that conversation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Edwin rush at the Center for building a culture of empathy. So he was on the show. I’ll link to his episode in a second, in the pot, in the show notes. But he ran, he does this facilitation technique his organization called empathy circles. And they did these empathy circles at the most divisive political rallies around 2016 2017 they were actually featured in a documentary called Trump phobia, or something like that. And what they did was they got people from completely opposite ends of the political spectrum together in what they called an empathy tent, and facilitated this technique around listening. And people didn’t walk away converted, but they walked away appreciating the other’s point of view and actually seeing each other as human. So I know your work is a little different, because you are literally combating misperception and misinformation. Can you tell us a little bit about what that work looks like?

James Coan 06:12

Yeah, sure. So three or four major areas say education, journalism and arts. So education, both secondary and tertiary, higher ed, we have a lesson plan about this finding of the perception gap and causes, consequences, potential solutions, and we’re starting to work with various organizations and higher ed, including the national social norm center. So for decades, there’s been work on correcting social norms about health behaviors among college students. Like, if students think that many other students drink more than they actually do, then they’re more likely to say, binge drink. But then you correct their norms and what is actually happening, and then they’re like, Oh, actually, I don’t want to do this either. Yeah. And then we’ve aggregated hundreds of data point points from surveys including Gallup and pew that show overlaps between Democrats and Republicans on more than 20 different topic areas. That’s called similarity hub. We’re working with a professor to test that inclusion into news articles. So right, if there’s a hot button topic, but a couple data points that show actually in certain aspects of this, we’re not hopelessly divided. How does that change how people think in and see each other? We have a nonprofit partner with that. And then finally, we have some guidance for those in the How to portray people across the political spectrum and a better and more accurate light. So some examples of this, you know, from maybe a more left leaning perspective, could be like Will and Grace. You know, Will, it normalizes someone who who’s gay. But then, you know, from the right there’s a show currently, Connors, the Connors, which is a REAP of Roseanne, which can better humanize kind of a white working class character. So tell us

Maria Ross 08:08

a little bit about the perception gap, because that seems to be where the crux of your work is about. Is about closing that tell us what that is,

James Coan 08:15

yeah. So the perception gap, and really it’s perception gaps, as you find more data on it. So originally, it came from a group with a very similar sounding name, called more in common in 2019 that looked at it from an ideological standpoint. So Americans, when we’re talking about everyday Americans, the American public, tends to be more similar ideologically than fellow Americans tend to realize an average Democrat Republican will agree on more are less extreme than people tend to realize. So there’s ideological component, but there’s other work that we highlight in the lesson plan and elsewhere on conversational misperceptions, so kind of a perception that conversations will go worse than they actually will, that people on the other side will want to listen less than they actually do, and there are threat misperceptions, so overestimating that people across the political spectrum dehumanize us. Way to say this is we think, they think we’re monkeys, but they don’t. And then there’s items about breaking democratic norms or engaging in political violence, where there are large gaps between what people think those the other side want to do, or how they think, and how those people on the other side actually do think and how they would act? Yeah.

Maria Ross 09:41

I mean, there’s definitely a clear relationship between the work that you’re doing and how to foster empathy, how to help people see another person’s perspective and perceive it for the reality that it is, versus the bias that I think it is because of these perception gaps. Yes, right?

James Coan 09:59

So you. It’s easier to have empathy or compassion or other related words when the other person is actually more similar to us than we realize. So yeah, sometimes there has to be that even though they are different, I still should have empathy or compassion toward them, but more like us doesn’t really take these normative stances. We’re just like, well, they’re more similar, they’re less threatening. So probably these emotions that you know, the goals are, you know, to to be more empathetic, to be more compassionate, tend to emerge on their own without necessarily forcing the issue very much. So

Maria Ross 10:41

where would we see your work show up? I know you talked about the different prongs of what you do, but where would we as people, not, you know, everyday Americans and workers and executives and where? Give me an example, or give us an example, please, of where that work shows up. Like, where would we see that in action?

James Coan 10:59

Yeah, well, so admittedly, more like us is in fairly early days. So African American probably would not see this work show up. I mean, it’s possible to go to similarityhub.org, and view all of this data that we found. There are other organizations. I’ll talk about one called Bridge entertainment labs that is working with Hollywood’s TV and film to change how we see and feel about one another from the entertainment media that’s consumed those documentaries. So there’s a group called builders that brought 11 people together in Tennessee to talk about gun issues and even braver angels made a documentary a while back. Or, if you’re a college student or or high schooler and you’re interested to learn about the business world that you may eventually join, right, we are, you know, very focused on getting into, you know, those places and and having messages reach students where they are necessarily relying solely on workshops and dialog as the method. So

Maria Ross 12:14

talk to me about that, that last point you just made, because I know you talk about the views can be improved without conversations that are costly and hard to scale. What do you mean by that?

James Coan 12:24

Right? So in the academic literature, there’s a difference between what sometimes called direct contact or indirect contact, or even just or indirect methods. Uh, when it comes to efforts to reduce political divides, sometimes called depolarization, or bridge building. There’s been an extremely strong emphasis on conversations as the method, and there is substantial work that supports that it can be effective, that dates back to the 1950s and even some work before that. But there’s also a whole body of work on indirect contact, on seeing others in a better light. So something known as various contact, watching people have useful conversations. There’s parasocial contact, connecting with characters, and then there’s a whole host of misperception interventions. There was something known as the strengthening democracy challenge, run by Stanford. And there were hundreds of submissions of eight minutes or less. 25 were tested, and three of the top performers, the majority of those specifically reduced, focused on misperceptions and misperceptions of threat, in particular, across the political, political spectrum. So there’s a lot of academic work on other methods, and there’s even fascinating stories we want to talk about it for other divides, like soap operas and Burundi to bring Hutus and Tutsis, you know, together and normalize, you know, relationships and friendships, collaboration between them. So there’s decades of experience in its beyond conversation. Some of these just mathematically, in a country of three 40 million people, can scale more easily than expecting everyone to have lots of conversations, although I should say that we’re open to conversations, right? There’s not a bad method. More like us is focused on scale. Also means that we’re interested in kind of stop, drop and roll messaging, like, what are the few kind of items to keep in mind when having a conversation which won’t be complete, it won’t cover every single detail about how to have a conversation, but it could spread. But again, that’s just a method, not only possibility.

Maria Ross 14:47

Oh my gosh, I love all of what you’re saying, because one of the things that I’ve talked about in the past in terms of how we can strengthen our empathy is just exposure, right? And one of the tips I give in my first. Empathy book, the empathy edge is explore with your imagination. So consume art books, documentaries, movies, shows that are either created by someone who has a different lived experience or portray people that have a different lived experience, so that you can actually activate cognitive empathy. First of like, oh, I What is that like? I didn’t know what your experience was like. I’m using my brain first to understand your perspective and your context, and that could lead to emotional empathy, where I start to, you know, really connect with the feelings that you have. But in order for me to get to understanding and compassion, I don’t have to necessarily go through the like I’m feeling exactly what you’re feeling, and I’m having a conversation with you, we can really activate that empathy, especially you know, work they’ve done with young children of just that exposure, and that’s why books and stories and movies and shows that feature characters who are Not like us, they’re not there to convert your kids to that specific thing. They’re there to just give your kids exposure to people like that so they understand them better. And so, you know, we could go on a whole rant about banned books, but we won’t. So I love what you’re saying about this idea of like, if we want to get this to scale, and maybe even bring people along who are uncomfortable having conversations. We can, we can go through all these other routes. And I was very intrigued by the work you’re doing around journalism. Is that to sort of get bias out of journalism, or what? What’s the work specifically you’re doing there? Yeah.

James Coan 16:39

So when it comes to journalism, I think there are a fair number of articles that may portray the country in very divided ways. So the original perception gap report for more in common had the fairly unfortunate finding that the more often that people follow the news, the larger their distortions were about those in the other political party? Yeah, that would be the opposite right, and people would get more informed and have more accurate views. So yeah, working with an organization called trusting news at this point, mostly focuses on building trust in journalism, on making sure that lots of voices in the community are heard, but they’re interested also in this more kind of national view of allowing people to have more accurate perceptions of those across the political spectrum, that there was another more in common study called Hidden tribes, done pew did a similar typology, and only about 15% of Americans are in the left and and right most categories combined. So it’s like 85% or so Americans are somewhere in between. But those 15% tend to have more formal education, have more wealth, have more political power and just tend to be louder. Yeah, so, right, that’s the kind of people who we tend to hear from, more, I should say, from not trying to be ranting at all. They’re more like us. There’s two other co founders. One co founder has raised money and worked on Democratic campaigns. The other is a recent past president of the National Federation of Republican women. So whenever I have to speak in ways that can resonate co founders who have fairly different political backgrounds, perspectives, extent and we’ve gotten a lot of resonance across the political spectrum with this. Sometimes when I present, there are conservatives who will come up, and they seem to be excited by what I what I’m saying, and I’ve gone to CPAC and feedback there. So it’s definitely not like a one sided area or approach that it would only work for one side I

Maria Ross 19:07

see. So given the times we’re in right now, do you all feel a particular urgency for the work? I mean, how are you helping given the times we’re in right now,

James Coan 19:23

yeah, so at some level, we’re there’s actually a surprisingly small amount that we’re changing in terms of what we’re doing, because we’re mostly talking about the perspectives of fellow Americans, the American and so unless the public’s views on all sorts of things just change, changes overnight. It doesn’t really have a huge impact on that directly. We do write a fair number of articles in the fulcrum and we’re going to have a couple articles coming out. Yes, well, I’m not sure when this it will be after. I’m talking right now, but possibly before you can hear this. You’re listening that discuss threat and compassion, which I guess would be pretty interesting from an empathy standpoint, that if we see another side or another person as a threat, likely to also be able to have compassion for them. And so we talk about this, you know, in terms of government workers who are getting fired, but also maybe surprising things, some, to some extent, listeners that there’s actually more than twice as many drug as gun deaths per year, but I don’t think maybe people more toward the left of the political spectrum would emphasize that twice as kind of dealing with drugs twice as much as guns in general. There’s probably more focus and but, but a lot of people who you know, working class, you know, possibly world more likely to be Republican voters at this point, right? There’s a whole host of kind of, you know, negative associations these people are, are they racist? Are they sexist, etc, and that can use the extent to which we have your empathy or compassion to group when there are aspects of them that are seen as quite negative.

Maria Ross 21:28

Yeah. I mean, I think all of this is important. I think where people are scared right now is that the policies being enacted are not a perception. They’re a reality for people, the governmental policies. I think that’s where folks are having trouble saying, I can’t look past some other side being a threat, because you literally are a threat to my existence, if I’m trans, if I’m a woman who’s pregnant, if I’m you know, all of these other things so but I think your point is really well taken that we’re never going to be able to tap into the to the conversations and to the empathy of just listening to each other until we realize that we’re closer than we think we are. And I think a lot of it is just, I make, you know, I’m making assumptions. You’re making assumptions based on the political side we’re on when, you know it’s a kind of a trope by now, of like, we have more in common than we do that divides us. But your work, I feel like it more like us is about actually giving us that data and giving us that like, No, we really are. This isn’t just something, some Pollyanna thing we’re trying to say

James Coan 22:36

yes and or at least right, we’re more similar than we tend to realize, you know, numerator and denominator would be about more similar or more different, but right, more similar than we think. And we’ve also focused, I would say, particularly on threat and trust, right? So it even to extent the written article, articles about kind of switching out the word polarization for over threat, overblown sense of threat, and emphasizing building trust, possibly even more than building courageous.

Maria Ross 23:10

I’m going to push back a little bit again to kind of go back to my previous thought. But what about the people who are under threat because of policies from one side or the other like that. We can’t gaslight them. We can’t say they’re not under threat when they’re under threat. So how do you how does more like us handle that? Yeah, because,

James Coan 23:31

okay, so some more like us does not comment on the level of threat from an administration or a given elected official. Right? These, these, yeah, given administration could be extraordinarily threatening for some groups and right, not trying to change one’s views and say, Oh, I actually know whatever tariffs are wonderful, or, like, no, no. I mean, like, we don’t, we don’t go down that kind of route. We’re just saying everyday Americans and the connection and the long term to leadership, right? Because, I mean, this is more of a leadership podcast, like, under what conditions do people support atypical leaders, and some work authoritarianism, where people who feel threatened, especially threatened to their safety and security, are more open to more authoritarian tendencies, and so a lot of the kind of work against the administration is often called, you know, say fighting or kind of protecting constitutional norms, fighting can often actually be counterproductive. So you do it for well, upholding democratic arms can work to extent we focus, I would say more on what we call draining. So draining the desire for this kind of atypical leadership, right that if people feel really threatened by another group of fellow Americans, maybe it makes sense to have a very strong leader who at least supports us, who is a bully for us. But if the people across the political spectrum actually aren’t that threatening, then wait, why do we need such an aggressive leader for our side? It drains desire for that, but also works more kind of in a, what might call kind of a liberalism, or you think about cancel culture, right? Like, oh, if, if there is so much emphasis, or, you know, if these people on the other side are so scary, right? And maybe we need to, like, put up walls in terms of what they can say or not. But again, if they’re less scary, realize that, you know, there’s only a few of them who are saying such things, right? This desire for more, maybe we call it left wing authoritarian tendencies, tends to diminish when we’re talking about trust. It’s a much, you know, it’s kind of a longer term, sort of like pulling the rug under, rather than like fighting going in the streets immediately. But to me, it also makes more strategic sense, since, yeah, a lot of people have been fighting for a decade, and I don’t know if they’ve accomplished very much,

Maria Ross 26:01

right? I totally agree. I really, I think that’s an interesting perspective on that of taking away the fear and the threat that leads us into these situations that become so extreme that we that there’s people who even want to follow such leaders, whichever way they go to the extremes, right? So that’s really interesting. I want to wrap up, because I know that more like us offers a few resources that are useful to businesses, and what are some tangible ways that leaders or teams or organizations can integrate some of those resources? Yeah,

James Coan 26:36

and I would say probably at some level, there should be a conversation to see what would make most sense in different business contexts, right? But our lesson plan presentation is a good place to start that yes, even though we’re testing this honestly with high schoolers, it’s not like watered down and a lot of this information about perception gaps when it comes to ideology and conversations and threats, is very powerful for adults, right? I were thinking of different modules. When I was in the private sector, we had to do all sorts of online modules about sexual harassment and things like that. And in theory, something like that, uh huh. Can be done in this field, and it may be an area that we pursue in the future, right? Often? Can

Maria Ross 27:27

I interrupt you for one second? Yeah? Can? Can these resources help leaders deal with the, you know, the things that are coming into the workplace, because we are humans, we don’t park our humanity at the office door. Can these resources help leaders navigate those differences within their workplace that might be negatively impacting the collaboration, negatively impacting the work, negatively impacting the understanding, because now there’s conversations happening at work that we didn’t used to have. So are you saying that some of these resources can help if leaders or organizations or HR teams or learning and development want to bring in some ways to help their leaders navigate, but also help the teams collaborate across some of these divides and misconceptions?

James Coan 28:17

I will give an answer. Probably right. I don’t want to oversell, but Right? Because in many cases, people are jumping to the conclusion that, okay, just because someone has a bumper sticker on their vehicle, it means they this whole host of things, and they should, they’re threatening all sorts of ways. Then yes, this work can help that. But if there are a small number of people who actually do fit stereotypes, in that case, you know, kind of have to deal with them as they are, but we’re to say people to be much less common than believed. And even if there are those kind of stereotypical beliefs, there’s a whole host of kind of factors about people you know on which and can connect all sorts of complexity and things that they’ve done that are admirable, and a lot of the guidance that we have for the arts in theory can also be kind of used as starting points to think about colleagues in the workplace,

Maria Ross 29:16

right? I love it. I love it. Well. It’s such important work. And thank you so much for coming today and sharing a little bit about what you do. And we need more organizations doing this kind of work, and more more organizations that tap into the research and the work that you’re doing, because there’s no other way forward, right? We can’t keep continuing on the path that we’re on, because it’s not going to be good it’s not gonna have a good end. So we need to find these ways of collaborating and these ways of busting, you know, like you said, this, percentages of the things that really are true to the stereotypes are so small, and we’re focusing 90% of our effort there, where we actually need to be coming together, on where, where we. We We are on the same page a little bit more. So I love it. Thank you so much for sharing these insights and your work. We’re going to have all these links in the show notes. I’m going to add a bunch of the links that you referenced in our conversation as well. But for anyone that’s on the go, where’s the best place that they can find out more about you and the organization?

James Coan 30:18

Yeah. So more like us.org, right? If people have individual questions, you’re welcome to email me at, James, no, don’t contact me.

Maria Ross 30:28

And I assume folks can connect with you on LinkedIn as well, and just reference that they heard you on the podcast.

James Coan 30:33

Oh, sure, yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. Okay, great.

Maria Ross 30:36

Well, James, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Yeah,

James Coan 30:41

thank you, Maria. It’s been a cool to be here. And thank you

Maria Ross 30:44

everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review and share with a colleague or a friend, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there. You can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events, please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Courage to Advance: The Talent Advantage: Strategic Recruitment in Uncertain Times with Tim Sprangers

Welcome to Courage to Advance, hosted by Kim Bohr and brought to you by SparkEffect, in partnership with The Empathy Edge.

Tune in to our subseries every 3rd Thursday, right here on The Empathy Edge! Or check us out at www.CourageToAdvancePodcast.com.

In today’s uncertain job market, what separates endless applications from landing your ideal role? Kim Bohr sits down with Tim Sprangers, CEO of Orin Rice, a Seattle-based sales recruiting firm, to uncover the levers you can actually control in the process. With over a decade of experience connecting top talent with leading companies, Tim offers practical guidance for navigating what he calls the current “uncertain market” – where both employers and candidates hesitate to make moves.

This insightful conversation explores how leaders can approach their job search like a sales cycle, effectively pivot between industries or functions, and simplify their value proposition to stand out. Tim shares what recruiters actually look for in resumes, why networking before you need it pays dividends, and how to determine if a recruiting partner truly adds value.

Whether you’re hiring talent or seeking new opportunities yourself, discover strategies for gaining a talent advantage even in challenging market conditions. Learn to position yourself effectively, leverage your network strategically, and approach career transitions with confidence.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

We’re in an “uncertain market” where both employers and candidates hesitate to make moves
Track your job search like a sales cycle to identify exactly where you’re falling short
When pivoting careers, focus on either transferable skills or industry knowledge
Make your resume content-rich with measurable achievements rather than fancy formatting
Network proactively before you need it, and help others without expectation
Your questions during interviews often matter more than your answers
“If a seven-year-old can’t understand what you do, it’s overcomplicated.”

“You can control the input. Sometimes you can’t control the output… you’ve got to control the things that you can, which is your effort and your energy and the time that you’re putting into it.” — Tim Sprangers

About Tim Sprangers: Tim Sprangers is the CEO of Orin Rice, a Seattle-based sales recruiting firm connecting top professionals with leading Pacific Northwest companies. With over a decade in recruitment, Tim’s quality-over-quantity approach ensures employers and candidates find the right fit through understanding each party’s needs. Orin Rice donates a portion of profits to nonprofits, including FARE and Treehouse.

About SparkEffect:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

Connect with Tim Sprangers:

Website: https://www.orinrice.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsprangers/

Orin Rice Google Reviews

Connect with Kim Bohr and SparkEffect

SparkEffect: sparkeffect.com

Courage to Advance recording and resources:

sparkeffect.com/courage-to-advance-podcast

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sparkeffect

LinkedIn for Kim Bohr: linkedin.com/in/kimbohr

Connect with Maria:

Learn more about Maria’s work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast. The show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors, and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work, to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business.

Kim Bohr 00:44

In today’s uncertain job market, the difference between endless applications and landing your idea role isn’t luck. It’s understanding what leverage you actually can control in the process. I’m Kim Boer, president and COO of Spark Effect, and in this episode of Courage to Advance, we’re pulling back the curtain on what really works with recruiting expert Tim Springers. Tim is the CEO and founder of Oren Rice, a Seattle-based sales recruiting firm that specializes in connecting top sales professionals with leading companies in the Pacific Northwest. With a background in business-to-business sales, Tim has over a decade of experience helping both local and global brands develop and implement effective recruitment strategies. His approach emphasizes a quality over quantity methodology, ensuring that both employers and candidates find the right fit through a thorough understanding of each party’s needs and goals. Tim, welcome to Courage to Advance podcast. I’m so excited you’re here with us today.

Tim Springers 01:43

Thanks, Kim, for having me.

Kim Bohr 01:45

So let’s start off by telling the audience a little bit about what brought you into being a recruiter.

Tim Springers 01:51

It was probably 11 years ago that I started the business and what was the catalyst was I had a different recruiting company that had approached me and wanted me to help them start a vertical. And it was at that point where I sat back and thought, if they think I have the skill set to do this, maybe I should just go for it. And so after spending some time in some big sales organizations, and also being in a startup, I thought, if I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it? So 11 years ago, my wife and I took the jump and never looked back.

Kim Bohr 02:24

And the company, as we said earlier, is Oren Rice, which I know has a personal story for you.

Tim Springers 02:33

It’s actually the road I grew up on. So in Eastern Washington, it connected really small orange with really small rice, which is probably at its peak population of 95 people combined.

Kim Bohr 02:45

I love that. It gives a little bit more of a personal reason for your roots. So, you know, we know the job market is really interesting right now. There’s a lot of uncertainty. And I think that’s one of the reasons I was so excited to talk with you just to really get from your perspective, what should people be thinking about, especially if they’re thinking about making a transition or if they’ve been impacted. And so if you, I really love for us to start, you know, kind of talking about the current job market from the lens that you see it. And then, you know, just kind of giving people a sense of what that looks like.

Tim Springers 03:18

I mean, there’s really three different kind of markets. There’s the employer market where the employers have the power. There is the employee market, which we just went through at the beginning in the tail end of COVID. And then you have the uncertain market, which we’re in right now. And so the worst market to be in is the uncertain because it cripples a lot of people. Businesses as well as people don’t know if they should be making a hire, or employees don’t know if they should be making a move. Because if they make a move, could they be the last person on the boat and the first person off the boat? So uncertainty really kind of drives a lot of market parallelization from both the employer and the employee side. So hopefully we can get past this here relatively soon. But we’re definitely in a market where it’s very uncertain. And what you’re seeing is it’s not just the tariffs that are bringing the uncertainty. It’s the American Brand Association. So even companies that sell technology and their customers might predominantly be here in the US, they’re worried about who buys their customers’ product. And if they’re international, if you’re McDonald’s as an example, will people stop going to McDonald’s? Here locally, there’s going to be a tariff of the beef coming in from Australia or New Zealand or wherever the beef is coming from. And so we’re all kind of anticipating that uptick. But there’s also the what is the money coming to corporate McDonald’s because people in Britain are mad and they don’t want to go to an American restaurant in Japan. So the uncertainty really does spread pretty quick.

Kim Bohr 04:56

And so you mentioned three and I think just even though we’re in this period of uncertainty, can you just speak just briefly to the dynamics of the first two to read, maybe read ground listeners.

Tim Springers 05:07

Well, it’s funny too because everybody will talk about ghosting, right? There’s always two sides to the ghosting story and you can really tell who’s going to get ghosted based on what kind of market you’re at. So if it’s the employee market, that’s where the candidates have the power where they can have multiple offers, things are accelerating. They don’t really have to make decisions as promptly because there’s a lot of opportunities coming at them. Well, when it shifts like it did in September of 2022 to the employer market, I think the catalyst of that really was when Elon Musk from a technology perspective went into Twitter with the sync and cut half of their engineering team. What that did was allowed all the other companies that were thinking about letting go of individuals see that, hey, Twitter didn’t break. He just cut half of the employees and so we can do the same thing. And so when that happened, there was a surplus of people in the technology space. And so it became an employer driven market. So the wages weren’t accelerating and the things that follow also kind of decreased.

Kim Bohr 06:18

So in this uncertain market, because we’ve got the changes the current administration is making, the tariff threats that are happening, the larger international brand impact, I know even on our end in the work we do from the career coaching and career transition side, we are seeing companies really hesitating to know if they should be investing in growth or if they’re needing to make cuts into headcount. And I think last year, what we noticed was there were cuts being made more strategically when they were being made around investment more for AI. And it feels like now there’s the unknown as to if we have to make cuts, it’s not even necessarily to make them to invest in that place right now because of the uncertainty that’s happening. And we’re also seeing that growth consideration really being just kind of people are trying to decide should we have the space to invest in the growth or not. So we’re seeing a little bit of that for sure in our business as well. So when you think about the candidates you work with predominantly in that sales professional role with organizations that can be global in size, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see candidates make when they’re trying to really pivot into different roles or industries during these uncertain times? Because we know that that forces. So let’s talk a little bit about that because I think that’s something that is really relevant to what people might be experiencing today.

Tim Springers 07:53

Yeah. So when you’re making a pivot, I mean, the first thing that you have to look at is what market are we in? Because when it’s the employee market, you can make any pivot you want because there’s a shortage of people to fill those roles. And so the one thing that individuals, when it shifts over to the employee market, what they don’t take into consideration is where they are at their career. And usually what that means is how much are they making? And so as an example, if you’re trying to make a pivot and you make, we’ll just use easy, simple math. But if you make a hundred thousand dollars and you want to make a pivot, the wrong messaging that you can say to somebody is, I know I’m going to have to take a haircut in what I’m making. And so I’m prepared to do that versus, Hey, I’ve done my research and based on my research, I know that I’m going to be making 60,000. So I’m looking for something around that amount. Because then it tells the person that you’re talking to that you’ve done the research and you know what you’re getting into versus them having to inform you. So the biggest mistake is one, not knowing what cycle we’re in, because if it’s an uncertain market, it’s a very difficult time to pivot because everyone’s trying to pivot. And if it’s not a employee driven one, know your value relative to the market.

Kim Bohr 09:15

So really doing that legwork and that research is really important.

Tim Springers 09:19

Yeah, I mean, even in even in a healthy market where you’re hitting multiple offers, and it’s an employee driven one. I mean, the example that I always use is, if I were to be getting married, and I needed somebody to bake a cake for me, I’m not gonna ask you to bake me a cake because you make brownies twice a month, I’m gonna go to somebody who does it for a living. Because I think it’s human nature to think that we can do everything and do anything. But what people are paying for at a certain point in your career specialization. So you’ve got to really focus in on what you do well, and know what your value is compared to that pivot that you’re making. And yes, it means you’re going back

Kim Bohr 09:58

Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about that more, because I think that is something where we see people, you know, and you and I have had discussions prior around, you know, job seekers, and really this idea of like, you either think about it from a functional lens, or you think about it from an industry lens. But there’s knowing that, and when you and I talked about it, that was a, that was one of those kind of crystallizing moments of like, that makes so much sense, especially when we’re in an uncertain time. So let’s talk a little bit more about kind of that, what does it mean to be in that functional, you know, versus industry, and a little bit more about how that pivot might look.

Tim Springers 10:33

Yeah, so let’s say as an example, I want to make a pivot. Right now, I’m in recruiting, and I’m not in technology. So if I wanted to make a pivot to a similar role, it’s pretty easy. I go to another recruiting company, and I can talk about my experience and the results that I’ve have, and they can address what is my market value, and we can see if it’s a fit or not. If I’m trying to get into something different, let’s say a technology company, what I need to look at is what are my transferable skills? Or what is my transferable industry? And so if I was going to make that pivot into a technology company, I would want to focus on ones that are trying to address things that recruiters have as pain points. So whether it be an applicant tracking system, or any kind of AI addressing what recruiters might do, because I’ve got one half of the equation, there’s either the role experience, or there’s the industry experience that they can draw from. But if I have neither of them, it’s almost impossible to make a pivot on that.

Kim Bohr 11:34

So we see a lot of people that have a desire to be in tech, or who come from tech and who feel like the only other, because they’ve been in tech for so long, the only thing they could do to make the kind of money they’ve made is stay in tech. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because I think that’s a fallacy that people may not realize there’s alternatives than just those two.

Tim Springers 11:58

Yeah, I mean, it depends on where you are in your career, because certainly what happens is you’re getting compounding on what you’ve done, and you’re climbing a ladder from a compensation perspective. And so there can be some truth to, it’s gonna be hard to make a pivot. But the question is, can you take a step backwards to get two steps forward? Because a lot of times, it’s not always monetarily where people are trying to make the pivot. It’s also about longevity. And so in tech roles, a lot of times, these roles will go two to three years, where if you get into, you know, manufacturing, distribution, other industries, people are there for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years with one company. And so there’s a lot of staying power. And so I think a lot of times when people are looking at these pivots, they’re looking more from a, what is the balance of money, the stability look like?

Kim Bohr 12:53

Would you also say that sometimes there is a big upside potential to something that’s maybe not on the surface as attractive of an industry?

Tim Springers 13:05

Yes, 100%. Yeah, it’s one of those that it’s not always the glam that brings the money. It’s the things that people need to use all the time, right? Like if we’re going to have a down market and my water backs up in my house, I don’t have the skill set to address it. I need to hire a plumber. And so there’s certain industries that are just very recession proof and one that not a lot of people are getting into. And in that example, you don’t have to become a plumber. There’s a lot of people that are getting ready to retire. And what you’re seeing is from a generation to generation, there’s not a lot of passing down of these businesses. There’s a lot more of these businesses that are for sale because people want to forge their own path. They don’t want to take over the family business. So there’s a great opportunity for people, whether it be franchises or buy, sell business, whatever these might be, to create a different path and not be locked into what you’ve done in the past from a corporate perspective.

Kim Bohr 14:10

I think that’s a really important piece to share, you know, I know a lot of the career coaching our team does, there are people who part of the experience is to understand is the path that they just left the right path for them and today with everything they have in their life. And for some, it is going down that entrepreneurial road that could look very much like you described. And I think it’s a really important factor to bring in when people are thinking about making a change or a change is forced upon them.

Tim Springers 14:39

Yeah, so I think it’s important to talk through why you’re making the pivot because the grass isn’t always greener and really identifying like what are the things that are missing and the reason that you’re exploring a move. So I think having somebody that you can talk to, whether it’s career coaching or a trusted, you know, friend advisor who talks through it and says, hey, maybe what you need to do is fix what’s right here because if you go to XYZ company, it’s going to be the same problem, just different logo, and sometimes it is you need to change, right? Like if you’re undervalued in the market or there’s been a change in leadership and you don’t see eye with the principles that they’re bringing in, but having that kind of sounding board is very important.

Kim Bohr 15:21

That’s very, very important, which takes us into talking a bit more about, you know, us having a strong network. And I think this is something that we all inherently know, and some degree, you know, many of us do, I think, but I think there is this, there’s a lot of opportunity for most, to really build that network more effectively, especially as we get more back into more face to face time. And so I really would like to hear you share a little bit of, you know, kind of your thoughts on that. But also, what how can people leverage, you know, working with somebody like yourself, when maybe your network doesn’t have as broad of reach as you initially think it might.

Tim Springers 15:59

Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, a recruiter can accelerate that. So if you’ve neglected your network, what they’re going to be able to do is identify, like we’re having this conversation very specifically, like here are the places you could pivot based on your experience. And rather than you doing a lot of the research, they might be able to expedite that by saying, Hey, you’re making 120,000 right now. Are you going to be able to live on 70? And it’s going to be your realization point of no, I can’t. So they can accelerate the fact that you haven’t developed a strong network. And they can also open doors that sometimes might not appear to be open based on the conversations of the things that might be peeled back during that conversation. From a networking perspective, I think it’s human nature to network when you need something. And, you know, the example that you will hear is you can’t just go to the garden, when you need a carrot, you got to go plant the seeds. Or if you go, you know, shopping, when you’re hungry, you’re going to buy everything in the store, whatever analogy it might be. The reality is you’ve got to continuously go out there and do things differently. Otherwise you’re either one, neglecting your current network or two, you’re not growing it. So you’re getting groupthink. And so I think what people need to do is evaluate how much time am I spending on building my network, whether it’s for current business or things in the future. And then two, am I doing things different or am I basically staying in that my same safe ecosystem?

Kim Bohr 17:37

And what do you recommend for that balance between digital and in-person? And I think, you know, there’s so much of the LinkedIn world, right, that we all have. So I’m really curious about your thoughts on that.

Tim Springers 17:52

I think Jamie Dimon, if you haven’t heard his rant on remote working, you should check it out. It’s a good 90 seconds, 120 seconds. But I mean, part of what he’s saying is it’s not just about people, the fear of employers having that people aren’t working as hard or as much. There’s also that human element of people who are working remotely are being passed up for promotions that they would probably get because they’re not getting the FaceTime. And I think that relates to if you’re networking just from a digital perspective, you’re missing that human connection that we’ve had throughout history that has been changed very recently to a very digital experience. So while I can see your face and I can sense your emotion, there’s also body language things that I might not be able to pick up on that you pick up on person or something in the environment happens that you both experience together versus I’m in my environment, you’re in your environment. So we’re not truly experiencing it the same way. So I think it’s good to do both because digital can expand you to places you might not be able to go. I was on a call learning about retirement planning and there was somebody from Argentina and somebody from New York and somebody from London and we were all having a conversation where I’m not going to fly those places to talk to these people who are trying to figure out the same things. And so I think it’s similar when you’re networking of how you can accomplish different tasks with the in-person versus the digital.

Kim Bohr 19:28

I think that’s a very important point, and especially when we’re just starting to see more and more of these in-person opportunities. And I think, too, it doesn’t have to be a formal event as people go to, right? It could also just be reaching out to somebody, having coffee, finding common ground, even in community, where we just naturally come across each other and having an opportunity just to stop and talk and take a little bit of extra time, maybe.

Tim Springers 19:58

There’s meetups for, if you’re going to go on a run, if you’re going to play pickleball, join a book club, right? What’s making a resurgence is Barnes and Nobles, like Barnes and Nobles coming back. And I don’t know if you’ve gone into those anytime recently, but the experience is great. And they’ve created the community that I think that Starbucks is trying to gain back, that third place. And so there might be opportunities for the things that you love and enjoy, where you can expand your circle.

Kim Bohr 20:29

So if we were to say, Hey, let’s think about like, what are the top three tips you would give people about how to rethink, you know, networking right now, if they were, especially if they’re impacted in job stop search, what would that be?

Tim Springers 20:42

Well, I think first and foremost, do something different. I think we are, you know, we do things on a repetitive, a safe, I wake up, I have my coffee, like we do things that feel comfortable and get outside of your comfort zone. That’s going to be a huge one. Number two would be mixing it up from a digital and an in-person. And so you’re seeing which one are you more successful at? Are you more successful at the digital version or going in person and having conversations with people? And then the last thing I would say is think about somebody else, right? I think that a lot of times we get so consumed about what’s going on in our world, where sometimes the best thing you can do is help somebody else, because it opens doors that you’re not trying to open. I’m not saying go out and do something because you’re going to get something back, but just inevitably it comes full circle. I mean, I believe that when you go out and try different, I’ll give you an example. I’m on this board for Shoreline Community College, and it’s a business advisory board where they meet once a quarter and you’ve got to approve what’s going on in the school because they get government funding. And I just did it because I wanted to give back and be part of the community. Five years into it, one of the board members who had just stepped down, called me up and says, hey, we have this search for this position. I never in a million years would have ran into that person, bumped into them, and they probably went to reach out to me based on what they were looking for, but it was a perfect fit.

Kim Bohr 22:18

Yeah, so much of where we’re at. It’s a great example. Sometimes we forget to look where we’re already just spending our time and realizing that there’s nothing wrong with sharing what we’re searching for, expressing that we’ve been impacted by the uncertainty or we’re really starting to think and really crafting and putting that out there and really bring a lot of good results if we just think about it, looking closer by. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about, you see a lot of resumes. There’s so much debate around resumes today and what works and what doesn’t work in AI and all these different things. But I think from the lens of a recruiter, I would say what are the most common mistakes you see in a market like this that is uncertain?

Tim Springers 23:06

I think first you gotta take a step back and think who’s going to be looking at the resume. People like me, internal recruiters, sorcerers, they’re going to be the first line of defense. And I say that from a perspective of, I think sometimes people try to make their document look a certain way. And if you’re sitting in the shoes of a recruiter, some of these individuals are looking at hundreds of resumes a day. And so when you’re trying to make multiple columns or fancy graphics, my thing is always you want your resume to look like everyone else’s resume, but you want your content to be better. And so the biggest mistake that I think people make is try to make it fancy versus having the impact of the information on the resume. So keep yourself safe.

Kim Bohr 24:02

Yeah.

Tim Springers 24:03

substance, 100%. How many people read a magazine or newspaper? The numbers are going lower and lower. So if you have multiple columns on your resume, as I’m going through hundreds of resume, I’m already thrown off because I’m not processing a lot of information that way versus all the way across the screen. So the first thing is looking at what other people are doing and 99% of people have it formatted that way. And then from what to have on there, you have to have measurables, measurables, measurables. It doesn’t matter what you do, but how many people have looked at a job description and thought, like, this was nothing? Like, what did I just read? It’s a whole bunch of words. And well, on the flip side, if I can’t look at your resume and know that you’re good at what you do, what’s going to make me talk to you? Either your tenure, and then there’s other little things like, you know, have you had somebody else look at it and proof it? Because if you’re doing little things like you’re spelling a word wrong, like if you send it to me as a Word doc, well, you’ve approved it on your computer, but my word hasn’t approved it. And so I can see if you spelled something wrong. You should always PDF it. And if you’re going to do like little things like abbreviations of like a month, well, if you abbreviate one month and the next one, you don’t have clients that will reject a resume for something as small as that. So sweat the small details, make it look uniform, but then just have really good content.

Kim Bohr 25:42

So I think those are really, really great tips. So talk a little bit about where does, you know, the fear around AI, you know, and the bots reading the resumes from what you’ve been able to, you know, experience and research, what is that? What’s the reality around that?

Tim Springers 25:58

Well, I mean, there’s certainly like, how can we make things more streamlined? But when I was at a networking event six or seven years ago, and you could say, Hey, six or seven years ago, it was a lifetime, but there was a very prominent tech company who had a AI, um, division and they were asked like, Hey, how much of this are you using to screen through your resumes? And they were doing none of it, none of it. And I think, is there some of it? Sure. But at the end of the day, if a company needs the hire, they are going to look at all the resumes because if I have 200 resumes go through, I think it, you know, the number is like the average resume is looked at for six to 10 seconds before there’s a decision to kind of like dive into it or not. So it’s quick. Yeah. And so do I need to get rid of that? Because at the end of the day, I need good people and companies need good people. So I think it’s more hype than reality, but there’s certainly some companies that are leaning into it like anything else, but I think it’s a small minority.

Kim Bohr 27:07

maybe smaller than we think about from the perspective of the AI type of technology, reading the resume and classifying it without some type of oversight, human oversight coming in.

Tim Springers 27:17

I think you still have because applicant tracking systems have had screening capabilities for very long time. And so even when you’d have those, you know, earlier when I was doing sales at careerbuilder.com, and we would be working with like Providence, who would get 100,000 resumes, and they’d set up screening questions, if they didn’t have enough applicants, they would look at the people who get past the screening. Because at the end of the day, it’s their job to hire people. And so they, they might start with a certain group. But that’s because the content is relative to what they’re looking for. So this goes back to the idea of like, you have to have really good content, it’s got to be strong. And you probably hear AB testing a lot from when it comes from a marketing perspective. But I think the same thing is true for creating a resume. If you’re not tracking what you’re doing when you send out your resumes, you don’t know what you’re where you’re falling short.

Kim Bohr 28:14

And where is your perspective on the one size fits all resume versus the targeted?

Tim Springers 28:20

approach. One size fits all doesn’t help anybody. Unless you’re going to a very small company that needs you to wear multiple hats, most people are paying for specialization. And so if you want to look at a sales role and a customer service role or a marketing role, I think you just need to have a different resume for each of those functions and be able to talk to these are the sales roles that I’m interviewing with when you’re in the interview and talk about the sales ones and just focus on that one area. But if you’re looking at other paths, just have a different resume, have a different conversation piece because at the end of the day, most people when they get a resume are looking at it right before they go into an interview. People aren’t studying it. Yeah, right before they walk into an interview, they take it, they scan it real quick. And they’re like, what questions am I going to ask?

Maria Ross 29:17

Mm-hmm

Tim Springers 29:18

So, that’s where it comes back to content. To me, it’s like numbers stand out to people. If you’ve got numbers in there, they’re going to look at it and focus it. And so, you have to have perspective to those numbers where people can then ask the questions based on that.

Kim Bohr 29:35

That makes a lot of sense. So what advice do you give to people who maybe are trying to break into sales, they haven’t, you know, they maybe they have a really nice work history, but it’s not been a traditional sales role. How do you help them kind of come into this into translating into what you think is so important for that content?

Tim Springers 29:53

Yeah. So it depends where you are in your career and what you’ve done. Right. So as an example, let’s say that you were sales adjacent and you were working as a waiter, you know, what I’m looking for is somebody can handle a conversation, go back and forth and ask questions, you know, be natural, naturally curious. And when they’re talking about their experience, they’re positioning in a way that you can tell that they’re used to kind of already selling something or positioning something. So if you’re a waiter and you’re trying to tell me why you’d be good at sales, if you say, Hey, I worked at Luigi’s Cafe for four years, and every Friday we’d have a competition to see who can sell the most specials. And 90% of the time out of five people, I would sell the most by 15%. You know, just some kind of nugget that shows that you understand that you’ve got to position it. And you’ve got to articulate your value proposition because your value proposition and this is you. But eventually, it’s going to be the company’s value proposition.

Kim Bohr 31:06

That makes a lot of sense. And having people be able to speak to the fact that the way they can articulate that really can help demonstrate their ability to believe in what they were representing, how they are able to hear what people are asking or saying back to them and pivoting around, that makes a lot of sense too.

Tim Springers 31:25

And so it can be trickier, you know, the further you get removed, like before in finance, the narrative needs to change and you need to maybe draw on some personal things like, Hey, I understand that I’ve been a CPA for the last four years. But here are some other things that I’ve done. I’m on the board of our nonprofit that does fundraising and we raised $20,000 by going and soliciting gifts and then we have this event. So I understand it’s not the same, but these are some of the areas that I could pull from my personal experience for a position like this.

Kim Bohr 32:01

That’s a great point to make. Again, reaching into what are the other things that we already aren’t inclined to be doing and just realizing that they have relevancy. What about, you know, talk a little bit about the, some of the interview techniques, you know, you see, what strategies do you recommend for people when they’re, you know, they’re trying, you know, they’re interviewing, maybe they also feel pressure with life. What do you try to kind of the top three things maybe you try to express to them? Yeah.

Tim Springers 32:30

I mean, I think that when you’re interviewing, you have to look at it, and this might be easier for me to say because I’ve always been in a sales environment and now I’m doing sales recruiting, but looking at it is like a sales cycle. And what I mean by that is you’ve got your resume that you’re sending out to the world. And so you need to track where you’re sending it and if you’re getting a response. And then if you’re getting a response, are you getting the amount of responses you feel like you should get? And if not, change it up to see if you get better response rate. And then when you get to the next part, it’s going to be a recruiter screen. When you’re having the recruiter screen, are you then getting to the hiring manager screen? If you’re getting to the hiring manager, are you getting to here? And so depending on the industry, they might have anywhere from one to 10 steps. And so you’ve got to track every step to know where you’re falling short because then you can kind of take control on the areas that you might be falling short on because it might be the resume, but it might be your ability to close the hiring manager for the next step. It might be when you’re in a panel interview, you get to panel interviews every time and for some reason you’re falling short. And that’s where you might be able to go back to people and say, hey, can you explain to me why I didn’t get this role? Because I’ve noticed that I’ve been falling short when I get to panel interviews and they might say, you know what, when somebody asks you a question, you look at them when they’re asking the question, but then you seem to look at the most who you seem to be think might be the most important person in the room to answer the question. And so you might not realize you’re doing these little things that if you track it, you can find out these little things that will get you to the next offer.

Kim Bohr 34:18

I think that is such an important piece of advice for people, Tim, because those little subtleties and those nuances like that are really important. And unless we go and ask for feedback, we don’t get it. And so that’s a huge one.

Tim Springers 34:34

And some people, some companies won’t give you feedback. It’s just policy they won’t. But a lot will because they’ve been on the other side of it and they want to help you. And so, and then the other thing I think people need to realize is, especially in a market like right now, there are a lot more people looking for jobs than there are jobs. And so if you’ve got a role that gets 300 applicants, they might interview three to five people. So that means they’re interviewing one to one and a half percent of the people who apply, who get to an offer. And so you just have to do a lot more activity. You have to do a lot more outside the box in terms of the networking things we spoke about and realize that it might not be you. It might be the environment. And so you just have to do more to compensate for what the environment looks like at the moment.

Kim Bohr 35:25

that persistence is really incredibly important right now. One of the things that stands out to me as well, as I listen to you, is this need that we just, as human beings have, right, of control. And when we’re in a time, as we are now, where there’s more uncertainty, there’s a sense of lack of control. Yet when I listen to you, I think what you’ve described so far feels like there’s a lot we can control in this job search arena, if we think of it from the way you’re speaking. And that, to me, feels very, I don’t know if comforting’s quite the right word, but it does feel like there’s something that can be done, versus feeling like something, we’re just a victim of these things that are happening around us that we can’t control right now.

Tim Springers 36:13

Yeah, you can control the input. Sometimes you can’t control the output, right? You can put a lot of effort into it. But you can’t necessarily make somebody hire you. Right. And so you got to control the things that you can, which is your effort and your energy, and the time that you’re putting into it. But also, are you just throwing stuff everywhere? Because it’s very easy to apply everywhere. And I’m saying, I’m not saying don’t do that. But also know that if you’re applying to a company, and you’ve got four different resumes, and you’ve applied to four different roles within that company, and you’re like, I’m a perfect fit for all four of them. You kind of already showed that you don’t know where you want to go. Most people want somebody who know the direction that they’re going, not just on a job search, but most things leadership or whatever it might be. And so if you’re applying to a company, I say, stay focused on that role for that company. And then when you get the reject letter, go the next role that seems like the best fit. But don’t do it all the same. Yeah, all at once, you’re kind of like raising your hand saying anything. And yeah, that’s not the right approach.

Kim Bohr 37:23

Yep, that makes a lot of sense. So when, so when you see candidates researching potential roles, you know, what is some of the specific information that they should, you know, arm themselves with before interviewing? I know we’ve talked a little about, you know, the role itself, but tell what are some of the top things you try to prepare people for that work with you?

Tim Springers 37:43

Yeah, I mean, doing some research, whether regardless of what kind of economy it is, you want to do research where they ask you, do you know what we do, say, hey, a recruiter hit me up and they thought it’d be a good fit, doesn’t really wow anybody, it doesn’t matter the industry. And so you might think that you’re coming across as like in demand and hard to get, but you need to do your research. And for me, it’s looking at the company and the person that you’re going to be talking to. And so the person you’re talking to, you want to know when you look at their career path and their progression, not that you might have the same exact, but, you know, things that might come up as issues in other interviews, like, hey, your stints have been short. Well, if the person you’re talking to has had short stints, then that’s not something you have to worry about. Or you can say, hey, I noticed that you went from XYZ company to XYZ company, you know, similar to you, I made this pivot because, so being able to relate on certain items, whether it’s the industry, the product, the company, knowing their progression can help you in that conversation where you might hit a foreseen brick wall. The company, I think that if you go, I mean, most companies, if you go to YouTube, have a pretty quick overview of what they do. You can get a very good understanding in a very short amount of time because the marketing department has put this together to sell people, whether it’s the employee brand or the product, where you can get up and running really quick. So if you’re not doing that, you’re falling short. And then, you know, lean on your network, you know, the further you get along, I don’t think you get up for initial screen, but if you want to know other insight, there’s places like Glassdoor where you have to realize where the messaging is coming from because there’s going to be very bad and there’s going to be very good. And so somewhere in the middle of life is it true. And so I would focus on a little bit of each. And if there’s a reoccurring theme, if it’s a concern for you, bring it up. You should be able to address it.

Kim Bohr 39:51

I think that’s a really important part of this preparation is what are the questions that people should be coming into interviews with, right? Because it does become a two-way street to understand what they’re seeing and what’s going on. And I think the more people can become very skilled in thinking about those questions as it relates to what you were just saying, like understanding the research you’ve done and really trying to be more nuanced and more targeted into the company and the role, not just about your own personal benefit, I think that’s a really important component as well.

Tim Springers 40:26

Well, there’s a natural curiosity. I mean, I think that’s human nature. If we’re having a conversation, and I just talk, talk, talk, talk, talking, you’re not gonna probably leave the conversation thinking like, oh, we should hang out again. But there’s a natural curiosity for me to say, you know, oh, you do, you know, you’ve hiked four mountains, why do you do that? And like, so the natural curiosity, not only from a personal perspective, but from the company and what they do, and the questions you ask, I think it’s more important. Sometimes, the questions that you’re asking, versus the answers you’re giving to the questions they’re giving, because it shows your ability to listen, it shows your ability to have done the research and put it all together. So it’s not necessarily the questions that they’re asking as much as the ones that you’re going to ask. So have some ready that you’ve done the research, and you’ve got questions you want to know, and those could change during the conversation. But then also have a couple that come up through the conversation that if it’s not natural, you’re asking at the end of the conversation.

Kim Bohr 41:29

Very good. And I think that’s a really important takeaway. So, you know, let’s shift gears just a little bit and talk about the reality of, you know, people that are in the workplace, you know, we all have had those moments of getting pinged on LinkedIn by somebody who’s, you know, tried to say they want to represent, you know, us for a position. So, you know, with so many of these recruiters reaching out on platforms like that, you know, how can job seekers really evaluate the quality of a recruiting partner that they want to work with, being really mindful, and maybe also just not thinking that they’re having to put all their eggs in one basket. I think that’s a really important part of this conversation I want you to share your thoughts on.

Tim Springers 42:10

Yeah, so, I mean, I’m not an eggs in one basket sort of guy. Right? Yeah. The reality is that unless you’re super senior, like, the CEO of Chipotle, who is now the CEO of Starbucks, like, I don’t think you should have just one representation. And you can have multiple people on helping you on your search. I mean, when you’re looking for a job, I always say, hey, I’m an extension, why not have somebody helping you look, if you’re looking at the same time, you don’t need to shut down what you’re doing. But, you know, let me bring other opportunities that I’m seeing that based on our conversation. And to your question, like, how are you vetting that? I think, like anything else, you’re looking at what’s their digital footprint, like, how long have I been doing this? What is my area of focus? And who is in my network that we might know that’s, you know, a mutual connection. And then when you’re having the conversation, you know, earlier, you asked why I got into the business. And part of it was, you know, somebody said, you could do this. And I thought, maybe I should do this. The other part was, whenever I had a recruiter call me, it was like, how much do you make? What do you want to make? And the conversation was either prolonged from that period, or it was cut dead. And I thought, man, that didn’t feel very good. That was like five minutes. And, you know, when I’m talking to somebody, the conversations can go very long, because I want to know what are the motivators? What are you looking for? Because if you go somewhere where and you’re there, for a year or two, like, either you or the company’s not happy. And I want to build a business that’s a repeatable, referred business. And so I think you’ve got to evaluate the conversation when you are having those conversations. Like, do you feel like the person was listening to you and had your best interest? Or did it seem one sided?

Kim Bohr 44:03

Like they’re just checking a box or trying to hit their own quota numbers of who they’re taking a box.

Tim Springers 44:08

But are they bringing up things that you didn’t think about?

Kim Bohr 44:10

Right. So bringing value into the conversation.

Tim Springers 44:13

they bringing value or was it a good use of your time? And do you enjoy them? Because the reality is people partner with people that they enjoy interacting with. And so who they’re interacting with is very rare that you’re going to be working with a company as a recruiter, a third party recruiter like me, where you really don’t like who you’re partnering with. Right. You know, because it’s an extension of me. So when I’m helping someone find a job for a company, there’s an extension of my brand going both ways that if there is not a match, like I’m not going to dirty myself with that on either side of the equation.

Kim Bohr 44:52

Yeah, the brand part is so huge because that is a really important point that I think maybe gets missed on both sides sometimes that reflection is really important to feel that it’s been true partnership, it’s been valued, and you can’t say enough about the impact on a brand in any, whether it’s personal or a company level, bad dynamics have really terrible outcomes.

Tim Springers 45:20

100%. Yeah, I mean, you’ve, and you also have to look at like, yeah, what type of role and how big of a jump and does it make sense. So there’s other things that, you know, you can very quickly get a sense of like, is this like a volume issue that the company is dealing with? Or is it a quality thing? So you can kind of get a sense based on the roles that they’re bringing your way. So I think, you know, the early on, it’s more the digital experience or digital looking in to see like, do I want to war on a conversation? And then once you have the conversation, like, did they bring the value?

Kim Bohr 45:56

So should people ever expect to pay to work? Should any candidates ever expect to pay to work with a recruiter?

Tim Springers 46:04

Well, I would never say never to anything, but I would never pay. So never say never, but I never would look in this market. There are third party companies that have because the job orders aren’t there. They’re trying to find a way to make up for the lost revenue. And so they’re doing like resume reviews and rewrites and LinkedIn refreshes where it’s a couple hundred bucks. So that’s a decision, but you should never pay a percentage or a couple thousand. And also, I think you’re going to get advice from 10 different recruiters that tell you 10 different things. And so you’ve got to take ownership and say, okay, I heard your advice and I liked this piece and I’m going to implement this piece and just run with it. And so I wouldn’t pay if they have someone and especially if they’re going to take a percentage, like there’s a newer model out there where for entry level, they basically get a percentage for each year you’re at a place like.

Kim Bohr 47:13

Yeah, those sound a little bit, it sounds like there’s a lot of slippery slope there in that.

Tim Springers 47:19

It depends on who you are. There’s value, but like from a sales perspective, like I’ve seen people take these boot camps that are like five to $10,000 and never get in sales. Yeah. Like, is there are things that you don’t know until you get into it that like, hey, picking up the phone and cold calling. Like that’s not fun. Right. I don’t think anyone in sales has ever thought like, hey, I love doing this. And so, you know, I think there’s elements of like, if you’re paying to get some kind of certification or education, I think a lot of it can be done for free on YouTube.

Kim Bohr 47:52

Yes, that is such an important piece of advice for people right now.

Tim Springers 47:57

Everyone’s trying to get famous for whatever reason it might be, but whatever your subject is, I have a squeaky garage door, so I’m watching these individuals who are professional garage people showing me how to fix it. In the past, I would have to call somebody, I’d have to do it. So if you’re thinking about like, hey, I might want to get into this, from a sales perspective, go somewhere where you have to go make cold calls. See if you’re actually willing to do it, because some of the entry-level roles that I work on, during the interview process, they’ll put you in with a group of salespeople and you’ve got to make cold calls.

Kim Bohr 48:38

You guys see how you really, you might sound good, but if you haven’t really done it, or you really don’t, you’re trying to sell yourself into it. It really does open up the reality check there. Well, so as we get to wrapping up our conversation, I’ve got one final question for you. Maybe two, but let’s just say one for now. So what’s one piece of practical advice you’d give someone who feels, you know, maybe they’re getting overlooked, looked into kind of this current job market.

Tim Springers 49:06

Have a conversation with somebody. I mean, my thing is always, one, looking at it as a sales cycle, knowing where you’re falling short, and two, I always say if a seven-year-old can’t understand it, it’s overcomplicated. Yeah, great point. So regardless of what your messaging is, even if you’re a networking thing, people just wanna know what you do. I recruit for sales roles. And then if they wanna draw in, what kind of companies? Well, I do 70% or tech and 30% being this and that and that. But if I started by just saying it, spewing it all out, I’m gonna lose my audience. So I think when you’re looking at your value proposition from when you’re networking, have it nice and tight, and be ready to expand on it. And then on your resume, same thing. Your parents, for most people, or your spouse, are the people who are gonna love you more than anyone. They have no idea what you do. Or maybe that’s just my family. But they love you and they have an idea, but you need to have somebody that if you explain it and they can’t just tell you what they do, it’s too complicated.

Kim Bohr 50:20

I think that’s really, really important.

Tim Springers 50:22

So I think the biggest thing is really knowing where you’re falling short, and knowing where you’re falling short. And have the activity to follow up. And at the end of the day, like this is a market where if you’re feeling like down, it’s a tough market. It’s not you. It’s not a normal market where you’ve got a lot of movement. And so you just got to keep pushing ahead and doing what you can control. And eventually things will turn.

Kim Bohr 50:51

So I just want to say, Tim, thank you so much for the time. I think you’ve just given the listeners so many different really solid nuggets, and hopefully wherever they’re at in this process, they’ve got something really tangible to take and to start to explore. So thank you so much for the time. And so for our listeners, we’ll have free resources relevant to our conversation today that you can download at courage to advance podcast.com, which will take you to our spark effect podcast page. And again, I want to thank Tim for sharing your journey and insights today, I want to thank the empathy edge for hosting our podcast sub series and to the listeners for tuning into this episode of courage to advance where transformative leadership isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about having the courage to find them. Thank you so much for joining us.

Tim Springers 51:44

Thanks, Gil.

Maria Ross 51:48

For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit TheEmpathyEdge.com. There, you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources, book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at redslicemaria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

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May 2025 Hot Take: Why Legacy Leadership is Messy

Building leadership muscles and practicing leadership is not always pretty. It’s got to get messy if you want to master it. Nothing brought this home to me more than a recent CrossFit workout where I really started to understand the power of muscle memory and why constant skills development is required to keep yourself sharp.

Leadership is like this – we are never done learning, never done changing, and that means we cannot quit as we authentically embrace new models of leadership, work with those in our communities, and aren’t afraid to look messy.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Leadership doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be authentic.
Find your community – find those who will be honest with you, hold you accountable, help you sharpen your skills, and help you hone your human-centered leadership skills.
Embracing new models might feel uncomfortable and take time to embrace while getting the results you want, but that doesn’t mean you stop. Just keep going.

“It’s the people that keep learning, growing, striving, and sharpening that edge that are the ones that become the legacy leaders.” — Maria Ross

Episode References:

I have a FREE upcoming 2-day virtual leadership event with me! Let’s have a chat first to see if this aligns with your goals and where you are right now. Visit www.TheEmpathyEdge.com/event to sign up for a time.

Maria’s Latest Forbes Article: Gen Z and the Empathy Expectation https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariaross/2025/04/30/gen-z-and-the-empathy-expectation-what-workplace-leaders-need-to-know/

Coach Scott of Stoneway Fitness: https://www.instagram.com/scottmrodriguez/

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to another hot take episode of the empathy edge podcast. I’m your host, Maria Ross, and I’m going to share some insights with you today and a lovely little event that I’d like to tell you about to see if you’re interested in attending virtually with me. But first, I want to talk to you about building leadership muscle and the fact that leadership is not always pretty. It’s got to get messy if you want to master it. And nothing brought this home more to me than a recent CrossFit workout where I really started to understand the power of muscle memory and why constant skills development is required to keep yourself sharp. So I have a virtual coach, Scott Rodriguez. You can look him up online, stoneway Fitness. He’s amazing. He was my coach in Seattle when he was like a block from my house, and now I coach with him and his team virtually, and the team gives us some pretty tough workouts. So when it pops up on my app, or they start describing it, if I’m online with them live, I always think to myself, Oh, hell no, and the negotiations start early. I’ll just do three rounds instead of five, maybe scale down to six reps instead of 10. For that part, my leg kind of hurts today. No, not really. You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. Is another common thought, and then the curse words start flying. But I do the first round, and it’s usually pretty ugly. My muscles are tight. The movements feel awkward. I flop around like a dying fish, definitely not movie montage worthy. And then I complete one round and start into the next. And my coach and comrades are all there, virtually or live. We’re all cheering each other on. Yes, even when I am watching the virtual recording, I can feel their hands on my back, and I start to think, Huh, what is this? It’s a little teeny bit easier. My body knows what to expect, what to do next. It’s a little prettier than before, a little stronger, but still tough. My muscle memory starts kicking in, okay? Maybe this might work. But seriously, I’m only going to do one more round of reps. Third round, I find the groove. I feel more coordinated, more agile. Is that even a spring in my step? Are those the endorphins kicking in. I feel like I might sort of be an athlete, and before I know it, I’ve done the six or the eight or the 12 rounds that I said I could not would not do. Y’all, leadership is like this, and we’re never done learning, not with the workplace changing so fast, not with AI or hybrid workforces, both geographically and between humans and robots, and not with the unique tapestry of each and every team we lead. It’s always changing and adapting. Feels uncomfortable embracing new models, such as partnering with your team rather than powering over them, might take a bit more time to master and get the results you want. You might flop around like a dying fish for a while too, but that doesn’t mean you stop. It means you keep going, rep by rep, motion by motion, conversation by conversation. Yes, you won’t always look pretty, but you have to be honest. Gen Z doesn’t want perfection. They want authenticity, according to the recent Forbes article I just wrote, I’ll link to that in the show notes. And this also means you find your community, your support, your people, the people you can rely on, the peers who will be honest with you hold you accountable and help you sharpen your skills. Those who can help you hone your human, centered leadership edge and still demand high performance and hold your boundaries both and leadership. You’ve heard me say it before, so get sweaty. Don’t be afraid to look messy and uncoordinated and work through it all with people you trust, those who will elevate you and help you become a better version of yourself, to become the Legacy Leader you want to be and that you know you can be. So with all that said, I’d like to invite you to a community that I’m coaching, a community I’m building of high performing leaders. Do you want to join us on the journey? I’m starting an amazing mastermind to help you become a healthy, human, centered leader who gets results and leaves a legacy. Now what I’m doing is I’m launching a two day. A free virtual leadership event so you can have a taste. It’s just a few hours on two consecutive days. It’s free, but not everyone gets in, so we need to have a chat first and see if this aligns with your goals and where you are right now. This is going to be a fabulous community, a fabulous place to learn, to grow, to build that muscle memory, a wonderful support group to come back to and say, Hey, I’m having this particular challenge, or this is where I struggle, or this is where I can improve. And we all know that ego kills empathy. So if you think you’ve mastered leadership, you think you’ve got this, I’m gonna guess that you probably don’t. It’s the people that keep learning and keep growing and keep striving and keep sharpening that edge that are the ones that become the legacy leaders. And the beautiful part is that you can become a Legacy Leader in such a way that you are shored up, that you are healthy, that your boundaries are kept intact, that you’re leading with more ease and flow, and you’re not gripping so tight. Does that even sound good to get to a place where you are crushing your goals, crushing your KPIs, and you’re feeling good about it, your team is feeling good about it. People leave replenished. They leave fulfilled. They leave at the end of the day knowing that they made a difference and that they had an impact. I know that if you’re listening to this show, that’s the kind of leader you want to be, it’s likely the kind of leader you are. But again, we all need support. We all need that person that gives us tough love, the person that we turn to in the Hey, can I run something by you? The person that offers us a new article or resource or tool or strategy or approach that shifts our thinking and transforms our outcomes? That’s the community I’m building, and it’s starting with a free two day event, a training event where you can invest in you and your leadership and your potential and your mental health. So just go to the empathy edge.com/event and sign up for a time to talk with me, and we’ll make sure that your investment of time is worth it and is going to take you where you want to go. This event is free, and you’re going to get a taste of the mastermind in it, and you’re also going to leave with some valuable strategies and tools to put everything we talk about on this show into action to make your life and your leadership Thrive. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate and review or share it with a friend or colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. You.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Lauree Ostrofsky: Hey Rockstar Leader, Don’t Forget About YOU

Most high achievers never look back and see how far they’ve come. They tend to focus on perfection and not wanting to let anyone down. Because of their outward focus on others – colleagues, customers, or employees – They often don’t know how to be empathetic and tender with themselves.

Empathy starts with self-awareness and self-care so leaders who want to achieve their goals would be wise to practice tenderness and empathy for themselves first. This kind of self-reflection and tenderness for self will help them be an effective and inspiring leader for others.

Today, author and leadership coach Lauree Ostrofsky joins us to talk about self-empathy and owning your leadership style. Lauree shares how challenging and yet worthwhile self-empathy can be. We discuss the downside of empathy and how to balance focusing on others with caring for yourself. She talks about how to develop our sense of self so we don’t fear reinvention, we can take better risks, and avoid unnecessary worry or anxiousness that doesn’t serve us.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Dig into your fears and discomforts. It may just be an opportunity that is outside your comfort zone and making you feel vulnerable. Fear is an opportunity.
Make a list of compliments you receive as you receive them – we need the physical evidence of what we have accomplished and where we have been to see how we’ve gained the confidence we have now.
Sometimes you have to give yourself space before you can give space to the other person to hear and empathize with what they’re saying and needing.
Own who you are without apology. You can invite people in and invite them to also own who they are.

“There’s a way to value people and value yourself at the same time, and it really takes understanding of yourself.” — Lauree Ostrofsky

From Our Partner:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

About Lauree Ostrofsky, Founder, Simply Leap

Lauree Ostrofsky, PCC, CPC helps women leap: clarify what they want and feel more confident putting themselves out there. For more than two decades, she has been an author, coach, and hugger with a client roster that includes executives at IBM, Microsoft, Harvard, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Her books are, Simply Leap, a happy how-to about facing the fear of reinvention and enjoying the crap out of your life, and I’m Scared & Doing It Anyway, a memoir about her own reinvention after a devastating brain tumor diagnosis at 28.

Connect with Lauree Ostrofsky:

Simply Leap, LLC: http://simplyleap.com

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/laureeostrofsky/

Facebook: http://facebook.com/SimplyLeap

Instagram: http://instagram.com/lauree_ostrofsky/

Threads: http://threads.net/@lauree_ostrofsky

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Lauree Ostrofsky 03:11

think probably, like most people you talk to, it’s an inside job. It is having done that myself, been my first client, is really the way to do it. I My background is in marketing, and I was successful, and it, you know, in the marketing and PR world, and realized that I was getting paid for skills that I was less good at, and not being paid for the skills I was most praised at. And that really led me down a road and a journey to find this work that actually aligns with my greatest skills.

Maria Ross 03:43

Who So tell me more about that. What skills are you referring to? So

Lauree Ostrofsky 03:48

in the office, back in the marketing days, I was praised for reading a room. I could go into any meeting, and I could tell you, especially client meetings. I can tell you, you know a client, the client said this, but they’re really not happy. We really need to do that other thing, because their voice changed when they talked about it, like I could tell my bosses that. And I started getting on teams. I started having the team members that no one could figure out how to manage. They were suddenly put on my team as well, so I could switch the way or alter the way that work that we were doing on a team to fit the personalities and the needs of the people there. And those are very natural coaching skills, and yet they weren’t great. It’s not like I could pick up the phone and convince the New York Times to cover us or something like, right? I guess you knew it, but like, I would have a panic attack while on the phone. Yeah, in a way, wasn’t the same. You know, in these other instances, of

Maria Ross 04:50

course, and I sympathize, I empathize with you, because I come from a marketing background as well. And what I realized later, as I did, like strengths, finders. And things like that. Yes, were these skills about engaging people that I was often told they’re really hard to work with, or, you know, especially marketing and working with technical teams. Or when I was in advertising, working with as the account manager, with the creative teams, there were people I was told were cranky or they were really difficult to work with, and I would just intuitively build bridges with them, and I would have conversations, and I was like the one marketing person they liked and trusted. It’s so funny that your experience is very similar, and I never in a million years, way back then, thought I’d be doing the work I’m doing now. But it does to your point. It does feel more authentic to be doing this and like tapping into the things that we’re good at. What I love about what you said is you were intuitively engaging in empathetic leadership, engaging and meeting your people where they were, so that you could get the best out of them, so that they could do their best work and they could thrive. And ultimately, this is my whole point about making a business case for empathy that’s good for the business, that’s good for the team, it’s not just good for the individual. So when I hear folks say, like, well, I don’t have time to coddle my people, it’s like, Well, do you have time to help your people? Help you make your bonus this quarter? Because that’s what you’ll do if you engage in empathetic leadership, right?

Lauree Ostrofsky 06:17

We, you know, I turned staff members around, yeah, because they suddenly understood things in a way that they didn’t before. And so and we made clients happier. Yes, I actually had clients who would just call me about something that was going on during the day, because they knew I would listen. Yeah, and it wasn’t. And it was like, we’re keeping this business because the level of trust is high enough. And I think you know it depends on the organization. If they value trust to that point they they’re and that they’re willing to develop it. But I think that you know that that mutual trust has an empathy edge to it.

Maria Ross 06:54

The Empathy edge, I love it. Now, your most recent book is simply leap. It’s about facing the fear of reinvention and enjoying the crap out of your life. I love that definition or that description. You also wrote a memoir, I’m scared, and doing it anyway, about your own reinvention after a devastating brain tumor diagnosis at 28 and you and I shared my audience knows about my brain aneurysm experience, my memoir, rebooting my brain is all about that, and I’m just wondering I’m seeing the connection between the work that you’re doing and the experience that you had in terms of almost being scared to embrace a different way of being being scared to embrace your own power when you’re dealing with your coaching clients. And how I’m relating this to empathy, and maybe my listeners, is overcoming your fear of embracing empathy and understanding that it’s a strength, not a weakness. And so can you talk a little bit about that fear? I’ve thought about it that way. I love it. Yeah, because, I mean, we really are reinventing leadership, and some people are really scared about that, and we know who they are because they’re the ones forcing everybody to go back to the office. They don’t know any other way to lead. They don’t know any other way to be. So talk to me a little bit about the role of fear in preventing I mean, it’s obvious how it prevents reinvention, but where do you see it really getting in people’s way?

Lauree Ostrofsky 08:17

Oh, that’s such a wonderful question, and a really wonderful way to think about how we manage our teams. I think, well, one of the things that I say to clients is, when you’re afraid of something, it’s usually a good sign. It’s a sign you’re on the right track. Because if you didn’t want whatever this is, it wouldn’t be scary, it would be easy, or you wouldn’t care, and so, so I feel like something is there in that is that discomfort is actually a sign. And sometimes we take signs as, oh, I shouldn’t do it, because it’s a sign that, you know, it’s not easy, or it’s not aligned, or I feel about it, you actually have to dig a little bit deeper, because sometimes the fear or the discomfort is, this is new. This is forcing me to stretch in a different way. There’s an opportunity here that I’m attracted to, but I’m I feel vulnerable about and when we feel vulnerable, it is easier to move away from it than it is to move towards it. I

Maria Ross 09:18

think that’s, yeah, but it’s also, you know, so it’s how I repeat to my clients over and over again. Fear is an opportunity. It means you’re on the right track, right. Go a little bit further. Take another step closer to right, because fear is different than the ick. Fear is different than the like, Oh, I know in my bones this is the wrong way to go, right. It’s that. And I love this because it’s so applicable to so many leaders nowadays who are just scared of changing their well, they’re not changing. The leadership paradigm is changing, and they need to upskill different things that they didn’t have to before. They need to learn how to lead in a hybrid environment, in a remote environment. It. They need to lead in a way that marries the personal and professional, because we don’t park our humanity at the door. And I have empathy for them, because that’s really a new way for many people to operate. And so they’re feeling a lot of the what I call the snap, back to bossism, is fear. It’s I don’t know how to do this any other way than the way I was always doing it before the pandemic. So, right? Pandemic was just this blip.

Lauree Ostrofsky 10:25

Yeah, what happens if I get it wrong and, quote, unquote wrong, right? I think that the risk feels too high. Yeah, the risk feels too high for me to get it wrong or to try like it’s either it’s very binary kind of look at it either, either I’m doing the safe thing that I know how to do, yeah, or I’m risking it all. And we also have to create the safety in in risk.

Maria Ross 10:53

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I talk about both and leadership all the time, and I love it. It’s like it can be both. I’m gonna try this and I may fail, but, you know, it’s both hard and it might be worth it. Like, instead of the either or like, it’s either gonna be black or white, I’m gonna fail or pass. We’re all learning I love, you know, speaking to a lot of other my interview guests, especially those CHROs and those chief HR officers who are talking about the fact that, look, this is an experiment. Nobody’s got this figured out yet. So we’re trying different things, and we’re keeping ourselves open to feedback. And we know some of it’s not going to work. We already know that going into it, but we have to try it, to see what we can learn and what we can tweak and what we can grow. And so I love that concept. So you talk a lot about, you know, focusing on your own confidence, focusing on taking care of yourself so that you can show up as the best version of yourself. Can you talk to us about how challenging but also worthwhile self empathy can be, and can you describe what you mean by self empathy.

Lauree Ostrofsky 12:01

Well, the example that I give is actually, if you imagine walking a kindergartner first grade or their first day of class, and you walk them into the class, and you remind them, Oh, I’ve packed your favorite snack for you. And you watch them, you know, figure out their seat. They’re like, well, these people kind of look friendly, you know, you’ll meet someone, and you kind of stand outside the door and you really hope for the best with them. And we have that parts of ourselves too. We are the kindergartner that we have to care for, around the fear, around the vulnerability, around the discomfort. We have to remind ourselves of the snack we pack, and the tenderness that we would give a child going into a new situation, we need to give ourselves some time. And I think that most of us mean teacher ourselves, or mean parent ourselves, or like, buck up kid. You’re gonna go in there like you don’t get to feel anything. And actually it’s totally normal. It’s totally normal for a kindergartner. It’s totally normal for us, yeah, and I think that kind of self kindness. So when I mentioned the child, most of us still like, oh, yeah, I get that. Okay. Well, so then what’s our version of that? What’s the version of packing our snack to enter that boardroom, right? And that meeting, we’re not sure how it’s going to go or to try something and experiment. So you were saying experiment, it triggered. I always talk about research to my clients that as a students, as people pleasers, as externally focused folks, we have a tendency to look for our a’s and our gold stars externally, and yet we’ve got to give them to ourselves, right? And the easiest way, one of the easy ways to do that, is to imagine everything as research. Because we know research, as you just said, as we’re collecting data all the time. If all this is is data, if every meeting and conversation you have is data, then, then we can come together and analyze that data, as opposed to, I’ve got one shot in this moment, everything you know, failure, that’s it. Yeah, the world will end. Yeah, yeah. But it’s really that those that wording that’s going to make it so much easier for us to to approach with openness, I know, and

Maria Ross 14:26

that can get hard. I’m a type A overachiever, external validation gal. I’m the achiever on the Enneagram, and I get it, and this is the thing I always I struggle with, and maybe some of my listeners do too. I feel like I’m so compassionate. I can be not always. I can be compassionate and empathetic with other people, but when it comes to myself, and I try to do, you know, tender, like I love the word you use, tenderness, tender self talk with myself, I have this little voice that, like, says you’re just placating yourself. You’re just babying yourself. Like you’re fooling yourself. And it’s really interesting to try to figure out, well, where’s that voice coming from, and is that actually what I subconsciously think about other people who I’m comforting. You know, it’s like this whole metaphysical Well, I don’t, let’s, I’m not going to turn this into a therapy session for my listeners, but, but I’m sure that there are a lot of other high performers as well that like, well, that yardstick is good for you, but not for me. And I’m wondering how we break ourselves of that pattern to say, Why is your yardstick so high, and if I may, say unachievable,

Lauree Ostrofsky 15:35

right? Well, one of the things I think that comes up is because we’re so future focused, we don’t always notice the path that we’ve been on. We don’t always, we often can notice the thing we don’t know now, but not the thing we didn’t used to know, right? And because when we look back, it seems so quick that we figured that out. It didn’t feel that way. No, when we were staring it in the face, you know? Yeah, trying to figure it out. And so I, like a lot of my work, is, do you remember two months ago we talked about this? I, you know? I find that actual, real examples work the best, especially when we have a very loud inner voice that might be the mean teacher, the main parent or the you know, you’ve got to figure this out pretty fast. I’ve so I often have my clients make a list of compliments you’ve received as you receive them, or a list of things that you accomplish as you accomplish them, so that way you have something to refer back to. We actually need, we need the data. We need the physical evidence. And I know this sounds simple, but most of us, high achievers never look back, and don’t allow ourselves to like like, judge ourselves for looking back, too. And so the beauty of recording in whatever way. So it could be a note on your phone or a list by your on your desk, or a post it note or something, the small amount that we can do, the tiny, easy way that we can do it, really makes a difference, because then the data doesn’t lie. Yeah, absolutely.

Maria Ross 17:19

I talked about this totally

17:21

lie Yes,

Maria Ross 17:22

100% and in the empathy edge, when I had my section on how to strengthen your empathy as a leader, my previous book, one of the tips I had was to build your self confidence. And that was one of the actual tactical tips, was create a folder on your email or in, you know, I have one in my file drawer too, and that’s where I statue. I have one on my on my email called sweet stuff, and that’s where I put all the things, where someone’s going, oh my gosh, you did this amazingly. You did this great job. Like I put that there because we have to go into our interactions with other people with that tank full, with that sense of self grounded. Because if we don’t, that’s why that that’s a tip for strengthening empathy, is because if you’re if you’re not broken, but if you’re feeling hurt, if you’re feeling unsure, if you’re feeling depleted, exactly, you cannot take on another person’s point of view without defensiveness or fear, and so it’s a reminder of going back and on those days when your confidence flags, going back to those files, going back to those notes, going back to the you know, it’s so funny, because just the other day, I was reading feedback forms that were sent to me after a conference where I spoke and I got, I did my own evaluation from the stage, and I got really great feedback. This was from the conference organizers. And 90% 95% were like, Oh my gosh, so positive. Like, this was so useful. Loved your presentation. La, la, la. And then a few people got their knickers in a twist about the fact that I mentioned I had a book they thought I was selling from the stage because I mentioned my book, and I mentioned that I was going to be at a book signing at the event right after my talk, which I was just telling people so they knew why I was running out of there. So whatever. But of course, what do you do as a high achiever? Right pages of feedback, and then I shut it so funny. I closed the document after I had read only the like, pretty much the negative ones. And I stopped myself, and I said no, and I opened it back up, and I read only the positive ones, which were most of them, and I skipped over the four or five kind of negative ones. And I thought, why do we do that to ourselves?

Lauree Ostrofsky 19:39

Oh, my God. I know it’s so important to remind ourselves that our brains do that naturally, yeah. And so we have to do everything we can consciously to shift our brains Yeah, away from it, yeah. It is even, you know, it’s a natural human response, okay, I know it was supposed to help me with like bears and. Yeah, exactly, right. It’s really not useful right now, no, and yeah. And it’s so interesting, because I talk with my clients a lot about I mentioned data already, but it’s even you know when with your response, or responses when you send out a newsletter, or when you you know are kind of collecting research. It’s like, well, some people didn’t like it. So does that mean we should change our direction? Well, actually, let’s talk about context. How much of this is about context, right? Something about them that was happening, the number of people that event like, how many? Statistically? Yeah, if only four out of out of 50 responses said, do it differently? Well, statistically, you never, yeah, that’s

Maria Ross 20:44

not a trend line. Yeah,

Lauree Ostrofsky 20:46

right. And so we kind of have to do that with ourselves, with responses like, what you’re talking about, it’s like, Okay, what’s the statistics here? What’s the other context? What side of the stage were they sitting on? You know what I mean, like, what? Oh my gosh. Other things that I can I can consider this from before I integrate it, before I take it on, right, or

Maria Ross 21:08

before I create that false narrative for myself of what’s going on. And, you know, there are times where, yeah, the majority of feedback about something could be negative, and then that’s a learning opportunity. And I always talk about this with, you know, I’ve had a few books. We talked before we started recording about the fact that I wrote a memoir about my brain injury recovery called rebooting my brain. And I have hundreds of positive reviews. I have emails from people thanking me for the book, like that’s what I wanted to do, is I wanted to impact and help other people so they didn’t feel as in the dark as we did. Yes, did I get a few one star, two star ratings on Amazon and on Goodreads? I did, and I recall those exactly, not the other 400 other right? But to the people that thought my story wasn’t harrowing enough for them, like that, I wasn’t close enough to death for them, like Yeah. So I call it my point being I call it the strainer method, because some of the feedback, and even the negative feedback about books I’ve written in the past have actually been really helpful. Like, if someone’s saying, well, she seemed to ramble on in this section of the book, I can look at that and I can say, oh, I need to do a better job editing in the future. Or, yeah, I can see how that that was a little repetitive in that portion. So some of the feedbacks been constructive and good, even if it’s slightly negative, but it’s, it’s that strainer method of like, take what’s good out of the feedback that you’re getting and leave the rest and take and not just accept the positive. I don’t mean that, but take what’s if it’s negative and it’s constructive, and you can learn from it. Do something with that going forward and make the next iteration, the next thing better than before. So

Lauree Ostrofsky 22:47

and again, there’s also, there’s also the ability to separate yourself and your sense of self. We were talking about self empathy before your sense of self can be it should be separate than the feedback you receive. And I think especially if you’re if you’re an over, over empathize, or if you’re a people pleaser. Further than that, it’s really hard that boundary is a little porous, yeah, and and so where we get our sense of self from is going to determine also how far in comments get. Yeah. And so I think being aware of when you’re in the right head space to even receive them, that’s so important. I hear right now. Can I really receive this right now, or is it going to be piled on with the thing I’m already upset about, right or I’m already fixated

Maria Ross 23:39

on? And that’s why, you know, with the new book with empathy dilemma, I talk about being I talk about self care and clarity, and that includes self care about your own boundaries and and clearly communicating them, and communicating not in an aggressive way, like this, is my boundary. Do not cross it. But you know, being clear about the boundary, because you can set a boundary if someone’s if you, if you’re a leader, and someone’s coming to you with an issue and you have something going on, or you, you know, I always use this example of like, every Tuesday you’ve told your team you’re going to leave at you need to log off at four o’clock because you’re coaching your kids soccer game. Someone comes into your office at 355 about a major issue with a colleague or a major issue with a project. You don’t have to give up your boundary, but you can acknowledge and say this is really important to you, I can tell, and that means it’s important to me, but you know that I have to leave early on Tuesdays, so I’m going to clear some space for us to have a conversation tomorrow, and I want to be able to be fully present and be able to listen to you versus you trying to get everything out in the two minutes I have before I leave, because that’s not really going to benefit you, and that’s a way of acknowledging someone and seeing them and being empathetic as a leader, while still holding your own boundaries, and then to your point, taking care of yourself, to be in a position where you. Can hear the person, where you can listen, where you can offer constructive feedback and advice if asked, but you like you said, it’s so important you have to be in that right headspace. And part of being an empathetic leader is recognizing when you’re not and being open and honest with the person to say, this is not a good time. It’s not going to give you your due if we have this conversation right now, can we have it tomorrow?

Lauree Ostrofsky 25:25

Yeah, there’s a way to value people and value yourself at the same time 100% I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about here, and it really takes understanding of yourself, because not all of us have taken the time to understand what our own triggers are, and to even notice how we feel in a moment, to recognize what’s, you know, what someone else is bringing to us, why we’re responding the way we are. Oh, what does that say about actually, where I am right now? And to be able to say, you know, what I’m gonna need a minute, yeah, so I can really hear you. You know, let me go to the restroom and come back. Or, you know, why don’t we take a five minute break here? And it’s, yeah, it’s kind of giving ourselves the even the one minute of space, the space to understand, like, okay, what are they coming to movie with? But first, where am I? For sure? And the better we can train ourselves about it, you know, makes it makes us better partners, parents and colleagues and bosses.

Maria Ross 26:24

So, you know, we talk about empathy as being very, very focused on the other and being able to see their point of view and understand their perspective without dipping into people pleasing, but just being there for them and understanding them. It doesn’t mean we have to agree. It doesn’t mean we have to change our decision, because what they’re bringing to us, but what are some tips you have to balance that focus on others and still care for yourself? What techniques or practices have you seen work for your clients or for yourself? You know, I’m the introvert, and I would say that owning my introversion has been one of the best things,

Lauree Ostrofsky 27:02

actually, to be a leader and also to recognize my own needs. I have led a lot of meetings. I’ve spoken in a lot of events as well, and I needed to recognize how much time I needed before the meeting or the event and how much time I needed after, because I’d force myself into networking before and then getting on stage Never a good place, because I’m already depleted when I need to be at my highest energy level, right? And and the same. And then I’d set up meetings for the day after, or at least the morning after. And it’s like, Well, that isn’t the way my energy levels work. And what I found is when I admit to other people I’m an introvert, one people are like, Oh, my God, I am too. There’s so much relief, yeah, and that, and I think it allows me to own my leadership style in the way that works for me, and I feel, I honestly feel less apologetic about it, and I think that that is the part that I help clients most with, is what’s a way to own who you are without apology, right as an invitation instead? How can you invite people in by owning something about yourself that maybe opens the door for them to own something too or make room for both of us? I

Maria Ross 28:29

love that theme of owning your leadership style, and I go back to as well, the dark side of that where some people read books or hear that advice and they swing the pendulum too far the other way of becoming unyielding, of like I said, the passive aggressive, like this is my leadership style, and I’m not going to change. There’s a way to communicate that to people in a loving, open way. Yeah, not that you have to be someone you’re not if, but, you know, there’s a way to communicate that that’s not so so much putting a barrier in front of yourself versus just, hey, this is who I am and this is how I operate. Do you find that it’s hard for people to balance that, you know, so they they come to you, and then they take that advice, and then they’re, you know, pissing off co workers or colleagues because they’re being aggressive about their boundary setting. Do you know what I’m saying? Is there a dark side to that?

Lauree Ostrofsky 29:24

Well, I would say that actually, the thing that I would I would more likely say, is that people’s responses to your boundary session, boundary requests, it’s often about them. So I’ve talked with I lost my mom last year. And so, like, there’s a lot of, you know, kind of grief about that, and folks will have lots of opinions and say, like, you know, she’s in a better place, or, you know, are, don’t you feel relieved? Or whatever, you know, like, people say these things, and it’s never about you, no, it’s always about them. So I would say that, I mean, for me, the context. Best about that is, is normally when people respond to your boundaries, as long as you’ve given some effort, most people respond from their own place, and if they’re not great about boundaries, they get really uncomfortable about yours. So it could be an invitation for a conversation I wouldn’t give up with the negative. You know, if you’re getting a negative, like someone’s really holding boundaries, is it because of something that’s going on with them? Is there something that can be named that actually brings you closer together, as opposed to further apart? And we’re not in a society where that is encouraged. But I think that you have the books that you do, I do, the work that I do, to really turn the tide, yeah, and staying in it is so powerful, yeah, yeah. It really can change our environments for the better.

Maria Ross 30:55

I love that. I love that so much. So let’s talk a little bit more as we kind of wrap up on this idea of fear, this idea of fear of being an empathetic leader, or being a people centered leader, this idea of fear around I’m going to get taken advantage of. I’m going to get walked all over, all of the false narratives that some leaders tell themselves about bringing empathy to work and even getting to know the people on their teams or the people that work on a personal level, not that everybody has to be best friends, but yeah, you know what’s what do you think is behind that fear? I know there’s probably a variety of reasons. People have different neurodiversity challenges, people have different social comforts, but what do you think is behind some of those fears? And how can we help leaders and colleagues get past that fear of connection as much as we can within a workplace?

Lauree Ostrofsky 31:48

Gosh, I would, I think I would go back to what I was saying before about the the positive side of fear that I think that was, it was a bit destructive the whole culture around fearlessness, that we need to be fearless, yeah, and I think fear has so much to teach us, and so fear in a work setting can also be really positive. There is an opportunity here, and I think that if we can shift in ourselves, how we feel about fear and what we say toward like, the narrative that we tell ourselves when we feel it or when we notice it in others. I I think that we see more of the opportunity there. I know that isn’t exactly what you’re no, I

Maria Ross 32:33

really like it. Like, it’s so important. I like where you’re going with this. Because I think there’s I’d like to just pick at that for a little bit, because I’d like to understand what you think about how fear is viewed in our culture and also in a corporate culture. What do you see as the negatives around that, and how can we change that narrative, like whether it’s about fear of empathy or not? I that’s just such a I’m just curious about that.

Lauree Ostrofsky 32:56

I think that we see weakness in fear. The fear is an example of weakness, and anything that could be termed weakness, we run from, we avoid, we shut down in ourselves or other people. And if we can wait a beat and just notice the feeling first. Notice the sense in the room as a conversation is happening in a meeting, it gives us a chance to see the thing underneath it. And fear and anger are the first responses. They aren’t usually the actual feelings underneath it, right, right, not many people wait to see what else is there or stay curious enough. And I think that perhaps is the because we’re afraid of fear. That’s the thing that comes through in our culture.

Maria Ross 33:59

Wow, yeah, I love that perspective, and it’s making me think about, what if we’re not the one that’s operating from fear. So what if we’re on the other side of that table and we’re dealing with a leader or a colleague that is unable to connect with us because of their fear? Do you have any advice for listeners or us about that. How do we how can we help them build that trust? How can we help them feel okay with that connection? I’m thinking specifically of, you know, I moved this summer to I don’t, I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area anymore. I live northeast of Sacramento, and I met a lot of new people. And there’s, there’s, there’s one person that it’s there’s a lot of fear from that end of creating a connection, and it manifests the social awkwardness, and I don’t know how to respond to it. My instinct is to double down, which is probably making it worse, right? I’m trying to be familiar. Increasing, yeah, increasing. The. Fantastic. It’s probably not good. And so I’m wondering, and I know I’ve worked with people like that too, where it’s sort of like I’ve made it my mission to get them on my side, to, like, win them over, right? Because I can sense there’s a fear around that. Or, you know, if you are a high achiever and you have a boss you think doesn’t like you, well, you double down on that. Well, I’m gonna make you like me, I’m going to make you have a relationship with me. So do you have any advice for the people that are probably not your clients on the other side of the equation, how we how we can interact with people operating from fear in a positive way to create a positive relationship? Yeah,

Lauree Ostrofsky 35:37

so a few things, because one is curiosity, and curiosity is so the answer. In so many instances, we can say, curious, Oh, my Lord, but let’s just be clear, Curiosity is not easy. It is not the first thing most of us pick no

Maria Ross 35:51

and some people and some people feel attacked if they feel like I’ve noticed this too, when I lean into curiosity, especially about this one person, it sounds like I’m peppering them with questions, right? And so then they’re like, Yeah, you can see them backing up, you know, right, physically and emotionally, but yeah. So

Lauree Ostrofsky 36:08

I just, I want to keep that in the background, because I think it’s, I think that we can stay curious in our minds, even if we don’t. Are verbally curious, I certainly mean, like, yeah, Curiosity can also create a pause. And I really think one of the themes in our conversation is pausing as much as you can. And so if you can get yourself to pause and internally stay curious, you might notice you might notice more about their tone of voice. You might notice more about their facial expressions. You might notice the thing that they just are talking about that you were glossing over and like, oh, wait, this is really important to them. I didn’t even realize so pausing and curiosity is always number one. The second thing is often, especially if your peers, the person is waiting for someone else to go first. When it comes to anything vulnerable, I’m not going to let my guard down until I can sense it safe. And if you’re noticing some kind of reticence in the other person, yeah, it might mean you have to create a safe space, not by throwing

Maria Ross 37:14

yourself out, spilling all your dark secrets. Yeah, right.

Lauree Ostrofsky 37:18

What more about kind of you know? More about, you know, sharing first, yeah, or and leaving space. And the other thing is that people are on different paths. And yeah, so some people take longer to to warm up. And I always keep in mind this colleague that I work with that I really thought hated me, and oh my gosh, because she was so short. She was working in New York, like, there’s a lot

Maria Ross 37:44

of you know, she was very curt and direct, yeah.

Lauree Ostrofsky 37:48

And she said to me, once you’re in, you’re in, meaning, she’s got a hard shell, but soft on the inside. And I always remember that, yeah, that the hard shells are often really soft on the inside, and that’s why they’ve built up the hard shell, right? And so, so my job, or your job, isn’t to crack the shell, it’s to notice when the softness kind of appears, right? You know, is it when they talk about their dog, or when they talk about a, you know, a certain moment, it’s like, yeah, it’s there, and I can see the glimmers of that soft interior. I’m going to be encouraged to be more patient, yeah, to wait it out, to notice how bits are coming to me. And they’re going to then be more comfortable softening their shells too. I love how this is coming full circle. Because the only way that you have the capacity to do that is to be compassionate with yourself and show up with your own sense of self, your own self compassion, your own self empathy, otherwise you are too busy with your hamster mind of thinking about, how am I coming across? What am I doing? You missed those cues. So yes, you just you brought us full circle. I love it. I love it. You’re welcome. Lauree, I could talk to you much, much longer, but we’ve got a wrap, so I will have all your links in the show notes, and especially your link to simply leap, and your other books and all your goodness. But for folks on the go, where’s a good place for them to get in touch with you or learn

Maria Ross 39:18

more about your work.

Lauree Ostrofsky 39:20

Yeah, yeah. So my business is simply leap, as you said, and that’s the best way to find me, simply leap.com because leaping is not simple, but talking about it really helps. So simply leap has just been such a, just a great name for me. And so, yeah, so I’d love to see you there. I also have my, you know, my books are there as well, and wonderful and new membership program that I’d love for them to be part of.

Maria Ross 39:45

So thank you, Lauree again, for such a great conversation. So much fun to talk to you and kind of tease out all these different concepts. Hopefully we’ve shared some good insights with our listeners and just really thank you for being here. Oh, thank you so much. And thank you. Everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate, review and share with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice. Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place. You.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Shermin Kruse: Why Stoic Empathy is the Balance Leaders Need

What can stoicism teach us about empathy in modern life? This centuries-old philosophy can directly apply to what we face now in our workplaces and our world.

Shermin Kruse is here to talk to us about her latest book, Stoic Empathy. She shares what stoic empathy means and how the fusion of these seemingly opposing forces is particularly relevant today. She shares her personal story and how her immigrant journey shaped her understanding of empathy and stoicism. Sher also talks about how she leveraged stoic empathy as a lawyer to great success. We discuss practical tools for building influence and emotional regulation that you can start using today with your employees – or your partner or kids!

Whether you’re a corporate leader, educator, parent, or simply seeking tools to navigate personal and professional challenges with integrity, you will love this conversation!

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Most of our relationships are long-term. Those are whom you owe a long-term duty to engage in and sustain that relationship.
Our control in this world is not fixed – everything changes, everything evolves, and we need to be able to accept that we can’t change and control everything.
Stoicism allows you to make informed and deliberate decisions rather than reactive decisions, especially in difficult situations.
Create relationships where you feel safe and are willing to trust the other person, even if you may not understand or agree in the moment.

“Know that silence is not submission, pause is not acceptance, and that even understanding is not agreement.”

— Shermin Kruse

Episode References:

From Our Partner:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

About Shermin Kruse: Corporate Advisor, Law Professor, and Author of Stoic Empathy

Shermin Kruse is a globally recognized author, negotiation consultant, law professor, and TEDx producer specializing in stoic Empathy, leadership, and complex negotiation, leadership, and complex negotiation. Born in Tehran during political upheaval, she immigrated to Canada as a child, later earning degrees in philosophy and neuropsychology from the University of Toronto and a law degree from the University of Michigan.

She is the author of Butterfly Stitching, a critically acclaimed novel, and Global Transactions and Regulation, a key resource for law and business professionals. Her latest book, Stoic Empathy, blends cognitive empathy with stoic principles to offer a transformative framework for leadership, influence, and resilience.

Shermin continues to champion empathy, resilience, and ethical leadership through her work in academia, business, and the non-profit sector.

Connect with Shermin (“Sher”) Kruse:

Website: sherminkruse.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shermin-kruse

Facebook: facebook.com/sher.kruse

Instagram: instagram.com/sher_kruse

Book: Stoic Empathy. Also on her website.

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Shermin Kruse 03:09

show. Thank you so much, Maria, such a pleasure to be here, and I’m so excited to join you and get to interact with your incredible listeners. I

Maria Ross 03:18

love it. So this has been a match in the making. For a while, we met through a mutual friend, and we’ve both had some scheduling issues of making this happen, and I’m so excited to finally make this happen and have this conversation with you. You have such a wonderful and inspiring story. So I want you to share, if you can, with our listeners, how you got to this point, you do so much. You are, you know, an expert in law, you produce TEDx events. You’re writing books. So tell us a little bit about this journey and how you got to this work that you’re doing now. Well, I appreciate

Shermin Kruse 03:54

that so much. And to you listeners out there, I’m usually the one interviewing people, so it’s sort of weird to be in the hot seat over here. And I think Maria is so interesting, I’d love I have 5000 questions to ask her. Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s do it another time. Yeah, absolutely. I would love that. As for me, it’s, you know, the story everyone’s got a story is actually one of the things that I tell my TEDx curation team all the time, everyone’s got a story. Everyone has a special magic or touch or ability to reveal a part of the universe to you in a way that you didn’t understand it before. And therefore, as a result, I think everybody has the ability to make us smarter, wiser, more connected to the world. For me, I would say, if I were to sort of pinpoint that gift of mine, it would be to love and study humanity and human nature. I was born in Iran, so I’ve lived a number of different continents, number of different countries. I was born in. Iran during the well shortly before the revolution and the Iran Iraq War. So I grew up during the war. I grew up during the immediate aftermath of the revolution, which was a very turbulent time to be in Iran. Folks weren’t even really used to the Islamic regime yet and still not sure whether to embrace it push against it. I mean, the revolution was so new, nobody really knew what was going to happen. Going to happen, and then suddenly all these people were being massacred. So it was a very, very strange time. And then the war, about a million people died during the Iran Iraq War, really, really heavy missile attacks in the city of Tehran. It was sort of similar to modern day Kyiv, I suppose, in that sense, and I immigrated. When we immigrated, we didn’t immigrate to the United States, we immigrated to Canada. And that’s right, I was 11 years old when we immigrated, and I had just wrapped fifth grade, but we didn’t really have fifth grade, because we were in bomb shelters most of fifth grade. So really, I had a fourth grade education in Canada. I don’t speak a word of English, and I have no real economic means whatsoever, but I’m there, and I’m a documented person, which is massive, right? You’ve already sort of received the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory golden ticket. Yeah, yes. And then on top of that, I was so lucky, because we ended up in mixed income housing, which actually exposed me to a really wonderful elementary school and middle school, so I was getting a decent education in a safe environment, albeit nobody could understand what I was saying, which was rather challenging, and there was a lot of bullying issues, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually I made my way to the States, United States, I ended up actually kind of falling in love with this country. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s very easy to see the warts when you’ve experienced other countries, including other democracies, but I think it’s also really easy to love this country and love what it could be. So I have been passionate, politically active person. It’s there’s this joke that Iranians have, what do you call a politician who doesn’t get any money for their work? And the answer is, activist. So

Maria Ross 07:19

yeah, yeah, 100%

Shermin Kruse 07:23

so I had to pay the bill somehow. And growing up with that immigrant mindset, mentality, I went to law school, which I love, actually I love. I did it for a really long time before I retired. 17 years I practiced law. Throughout that whole time, I was really dedicated to my community, a lot of writing, a lot of speaking, a lot of IDEA curation,

Maria Ross 07:44

which is kind of real quick. What kind of law did you practice

Shermin Kruse 07:47

complex commercial litigation, primarily in the fashion sector? Wow, so it would be so I worked primarily for the LVMH group. So the Louis Vuitton mo at Hennessy house was my primary client. Most of our litigation was against other big names, marks, as we call them, right? So it might be LV suing Dooney and Burke, for example, right? Okay, so, yeah. So it’s like a nine or 10 figure piece of litigation involving international parties and usually involving federal law, because it would involve Mark law, right? So it was really fun. I mean, really exciting for a long time,

Maria Ross 08:27

yeah? So you get into law, you’re here and you’re working, and then take us through kind of fast forward to where you’re delivering a TED talk about empathy, yeah. How did that? Where’s that bridge there?

Shermin Kruse 08:38

Though, I have been studying human nature since I was a child, and in university, I studied neuroscience and philosophy, neuropsychology, to be precise. Then as an attorney, what I did for a living was advocacy. It was I had to learn how to convince people to think the way I wanted them to think. And Maria, I couldn’t do it by slamming my fist on the table, yelling, shouting, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, because it wasn’t true to me. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have even worked for me. I don’t know that it would have been successful. Some people are, you know, some people can yell and scream and use force and listen it well, yeah, best way to live your life by power. It’s, well, it’s the command and

Maria Ross 09:27

control model, and it gets you compliance, but it doesn’t get you engagement. And I’m gonna link in the show notes, because you’re reminding me of a great interview I had with Robin dreeke, who was a former FBI counter intelligence agent, and his role was to turn enemy folks into spies to help the cause of democracy and help the cause of freedom. And he did that through empathy, not through coercion, not through torture, not through you know, but just you know. How do you really see people and find common ground and understand what. Important to them so that you can find a way forward together, and that kind of engagement breeds so much loyalty versus just compliance, which, yeah, might work in the short term. It’s like parenting, right? Punishment can work in the short term, but in the long term are is what is the relationship like? So I love that 100%

Shermin Kruse 10:18

and so what you’ve just identified with parenting that is an ongoing, long term relationship, right? If you want to just zoom in and zoom out, if you’re going to zoom in, obliterate an enemy and zoom out, the strategy can be different, although, interestingly, empathy works for that too, but it but most of our negotiations, most of our power dynamics, most of our relationships are long term. Very rarely do we zoom in and zoom out, even in a corporate business context, it is your clients, your partners, your vendors, your customers, your stakeholders, right your board, your CEOs, your So, these shareholders, these are people to whom with whom you have a long standing relationship, and to whom you owe a long term duty to engage in that relationship. And so the sustainability of the relationship is key. It’s really interesting what you bring up about the FBI, because a lot of the work I do is utilized by the FBI, even your typical SWAT interrogation unit, because it’s most likely to yield information. And the FBI has learned that utilizing these tools and therefore revealing more information from these is power. Information is power. Totally more knowledge. If you’re gonna talk to anybody, it’s because you want them to tell you something, right? So you’re doing the

Maria Ross 11:42

because I definitely want us to get into talking about the book so really quickly. So when you did your TED talk about empathy, tell us about that and tell us about what you’re hoping to bring to people through that work.

Shermin Kruse 11:57

Well, my most recent TEDx talk was my third so there’s been a spectrum of empathy related talks given from me for the last 10 years or so. This one is among the continuum of that evolution. This one specifically is on stoic empathy, because as I continued to refine my ideas on empathy, and I’ll talk to you listeners about this in a minute, but focusing on the divergence, distinction and spectrum between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, I started to recognize the tools of stoicism in that Very spectrum, and controlling where we are within that spectrum, and helping find empathy for ourselves, etc, etc. And so that’s what became stoic empathy, which is the current book, which

Maria Ross 12:52

honestly, what is, what is stoic empathy? Okay, so, okay.

Shermin Kruse 12:55

So let me just say it literally circles back to 2530 years ago, whenever it was that I graduated college with my degree in philosophy and neuropsychology. So stoic empathy is the ability to gain power in the world, ethically and consistent with our value system, utilizing control over ourselves by using stoicism and influence over others by using empathy, actually combining the power of self control with the power of empathic influence to gain momentum in a world even if the odds are against us, but in a way that helps with our sustained relationships and long term relationships, right? Without harm, because a lot of folks, you know, they want to win the battle, but they don’t want to lose the war, right? You want your kid to put the iPad down, but you don’t want to have a lifelong of strained relationships with your kid, right? You want your vendor to agree to this new price point you want your partner to engage with you going forward in the post merger integration from that point on, as opposed to just agreeing to your deal terms, right? So that is the methodology. So it is designed to not harm your relationships, which in a power struggle, let’s be candid, is, yeah, that’s the word struggle. That’s the struggle. Yeah, right. Struggle. The

Maria Ross 14:29

reason for the use of that word, yeah, absolutely. And I just want to talk about this because you mentioned that stoicism and empathy are often seen as opposing forces. And I love what you’re saying here, because this speaks exactly to what I have in my latest book around the five pillars of being both an effective and an empathetic leader. Self awareness is the first one, and it’s not necessarily meant to be sequential, but you can’t really get very far with the rest unless you have self awareness and you have. That mastery of self, and then the second one is self care, where you’re replenishing your tank so you’re showing up as the best version of yourself, fully grounded, fully present, so that you don’t take on other points of view with defensiveness and fear. So I’m seeing a lot of strains of what you’re talking about in terms of stoicism, of those preliminary preparations to then engage in an empathic connection with someone and be able to see their point of view, understand their context, get curious and ask more questions, because you’re not in such a self preservation mode. So can you educate us a little bit about the principles of stoicism and how that feeds into this idea of mastering your own emotional regulation and self regulation. So

Shermin Kruse 15:49

I would say spot on, and stoicism would be, in my opinion, the best way to achieve your first and second pill, because it’s more that it’s the how right. How are you going to get that self understanding? How are you going to gain that self mastery? How are you going to gain that self control? And the pillars of stoicism? I mean, it is a 2000 year old philosophical belief system that borders on a spiritual way of life. So, you know, there’s so many books and mountains of research dedicated to it, but really, at the end of the day, it’s very simple, it, and it really gets boiled down to one principle, and that is the dichotomy of control. It is understanding. And it sort of goes back to, I’m not a woman of faith, but I but if you are. It goes back to that sort of Christian saying, Give me the grace or wisdom to understand what’s in my control. Oh, the Serenity Prayer.

Maria Ross 16:49

The Serenity

Shermin Kruse 16:50

Prayer, that’s what it is. The serenity prayer, to accept what I cannot control, but to change what I can. And the wisdom to know the difference, yeah, wisdom to know the difference, and with that, and this is a pivotal component of stoicism and empathy, especially as they combine, is how that changes, because our control in this world is not a constant. The things we control are not constants. They change. They evolve with our power in this world. They evolve with our circumstances, with our Dynamics, with our wealth, with our race. You know, they could change from day to day for any particular I think it’s also and this is something that I haven’t really heard talked about, but it’s the wisdom to know that is not fixed, but that is where it is today, right? And there needs to be an acceptance that comes along with what it is today, but then there also needs to be that hope and that understanding of what it could be tomorrow, right?

Maria Ross 17:54

You know, what I love about what you’re saying is I do a lot of work for myself about understanding my own emotions. And you know, I might be an empathy expert, but probably, you would probably say the same thing, I’m not always an expert at empathy in every waking moment, because I’m not always my best self in every waking moment. So even experts have to work at this and practice. But I love what you’re saying because it sparks for me something that I’ve been working on and telling myself and trying to help my son with as well, who’s 10 and a half, is that emotions are temporary, and that when we feel anger, when we feel hatred, when we feel frustration, when we feel sadness, telling ourselves that this, not that this too shall pass, because it’s we really want to acknowledge what we’re In when we’re in it, but this idea that our emotions are not fixed either, and I kind of see that in the same way that you’re talking about control, because I might have a command of the situation with this particular team at this particular moment, in this particular company, in this particular market, but there’s so many forces at play every day, every moment, that change things. And so it’s kind of linked to being present and having gratitude in the moment when you’re aware of the control and the influence you have, and leveraging that to its best ability. Kind of going off a little bit on a tangent, but you really sparked, for me, that idea, this is

Shermin Kruse 19:20

such a wonderful conversation. And Maria, this is exactly what I was hoping to do today. I was hoping to really dig in with you, because you have this beautiful way of looking at the world that is so extraordinary and so broad and interconnected, and it’s fascinating to have someone like that sitting in front of you. I mean, we’re sitting in zoom in front of each other, but sitting in front of you and then be able to dissect the notion, here’s the a lot of the roots of what you’re saying. So a lot of the roots of what you’re saying is nothing is fixed, suffering, pain, even life, right? Even life. And this that goes back to the stoic concept of. Mantomori, but it goes back to also Hamlet and Islam and Christianity, and put some and all of these faiths and the idea that nothing is fixed, even pain, even suffering and even life right, everything is transient. And more importantly, this transient experience that I am undergoing is not only something that is happening to me and I am a passive recipient of it, but rather it is something with which I can engage fully and therefore influence, maybe even control, depending on what it is, right? Most certainly influence. So the Greeks and the Romans thought of emotions as in two parts. There’s the sort of the primary part, which is your immediate feeling, and then there’s the secondary part, which is what it is after you have cognitively evaluated it, right? Modern day neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists divide up emotions into five parts, neurophysiological, psychological, behavioral, emotional, motivational, etc, etc. So here’s the thing, you can dissect an emotion, and by dissecting an emotion, you can understand the emotion better, and therefore understand better how and what aspects of that emotion you have control over, and how much control you have over how you express that emotion, right? Because you might be terrified, but you might be very cautious of how you show that terror to your children,

21:41

right, right.

Maria Ross 21:41

Or to anyone, to your neighbor, to your spouse, to your employees, like anyone. And that’s the thing of you know, this is a constant conversation in our house where it’s, I’m, you know, I’m sorry that I snapped at you, because what I was feeling was frustration, or I was feeling trapped, or I was feeling these other things that caused me to react in a way that you read as anger or as indictment. And so we’re always kind of talking about this, and I think about workplaces both good and bad, that I’ve been part of, and those leaders who, you know, I don’t say this lightly, I had two leaders that were psychologically abusive, and I don’t say that with drama or, you know, hyperbole. And I think about knowing what I know now, about studying empathy and about researching leadership and getting older and wiser, is wow. What was going on for that person that they thought that was an appropriate way to react or respond in that moment, and how hurt must they have been, or how insecure must they have been. And you know, what could people do in that kind of situation to help someone through that? If it is a work situation or it is a colleague situation, or whatever it’s, what can we do to kind of center ourselves and separate the emotion that we think we’re feeling from someone else with what is reality of what is going on for them?

Shermin Kruse 23:12

Well, yes, and how much of that reality are they even observing, and how much of that is that is totally decision at that time, because even those of us who study this material, we have caught ourselves behaving impulsively before or automatically right? One of the ways in which I respond to things automatically all the time is I’m still very overcome by loud, sudden sounds. A lot of that is because growing up and the missile attacks, etc, etc. But if I hear something vociferously falling right behind me, I jump right. I jump. And it’s not because I’m afraid, it’s because I’m an alert. I’m in a state of alert. My body has learned loud sound. Be careful. It could be a kid jumping up saying, boo, it is smallest thing, and I would still jump up in an unnatural way, almost because of the way my body responds to whatever trauma it has stored in me. So the other thing to often consider is, look, they might not even have the capacity or ability, or the training or the time to even reflect this could just be habitual. And if it is habitual for them, how much control then do I have? And maybe the answer is, I have a really interesting

Maria Ross 24:34

question for you based on that, yeah, and I go off script a little here, when you’re faced with a leader or a manager or even a colleague like that, that you suspect they’re not even conscious of the impact of their reactions or their behavior. Do you have any advice on where to start, where, how you can appropriately have a conversation with that person depending on the power. Dynamics that would actually be influential in helping them recognize that maybe there’s some work to do without it sounding judgmental or shameful. I know that’s a lot to pack into, like one conversation, but based on your work, what would you advise someone listening that’s going, Oh, wow, I wish I could show that person that what they’re doing is actually harmful, sure.

Shermin Kruse 25:21

So my advice would be and this advice would apply every single time. Start with stoicism. Start with gaining control over yourself, because when they’re behaving in that way, you would be well within your rights to be defensive, to be angry, to be judgmental, to not have control over your own words. If you are able to create space, literally in the seconds of time that pass, and be able to reflect and think cognitively and clearly about the situation, you are far more likely, whatever the answers are, to come up with them in that moment and acknowledge that the answer might be at this time, on this day, given the power dynamics, this might not be in your control. So then that’s to me, you don’t do anything right. You might believe that your commitment to justice or your value system, or whatever your goals are in that moment obligate you to do or say something in a manner that is appropriate and consistent with your way of thinking toward the world. Or you might not, but if you do, you should know what is the likelihood of impact? What is the likelihood I’m going to get fired? And if little Timmy needs his braces or needs his treatments for his medical condition, and I need to keep this job. Maybe I don’t want to risk it. Maybe I do want to risk it, and that is how I show my commitment to this value, but let that be an informed choice and not something you accidentally fell in too, because you just had to say something, yeah, right, yeah. Let it be an informed choice, so that when you make a sacrifice, which you will in life, will you will sacrifice material comfort, you will sacrifice all kinds of wins in order to stand up for your principles, hopefully right, especially leading a life of empathy. So then when you make that choice, you are prepared for the consequences that follow, and it was informed and delivered right now. That doesn’t mean that it was the right thing to do, either you could reevaluate later and say, right, you know, maybe I should have done this differently, or thought about this differently. I learned. I’ll do it differently next time. But the more aware and thoughtful you are, the more strategic you are, the more space you’re able to create between the stimuli and the response, right? That space? That is where your willpower sits. Yeah, that is where your control sits. I had

Maria Ross 28:01

a guest on, and I’ll link to this in the show notes as well. Chris L Johnson and we talked about the power of the pause for leaders. And just that. I mean, it’s something I work on all the time in my you know, 52 years, I’m still working on the like recognizing the physiological symptoms of me losing myself given a certain stimulus, and take a breath, take a pause, and then think about what you want your reaction. And I will say, you know, given our current climate of the world and of our country, that’s been some of the best advice I’ve heard from activists, from people that say, Okay, this is all meant to distract and get us all lathered up. Let’s all take a pause. Let’s take a breath, and then let’s figure out the best way forward, because now we’ll be engaging our cognitive functions, our executive skills, to decide the best way forward. And I just think that’s so important in the micro moments like you’re talking about, and in the macro moments as well,

Shermin Kruse 29:03

absolutely. And I love the example you just provided, which is in the context of activism, just taking a pause, reframing, before we turn to strategizing. And I love what you just said now, which is in the micro moments, in the context of a conversation. I call it the dynamic pause, or the tool of silence, right? Yeah, and all of the various features of this incredible tool, yeah, right, yeah. All that it can earn for you in that moment is absolutely incredible. But one of the things that ends up happening Maria is the more you practice this, and the more aware you are of how you’re acting, and the more intentional you are of how you’re acting, what you’re feeling, how you’re expressing what you’re feeling, etc, the slower time moves for you. Yeah, time is relative. Time could be moving at a consistent pace for someone else, but be moving much slower, like you’re Neo. From the matrix or something. Yeah, the little bullets are coming your way and able to move your body. But seriously, though you’re able to, know slow it down for yourself,

Maria Ross 30:09

you can the more present you are, there’s an expert, Laura, I want to say her name is Laura vanderkamp, and she talks about the power of time, of you actually accounting and keeping a time journal. She’s kept it for years, and it’s kept her sane, and it helps you, number one, remember things more because you’re writing things down, but it also helps slow down time for you to know where your time is going every hour. It’s an amazing practice, but, yeah, it’s this idea of I remember talking to another guest I had on the show who’s also a friend of mine, Renee Mehdi. She’s a mindfulness expert, and she spoke about, I don’t know if she spoke on the podcast interview or just to me personally, but she spoke about going to a silent retreat, and how life changing that was because when her family came to pick her up, she said it felt like I was moving through molasses. I felt like I couldn’t keep up with their conversation. I couldn’t keep up with formulating my thoughts. And it lasted for a few days, I know, and she said it was wild, and that was at the beginning of her mindfulness training journey. And I just thought, wow, what would that be like to just feel like you could actually, literally, like you’re saying the matrix, the great coming at you. Can I also ask you to share you’ve already kind of shared one here, but some other practical tools for building influence and emotional regulation. So one or two of those actionable strategies, it sounds like taking the pause. But is there a strategy you have for getting someone to take the pause in the heat of the moment?

Shermin Kruse 31:47

Okay, so I’m happy to move on and talk about some other tools, but we can also just dissect the pause and the silence there. It’s so in terms of a strategic manner of approaching that really the best way is a reassurance in the knowledge that silence is not submission, pause is not acceptance, that even understanding is not agreement, no, right, no. And because I find so often, I mean, I don’t I was a debater, and then I studied philosophy and psychology, and then I was a lawyer, and I was a litigator, and I was taught to argue for a living. I got paid lots of money to anticipate what people were going to say before they even finished talking so that and having a prepared response ready to go. And there’s a time and a place for that, and there’s a there’s a way that can be utilized. And I’ll tell you that time and place is not most of life.

Maria Ross 32:44

Yeah, it works really well in a courtroom, yeah, the big tournament, yeah. But for

Shermin Kruse 32:50

most of life, if we’re just waiting for our turn to speak and oh, yeah, right, and using all of our mental energy to formulate our next thought, it’s gonna be really hard to force that silence. Yes, we already know what we want to get, what we want to say. Now we’re just waiting around and

Maria Ross 33:10

we’re not listening, and we’re not actually listening to the context of the other well, I talk about this all the time, that empathy does not mean you agree with someone. It just means you’re getting curious about their point of view and their perspective, and you could still walk away saying, I don’t agree with you, but I understand where you’re coming from. I had this with someone years ago in my own life, where we disagreed about a certain political issue, and I was surprised that they had this perspective. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this these days, but then I heard him out and I thought, wow, what you said makes a lot of sense. And I actually understand that point of view. I understand how you would get to agreeing with this. I still don’t agree with it, but man, that I never thought of it that way. Well.

Shermin Kruse 33:55

And Maria, your analysis there, if you go back to your conversation with your FBI guy, if you can’t understand where they’re coming from, how are you going to change it? Yeah, how are you going to reach them? How are you going to connect with them on a level that works within their framework and their logic, right, and their moral values and so so I think step one would be taking that step Okay, step two would be, and this is important, there’s a big difference between a silent retreat and a dynamic pause. A Silent Retreat is nine days of pure listening, okay, even just to your freaking backache, which is what I find most terrifying about it, sitting there and just listen. You can’t even write. You can’t, you know, it’s just listening. A dynamic pause is different. It is in this moment I’m allow. Doing my processing of verbal linguistics to slow down. It doesn’t really even stop all the way to slow down so that I can extract more auditory information from my environment. That then gives me more stimuli than I had before, because now I’m picking up tone, tenor, body language, mood, the birds I couldn’t hear before, the traffic accident across the street, whatever it might be, right? I’m picking up all this additional stimuli that I didn’t have before, which gives me greater armor to form my strategic response going forward. And I’m giving myself a second, not just to regain that additional stimuli, but to gain calm over my thoughts, right? And maybe I’m making the other person a little bit uncomfortable, right, not in a horrible way, but in a I also want them to think very clearly about what it is they’re saying. And if we’re spitting back and forth beyond each other. They are also not thinking about what they’re saying. Yeah, so if I give create that space, they, too are now forced to deal with that silence right after they just said what they said, and they could have an opportunity to re evaluate what they said, right? And maybe they’ll double down, maybe they’ll backtrack, maybe they’ll act like they’re doubling down, but actually

Maria Ross 36:26

backtracking right. And

Shermin Kruse 36:28

maybe through your silence, you could actually decipher that distinction,

Maria Ross 36:32

you know, what you’re making me think of saying this the other alternative that we never talk about. And in all my leadership workshops, my keynotes, I always talk about this about, you know, empathy is not agreeing. It’s being able to listen and hear the other person’s context, and, like you said, getting all those other auditory and nonverbal cues from the environment. But the possibility that we don’t leave ourselves open to is that there could be a reevaluation of our initial stance. So the goal of empathy is not conversion. It’s not coercion. I always say that, however, listening to someone’s context and hearing their point of view could be so compelling to you as to possibly make you rethink your decision or your stance, and we have to not be afraid of that. It doesn’t mean it always happens. And yeah, you know, there’s some conversations specifically I’m thinking of where you don’t want that to happen. But you know, in a budget discussion, in a strategic decision meeting, it’s opening yourself up to the fact that you might hear, if you listen, you might hear a compelling argument that changes your mind, and that’s okay.

Shermin Kruse 37:45

So I would describe that as a form of stoic courage, because it is that is very difficult, and

Maria Ross 37:55

of course, I don’t know how to do it. I just talk about it. I don’t know how to

Shermin Kruse 38:00

do this. You could do it with the budget, right? Maybe you can’t do it vis a vis you know, your deeply held moral beliefs exactly, but there’s a whole world between the budget and your deeply held right universe. And so we could practice at it. But here’s the tricky part, it’s difficult to maintain yourself in a place where you’re constantly refining and reevaluating your understanding of the world without insecurity, with confidence and with a really strong grounding in knowing who you are, right? That’s a difficult balance. A lot of people who we know who go back and forth and back and forth, they were either lying to begin with, or they have no real convictions, or, you know exactly, yeah and so. And then there’s most other people who just don’t go, don’t change their minds at all, which is, can you imagine if five years from today, you’re the same person you were today? You grew not at all? Right?

Maria Ross 39:06

Right? Not good. Yeah, I always say I was like a hot mess in my 20s, and so glad I didn’t get married back then. Yeah, no, it’s, I think it’s true, but I think it’s just something that, like you said, that’s sort of like next level that’s like, you know, Jedi mastery level of being able to have those conversations. And I’m not, let me be clear, listeners, I’m not there yet.

Shermin Kruse 39:28

So we could practice at the budget meeting. We could practice at

Maria Ross 39:31

the budget meeting. I mean, you know, honestly, you know, where I practice is with my kid. Yeah, there’s sometimes that he you know, there’s different boundaries we’ve set and rules we’ve put in place. And when he articulates things in a certain way, and I’m actually listening, I do tell him like that’s a fair point. And sometimes I will go back to my husband and say, maybe we need to rethink this. You know, I mean, sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, but having that can. Connection with someone could potentially, you know, lead to it doesn’t always have to lead to a third outcome. That’s a compromise that no one gets what they want, right? It could lead to something where, just as much as you want to bring someone along with you, again, I’m talking about in like a work situation, they could bring you along with them. They could.

Shermin Kruse 40:21

And one of the things that really helps with that, and I love that you use the example of 10 year old child, is deep inherent trust in good will of that individual right, which is not always present, right? And you know, we must acknowledge that, of course, especially in corporate settings, right? But when you know it’s there. I mean, I say this to my husband all the time when we’re in a conflict situation, just give me the benefit of the doubt here, it’s been 20 years. I mean, you know

Maria Ross 40:55

who I am exactly, well, and that’s why all of this is so interconnected, all of these emotional intelligence skills and this idea of creating trust and creating psychological safety in the workplace, you want to create these relationships where you can have this ebb and flow and it’s safe and it feels like okay, you know, share. I’m not 100% on board with you, but I’m willing to trust you, yes, because you’ve given me some good points to think about, and that’s also the relationship we can build with our managers, so that we can have a back and forth with them, and they can hopefully let go of a little bit of command and control and be listening to our input and our perspective. But also, you know, the other way around of managers for their people, and when you get to know your people, and you work at building that trust that isn’t just transactionally related, right? This is why this work is so important in the workplace, and it just boggles my mind. The leaders, you know, the numbers dwindling, but the percentage of leaders who think that empathy has no place in the workplace, it’s because they don’t understand what empathy actually is. They think it’s something else. They think it’s people pleasing or caving in or coddling. So that’s always my first cue of if you have a leader that says they don’t believe empathy has a place in the workplace, it’s like, Let me have a conversation with them, right? Tell them what you really let’s parse out what they think it means, right? So this is so great share I’d love to just kind of close with maybe a final thought or a gem, or a direction, an intention that you want to give to our listeners as they navigate this balance of understanding how to bring in some stoic empathy into their relationships and into their interactions. I

Shermin Kruse 42:39

love that I would say my closing remark is always what I say to myself first thing in the morning and right before I go to bed at night, which is tomorrow’s another day, and I can do this better every day. And some days I do a really terrible job, and some days, I’ll tell you I’m kicking butt out there, right? Totally either way, tomorrow is another day, and it’s a chance to do it all over again. When we’re talking about emotional regulation, especially emotional control, this idea that I can’t help it is not accurate, at least not entirely accurate, right? There might be some things, and we talked about this earlier, that are trauma rooted, that are habitual responses. But even those, with enough time and enough practice, you can gain control over them. And this is where I suppose the final tool I’ll close on this is that where I discuss is the tool of Memento Mori,

Maria Ross 43:42

which is you will die, right? The

Shermin Kruse 43:47

Greco Roman stoic ideology of you will die, which means you are not dead, which means you are alive, right? And you have another chance, but it won’t last forever. The transience of this life, the transience of everything, and therefore the exponential meaning of it all, because it ends, because if it never ended, it would have no such meaning, right? Right puts on us both the ability to gracefully forgive the mistakes of the day and take them seriously enough to do them a little bit better tomorrow, right? And keep working toward that, and keep working toward that. And so this is what I want. And I tell my kids all the time, I want this combination of grace and forgiveness, empathy for yourself with a dedication to a resilient mindset that is put toward growth. It’s a combination, because if we’re forgiving ourselves way too much, we’re never growing, we’re never pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones, we’re just staying in our little bubbles and saying. It’s okay to be safe and never feel threatened, okay. I mean, if that’s the way you want to live your life, but you can do bigger. You can do better by embracing a little bit outside of that comfort zone. And you have to be willing. You have to have the stoic courage to be willing to open yourself up to that while still having that grace within yourself for the imperfections that come along the way. Oh

Maria Ross 45:27

my gosh, so so good share. I This conversation was worth the wait. I’m so excited, and I’m so honored to share you with my audience, folks. The book is called stoic empathy. Make sure you check it out. I will have all the links in the show notes on how you can get the book and how you can connect with share. But for folks on the go, can you share with us? Where’s the best place to find out more about you and your work?

Shermin Kruse 45:49

100% probably my website, sherminkruse.com, so that’s my full name followed by a.com Easy to find. I am on LinkedIn. I’m not easy to reach on LinkedIn. There’s just way too many people, but I promise I’ll get to you sooner or later on LinkedIn, if you but if you go through my website, you’re more Yeah, you’re more likely to get a quicker response,

Maria Ross 46:11

yeah. For anyone exercising right now, that website is S, H, E, R, M, I, N, K, R, U, S, E, so share. It’s been wonderful to connect with you again, and I’m so glad we’re in each other’s orbits. I love your work. Thank you for your insights today. Thank you for the conversation, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate, review and share it with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Moe Carrick: Redefining Leadership Beyond Gender B.S.

Masculine traits. Feminine traits. Can we please stop gendering leadership skills and focus instead on the human traits that will enable us to thrive?

Today I speak with culture and leadership expert Moe Carrick about gender traits in leadership. We discuss the traditional leadership narratives and the negative impact that has on both men and women in the workplace. We talk about the crisis for men and boys right now and why men are falling behind in all sectors. Moe shares the difference between emotionality and emotional intelligence and how we can help debunk outdated myths of masculinity. And she shares some great stories from past clients and what they were able to achieve as a leadership team in tough times when they embraced emotional intelligence and vulnerability. We dissect the current backlash toward more “masculine” energy in the workplace, which will only hinder our innovation and success, and the role women leaders can play to encourage healthier, more emotionally grounded leadership.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Gender has nothing to do with being a successful leader. While some traits may be considered more masculine or feminine in energy, skills are not gendered – they are all human traits.
There is a difference between emotionality and emotional intelligence. Emotionality is unmetabolized emotional expression. Emotional intelligence is a source of data helping us navigate the emotionality.
Everyone needs to resist their own internal messaging about what good leadership looks like – it is not command and control or blaming and shaming. It is empathy and collaboration.

“If we’re going to encourage male vulnerability and male emotions in the same ways we experience and give women permission to express feelings, we need to be prepared to not jump into fixing and solving what they’re struggling with.” — Moe Carrick

Episode References:

The Empathy Edge: Pam Fox Rollin: How to Grow Your Group Into a Team
The Athena Doctrine By John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio
Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
Richard Reeves: Institute for Men and Boys
Suits

From Our Partner:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

About Moe Carrick, CEO and Culture and Leadership Pioneer

Moe Carrick is a pioneer in workplace culture and leadership, known for her award-winning frameworks that have helped companies like Nike, Reddit, and Amazon improve engagement, reduce burnout, and drive performance. A TEDx speaker and bestselling author, Moe’s work has transformed businesses across industries for over two decades. She specializes in creating environments where people thrive, rooted in her deep expertise in leadership, human connection, and innovative workplace practices.

Connect with Moe:

Moementum, Inc: moementum.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/moecarrick

Instagram: instagram.com/moecarrick

Culture Pulse Check: moementum.com/people-culture-pulse-check

WorkMatters Kit: moementum.kit.com/workmatters

TedX: Rethinking Women’s Role in Defining Masculinity

TedX: Workplaces Fit for Humans

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Moe Carrick 02:56

Thank you, Maria. Thank you so much for having me so you are a trailblazer

Maria Ross 03:00

in workplace culture. You’ve, you know, we heard in your bio, you’ve worked with brands such as Nike and Amazon and Reddit, helping them improve employee engagement. So tell us first before we get dive into our juicy topic today, what brought you to this work? What makes you so passionate about it?

Moe Carrick 03:19

Yeah, I mean, I’m passionate about it because I work, and I’m from the house of work, you know, I started working when I was 14, and I don’t know that I really stopped, even through the birth of three children and divorce and remarriage and cancer and all the things. I really believe that we spend more time at work over the course of a life than we do anywhere else, and we deserve to thrive there. So I think, you know, early on, my work as an internal consultant and external consultant to organizations very much focused on how to help them get results, which still matters, but also it’s my strong belief that we get better results when people are thriving at work, and it’s a win win all the way around. So a lot of my, most of all, well, all of my writing and my talks, my content and my and my work is really focused on how employers and leaders and systems can activate the talents of their people for success so that everybody wins. And you know, ultimately, I’m, you know, personally, interested in reducing job misery, because there’s too much out there, too much.

Maria Ross 04:24

I mean, yeah, that’s, you know, the thing when I began down the path of this work as well, from brand strategy work, but my change management work, even early in my career, it’s we do. We spend the bulk of our time at work. And so when I started in the empathy work, it was, why not make it a place where people can thrive and do their best work? And, you know, we heard, we heard so many attacks for the millennials and Gen Z about how they were trying to change workplace culture. And I was like, This is good for all of us, like they’re just asking for the things that we were too scared to ask for, right? Right?

Moe Carrick 04:57

Well, absolutely. And also, as you know. As a brand strategist. When we get culture right, it illuminates and enhances our brand, because there’s thinner and thinner barriers between our customers, our employees, and our identity as an organization, which is also how we sell, how we deliver against our mission, etc. So it all weaves up in the same direction? Yeah,

Maria Ross 05:21

I always say that culture and brand are two sides of the same coin, and if you really want to be an authentic brand, a believable brand and a sustainable brand, you have to make sure your culture is walking your talk as well. So I love it. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about gender. Because I get asked this always, you know, things like, are women more empathetic than men? You know, am I going to be seen as too feminine if I have as a leader embrace empathy? And I was sharing with you the story of how my first empathy book came to be the empathy edge, which was about empathy as a competitive advantage, and the fact that I had an agent who was interested but wanted me to change the book to be about feminine traits being strategic and competitive. And I said no, because my whole point was I was trying to de gender, the very human trait of empathy, because men are just as responsible for embracing it as women, and it’s a human trait. And when we give ourselves these excuses of saying, Well, this trait and this leadership quality belongs to this gender, and this leadership quality belongs to that gender. That’s where we we kind of give people identity crises, right when we do that. So talk to us a little bit about what is going on in the workplace. When we’re hearing all about we need more masculine energy in the workplace. How do you see the different gender traits playing out in the workplace, and what’s your perspective on how you balance those for a healthy culture? Yeah,

Moe Carrick 06:53

yeah. Such a good question, and there’s so much there. I think for me personally, I’m sensing with things like what you recently heard from Mark Zuckerberg around we need more masculine energy in the workforce. I think that’s actually very consistent with what we’re seeing on a meta, really global political level, which is a hearkening for what was once, for the way that things used to be. And you know, we’re seeing that in every nation, not only here, as we see rise of authoritarianism, whatever your politics are, we’re definitely seeing some leaning towards a harkening back to the way it used to be. And one of the things that I think impacts the work we’re talking about here is that we have historical notions of what good leadership look like that are biased through a gender lens. And I always think about the work. I’m sure you’re familiar with the work of Michael de Antonio and no, yes, and John girzima The Athena doctrine, which was a huge, big study, 100,000 research subjects looking at what are the important traits for leaders in the next 50 years. And then they asked the question, which of these traits do you see as masculine or feminine? And we know that the majority of traits that people saw as critical for success in business and organizations for the next 50 years fell also in the feminine categories of how they were described. So I think we’ve had attribution errors around what good leadership looks like that are based on historically, who were the leaders, right? And the leaders were men. They still are largely men in the C suite. Even though we’ve made advances, we’re still behind, and so we have there’s an enculturation around that now for me, unfortunately, that also means that we’re we have to look at the way that men and women are taught to be emotionally intelligent, and we are taught really different ways to be emotionally intelligent. Jennifer bosom, who’s the University of Florida researcher, talks about how men are given a much more narrow band of emotional expression, absolutely, and they’re really only given permission as little boys here in Western society to express one emotion, which is that of anger, and women are given almost the complete opposite messaging, which is, there’s one emotion we can’t express, which is anger. So when we look at that, it makes sense. Yeah, we have, we have, we have genderized what good leadership looks like, and that right now today, we have sort of almost like a whimsical look back of like, If only it could be clear like it was in the industrial revolution. And I think that’s what we’re getting when we say we need more masculine energy. If we think of masculine energy as things like decisiveness and logic over emotion and hierarchy, then yeah, that there’s some of that that has been attributed to masculine which doesn’t mean only men do that, of course, but it’s masculine energy. And I think it’s like we’re past that now, yeah, and I think we’d be past that now

Maria Ross 09:41

well, and also, you know, I’ve said this before on this show, women don’t always have a lock on it, either, and I, you know, two of my most psychologically abusive bosses, my listeners have heard this a million times were women, and some of my most empathetic bosses were men. So we need to let go of this notion that I get. To what’s the word I’m looking for shirk responsibility for being emotionally connected with my workers because I’m a man now that doesn’t mean I’m equipped, like to your point, if I haven’t been taught how to engage with empathy while still being decisive, being clear, making tough decisions. And, you know, that’s where I talk about my both and leadership all the time, that we don’t have to choose one over the other, which seems to be the false narrative that a lot of men are telling themselves. And also, you know, quite a few women are saying, I can’t be emotionally connected. I can’t be a good listener, because if I am, they’re gonna say I’m weak. So we’ve got to get rid of this notion, because we are whole human beings. And what I love about this is there is a business case to be made. There is data, there is research that shows that when you are an empathetic leader and you are compassionate, you can regulate your emotions. You can make tough decisions with empathy and support people and actively listen and put ego aside and all of those things. There’s a host of benefits that your team and your organization experience, including increased engagement, innovation, retention, loyalty, and then to your point earlier from the external point of view, when you can then carry that empathy through to your customers and your clients. You get higher revenues. You get better customer lifetime value. You get customer evangelists that talk about you because the bar is so low absolutely and they’re treated nicely. So totally. Talk a little bit about because I loved your TED talk, and I’m going to put a link to it about women’s role in redefining masculinity, but I want to talk about it specifically through the lens of work. Let’s talk about why men are falling behind in many sectors, and what has been the fallout of them subscribing to this socialization they’ve been given.

Moe Carrick 11:56

Yeah, the fallout is so enormous, is it? And I mean, and certainly right now, if you look at Richard Reeves and some of the work that’s coming out of the Institute for men and boys, men are not doing well right now. We have the highest opioid addictions, the highest victims and perpetrators of gun violence. We’ve got depression and suicide rampant among men, especially young men and men of retirement age. So like we’re just the community of men has fallen in health and well being as feminism has risen, those two things are not connected to me. You know, it’s I don’t think because women are doing better globally, that that means that men are doing worse. I just think we haven’t really, actually paid attention to what we’re investing in around the well being, and in particular to our the point of our conversation here the emotional capacity of men, because let’s face it, empathy is an emotional intelligence skill. It’s also neuro biologically hard wired in us to experience empathy. So young children experience all the same emotions and have the same skills innately that they’re born with as human beings. But what happens is that they become trained out of us, right? And I have an example I’ll share. Like I was in a session last week with a client a small group, and they were all leaders, and a man was describing something painful, which was the level of stress he’s been under in their environment recently, which has really reduced his mental health and his well being, and he was very tender around expressing it. Had some tears in his eyes, but as he was talking, a woman colleague of his began to outright weep, like I could see the tears rolling down her cheek, but then over time, like she was really emotionally impacted, and I asked her if she wanted to say more about what was going on for her, and what she said was, I just really feel with him. I’m really feeling with him. And what was fascinating to me was that it was actually easier for the group to handle the intensity of her feelings than it was his. Yeah, because his expressing this tenderness made everybody uncomfortable. Next thing we knew, everybody’s trying to help her feel better. And I thought, let’s just interrupt this for a minute. Let’s just hold biologically. What’s happening to her is biological. She’s feeling his anguish. She’s connecting it to her own experience of anguish, and she’s letting it show in a vulnerable way that’s we all have that hard wiring. But what’s happened is that we’ve given men a lot of messaging that they couldn’t, that they shouldn’t, and that they can’t actually act on their emotional states of being in a way that builds connection, which leaves them horribly alone and isolated. So this plays out at work over and over and over again around the mixed messaging. We hear it from women all the time. I know you’ve talked about this with women on your show, where women are given negative attribution for the same characteristics that men are lauded for. So Right? Are, you know, assertive are get labeled the B word, right? The same thing. Happens to men? Do you remember many, many years ago when Barack Obama was elected the second time he there was a video that was taken by a staffer in his office of him coming to his team and sharing his gratitude for their help in getting him reelected, and he shed a tear, one like one tear like the man was not weeping. He was just saying, you know, like, think he was

Maria Ross 15:24

having emotions.

Moe Carrick 15:26

He was having a human being. Yeah, right. Very appropriate emotion to the context, which had been a hard fought one. You know, as politics are moved by it. He was moved by it, and to his team in the room and to many who watched it, it created more confidence in him as a leader, more connection of his capacity to do the hardest job in the land. But there were people who took that video as weak, who chastised him as saying, This is not what a leader does when really to do anything but show up the way he did, would have been to miss the moment and be tone deaf, yeah, magnitude of what was happening with his team. So that’s the kind of messaging that has messed us up. I think Maria Yeah, around our natural ways of connecting, yeah,

Maria Ross 16:12

well. And I think that, you know, as a mother of a young son as well, and trying to help him with emotional intelligence and being able to express himself. You know as adults, I think we know enough now that when we do see men acting contrary to their emotions, they almost it’s almost less leaderly Because it reminds us of a toddler who can’t regulate their emotions. And by regulate, I don’t mean stifling it. Yes, you just can’t navigate your own emotions. If you are moved or you are upset and you shed a tear that’s showing a healthy adult emotional reaction, and if you have a leader who says that’s not appropriate in that moment, I would question decision making and the emotional maturity of that leader. And I’m hoping that more of us, as we start to get to exposed and we start to unpack emotional intelligence, will have that reaction, that negative reaction, to a leader who doesn’t own their emotions and regulate their emotions. Now that said, You know what I often do when I’m doing workshops and trainings, is also help people feel comfortable that when we’re talking about empathy at work, it doesn’t mean Everyone’s crying on the floor with each other, because I think that’s the other extreme they go to, right? So tell us some examples of clients you’ve worked with, or teams you’ve worked with, and what delta Did you see? What shift Did you see with some of the male leaders of finally understanding that point, and then what were the results on the team? Yeah, as a result of them finally being willing to reject those old narratives, yeah, and start to actually equip themselves to get in touch with their emotions.

Moe Carrick 17:56

Totally, yeah. I’ve got two examples that I’ll name that are, I think, particularly potent. And let me also offer a little bit of language around the dynamic you’ve been discussing, which is that I really love to differentiate with clients between emotional intelligence and emotionality. Well, emotionality is unmetabolized emotional expression. So you were talking about your son. I also am the mother of three, and I remember when my kids were little, when they felt something intense, they would lay down on the floor and wave their arms and kick and scream and get ready to face that. Why one child in particular, it was very sensitive child, it would be very it was quite intense. Yes. Now 32 Uh huh, and he does not when he has an issue at work, lay down on the floor, kick and scream and cry that is not what he does now, at the same time, he has learned through the school of hard knocks how to express what he needs and what he wants, which allows him to tap into those same feelings. He doesn’t feel anything different than what he felt at age three. He’s just learned how to take care of himself, to metabolize that emotionality and use that emotional intelligence as a source of data to say, Hey, boss, I’m frustrated. I’m worried that we’re not going to succeed with this, etc. So that’s really what emotional intelligence is all about. Is how do we navigate our landscape of emotionality, metabolize those emotions, which happens in our bodies, and then use our cognition to use them as probably one of the most powerful sources of data in the link, I

Maria Ross 19:25

love that, and I love that you talked about it as a source of data, because that’s the other thing I try to tell leaders is think of empathy as a method of information gathering and trying to just understand someone’s context and get information about it. So

Moe Carrick 19:37

I love it, yeah, and convey to them that what they’re feeling is also valid and real. So let me give you these two examples. I worked with a client. This was years ago. This was the energy sector CEO of a company. It was when solar was just starting to really grow, and they had the company had been acquired. They’d gone through some school of hard knocks. They were at about 800 employees. And they had to do a layoff, and the CEO was, of course, the one that would deliver the news to the workforce that was being retained, which is, of course, one of the hardest things a CEO does right is, how do I tell the people that are still here who have survivors guilt, that their friends and colleagues have had to be let go? So he, I was coaching, he and the executive team, and he did a practice run. I suggested he do a practice run to his team group of other C suite leaders, and he prepared his talk, and he gave it to them the day before he was going to talk to all employees. And I was so proud of one of it was his CFO, who, after he gave his talk, which was full of a lot of data, had a lot of compelling market information about why the layoffs were. Very logical, yeah, very logical. And it had a little bit of, like, I would call it hype up, that was a little bit tone deaf around, like, we’re gonna be fine, you know, we’re yeah through this together, yeah? But he gave his practice, and it was really, you know, he was working hard, and he was an articulate, intelligent leader that had actually quite a bit of respect in the workforce. But the CFO at the talk, said, You know,

21:03

I wonder

Moe Carrick 21:03

what you’re actually feeling. And the CEO said, I’m devastated. He said, I’m devastated, I’m sad. I’m in grief. I feel like a failure. Some of my friends now have to look for jobs to support their young families, and this is really hard for me emotionally, is what he said. And he again, he wasn’t in a he wasn’t histrionic, right? Like needing therapy, sharing what was happening for him. So the CFO then said, I think it’d be powerful, Greg, if you could bring a little bit of that

21:38

into your talk.

Moe Carrick 21:42

So they talked about it, and he reworked the talk. I coached him a bit. The next day, he gave the message to the employees, and in it he said those almost exact words, I’m devastated, and I feel like a failure. This is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my career. And he looked his words matched his affect, right, which was sort of sad, not hysterical, but also grounded. And this gets to the paradox that I love, that you’re naming of end, both because he appeared real, but he also appeared leader, like right, which was he said. And here’s the decisions my team and I have had to make and have made. Here’s the going forward plan. Here’s what I think we all can do to process the loss and to support our colleagues who whose jobs couldn’t be maintained. And so they his team, I think, saw him as both a real human, yeah, with feelings, feeling what they were feeling right, also having hope, which is one of the most important currencies in a time like that, and of course, that we’re living through right now. Yeah, of saying, and I can imagine a foreseeable future where we will be in stronger financial footing, and we can hire back the team, you know? And I think so, I think that’s a really good example of somebody who really pivoted, based on some feedback to create a more compelling, strategic message that helped the workforce stay really engaged and connected.

Maria Ross 23:13

Okay, so that story just encapsulated my entire most recent book, because it’s, it hits on kind of all the five pillars of being both an empathetic and an effective leader. And I just want to unpack that for a little bit, because number one, it was, it was self awareness, to understand his own emotions and name them yes, and to be present in the conversation. I call that being confidently vulnerable, right? Yep, he was. He didn’t fall apart as he was being vulnerable. Self Care was obviously around, you know, being able to make sure his capacity was full when he delivered this talk, and could do it from a place that wasn’t full of defensiveness and fear clarity, which was, I’ve prepared. I know what questions they might have. I want to give them as much information as to what is happening next, decisiveness being, you know, transparently communicating why the decisions were made, so that people understood, even if they didn’t agree, they could understand. And maybe not the joy piece as much, but a little bit of the joy piece in terms of the hope. So I love all of that. And I just want to point out, as I always do on the show, just because he was feeling those things and just because it was a hard decision, empathy doesn’t look like changing your mind. So, you know, some people think, well, if I’m being empathetic, I just don’t do the layoffs. No, you still have to make the decision, but the way you do it to your point the way that it’s done with compassion. I was a recipient of an empathetic leader who had to do layoffs of a team right in my past, and that’s why he’s still a mentor of mine to this day. So I love that example, and what I love the most about that example was how it happened in that group, where there. Was safety for another man to communicate. We want to hear how you feel. Yeah, so I want to pick that a little bit. How did they as a team get to the point where they had enough safety and they had enough self awareness among each other that you had another man pointing out, maybe you want to bring more feeling into this to another man, like, what happened before? Like, what was the behind the scenes of how they even

Moe Carrick 25:28

got to that point? Right? So the behind the scenes was that I was called in, as I often am, at the point at which a CEO has assembled their team of experts. They’re usually in a scaling mode, and they find that these thoroughbreds cannot work together. That was why I was initially called in. And so we had done a series of Team advances, which are team retreats, basically, but I prefer the word advance if we’re going to use military, militaristic terminology, to really create the essential ingredient for high team performance, which is vulnerability based trust. Trust that’s based on the knowledge that we have each other’s back, even when we’re imperfect, and that we are interdependent. You know, I think oftentimes executive teams, because they’re all running their own function, whether they’re 10,000 employees or 100 employees, they have their own function, and so they tend to think of their team as their downline, but their team ought to be their colleagues at this, at their leadership level, in my opinion, because that’s the group that they can really be themselves in. That’s where they can garner support, that’s where they can stay and do the hardest things, and where they cross functionally have to come together on behalf of one organizational mission. So we had done a lot of work on self awareness, on emotional intelligence, on Team agreements, which included talking to each other, not about each other, describing emotions as a valuable source of data, deep listening and curiosity. And so those behaviors were present in that team which facilitate the conditions where, by the CFO, who wasn’t, you know, just a super hardwired touchy feely guy, yeah, he knew enough to be like, That talk’s gonna fall flat, yeah, yeah. And he knew that partly because he had delivered similar talks and I did not go well. So he was like, I really want to help my colleague here has a better impact than we know some things now we’ve got some tools and some skills now that are about how we have committed to be as a culture.

Maria Ross 27:29

I love that, because that kind of speaks to this idea I have just within a leader and their own team building, like a code of conduct, a code of like, here’s how we work, beyond the job description and often, to your point, often the executive team gets left out of any sort of team building, team bonding, team dynamics. They just sort of assemble these top performers at this level and expect them all to work together well. And I love your phrase about there are a bunch of thoroughbreds and they

Moe Carrick 27:59

and thoroughbreds. If you ever see I’m a horse person on the racetrack, when they’re near each other, they’re horrible. Yeah, they’re horrible because all they want to do is run. So we’ve got to find a way to help these high performing individual leaders move away from what they’ve been trained, which is rugged individualism, interdependent, shared problem solving, rather than heroic problems. Right now, let me give you a second example, because it might be an interesting one, and it’s not. It doesn’t involve an act of a man, but it involves an act of movement away from historical notions of what leadership looks like. So this was an example in healthcare situation where a nurse leader, a senior nurse leader, was working with her, with she was working a couple levels down because there had been some problems in one acute care area, and it was actually somebody had a nurse that was on duty that day had actually sent a patient home with the wrong prescription. Not a good thing to do, and realized their mistake and came up because there was an absence of the right leadership level for her to go to Shin going right to this CNO and said, I’m panicked. I just sent someone off of this, you know, prescription. And the CNO had been working with me as a coach around emotional intelligence as well, because her challenge was what is true, I think for many of us, in terms of outdated notions of what good leadership looks like, was to be a problem solver who unconsciously cut off her team’s engagement and accountability at the knees, so she was literally dying on the vine. She was so burned out and her team was checked out because they didn’t really do anything serious, because they knew she would take care of it, she would ride in on her white horse and fix everything, which they resented, but it also made their jobs a lot easier, right? So when this nurse came to her in a panic, she had had this coaching, she had some self awareness, and she stopped herself from doing what she later told me she. Desperately wanted to do, which was to pick up the phone and fix the whole thing. She was like, I want to call the pharmacy. I want to call the patient. I want to make sure that this and so she but she didn’t. She knew enough to be like that is not going to help me lead in this situation. So she asked this nurse really important question, where do you want to go? First of all, she said, that sounds really hard. Yeah. She acknowledged the feelings, the feelings that made medication mistake. It happens, and it sounds really hard. I can see that you’re really anxious about this. So empathy first. Then she said, Where would you like to go from here? Or something like, what happens next? And this nurse had it all figured out. She said, Well, my next move was going to be to call the pharmacy, or to call the patient on their cell. Then I was going to call the pharmacy and make sure that that prescription is no longer the system. The CNO was like, great. That sounds awesome. When do you think that needs to happen? She’s like, right away, the nurse leader, then the CNO said she was a little anxious, because she she knew it had to be done, like, within the next few minutes, right? So her problem solving got the best of her, and she said, Do you want me to call? Uh huh? And the nurse lady said, no, no, this is mine to do. What would you mind if I called from here? Nice. And what was so powerful is that this new nurse who had to make this call and apologize and say, I’m so sorry, sent you home with the wrong dosage or prescription, and I’ve remedied it, and here’s what’s happening. She got to do that while being born witness to her boss, who was nodding and listening and saying, Good job. Yeah, that nurse is not going to make that mistake again. Yeah, she was held with care and compassion, and the messaging she got from her boss’s boss’s boss was good job. Yes, mistakes happen. Good job for the CNO, the learning was also palpable, because she got this meta messaging of like, oh, actually, it’s so much easier when I don’t have to be the only one with the answers. Yeah, right, I’m less tired. I didn’t have to make five extra phone calls. My employee Did it, and now I’m very confident that she’s not going to make that mistake happen again. Yeah, win, win, win. And that wasn’t her being more of a woman, that was her resisting her own internalized messaging about what good leadership looks like. Well,

Maria Ross 32:15

that could be done by a man or a woman. This is my point. You know, it’s we don’t need it to be over aggressive. We don’t need it to be shame and blame. Because if we can just take a pause and remember, what is the goal here? The goal here is not just to keep the patient safe and keep the hospital out of a lawsuit. The goal is also to grow our teams as leaders, absolutely. So how do we accomplish? All of that command and control is not going to help accomplishment. Blaming and shaming is not going to help accomplish. It. It’s empathy, it’s collaboration. It’s that self regulation, that self awareness. That’s that first step of being able to show that empathy in a productive way and practice that empathy in a productive way. So what a great example. And I just really quickly wanted to just go back to the point we were making earlier about executive teams often not taking care of themselves as a team the way you would if you were just like the head of marketing, and you had a marketing team or the head of engineering. And I am going to link back in the show notes to an interview I had with Pam Fox rollin about how executive teams can work on their own team building, and why those that shouldn’t be left out of the equation. So I just, I wanted to mention that because I wrote down her name as you were talking.

Moe Carrick 33:33

Sometimes the way I think about that, Maria, I will listen to that episode. I haven’t heard it, but I sometimes say it this way, and you know, the bad stuff flows down. Yeah. So if you’re not working in vulnerability based stress, able to tell you the truth and hold accountability as peers at the senior level, how can you possibly expect that the teams below you will do that? They won’t, because they’re copying and indexing you, right?

Maria Ross 33:57

You’re modeling so I wanted to ask a follow up question on, really, both of these examples, and we’re talking a lot about, you know, we’re talking about, well, I have two follow up questions. One is, how can male leaders, male identifying leaders that are listening? Where can they start on increasing their capacity for emotional intelligence? And then I have a follow up question related to your TEDx talk, which is, what role can women leaders in the workplace play in helping them? Because, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. So yes, it’s definitely for men to work on that skill and work on that capacity for themselves, but there’s also a role we can play as women in the workplace, in leadership roles to foster that adoption. So let’s, let’s dive into the first one. How would you advise, I know, you know, in a pithy tip, it’s really hard, but where’s kind of a first step you would say, would be good for a man who’s like, I know I need help with this. And I don’t know where to start. I think

Moe Carrick 35:01

my first recommendation, I have two that are probably equal. The first one would be to begin talking about your own emotional experiences with other men. I think that’s one of the fastest places to start, because men, supporting men is critical to finding the way that works for men to do that so that can include things like, how do you handle this hard situation? Or, you know, it can be at home, my wife’s really angry at me for watching the game all weekend. Do you ever get that like, how do you I feel frustrated, but also I want to be supportive for her. Like, begin talking with your friends and your colleagues at work about your emotional experiences. Now, many men when I say that, of course, they look at me like I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know what I’m feeling to which I say, all right, start with the body. Begin noticing in positive or negative attribution, emotions, so joy, sadness, loss, exuberance. Notice what’s happening inside your body. Heart’s racing, your palms are sweating, and then begin to try to connect, asking yourself the question, what might I be feeling? We often use the feelings wheel. Some of you, I’m happy to share that in the show notes. I think that Dr Brene Brown’s book, The Alice of the heart is a great place to start, oh, yeah, begin to study and name and understand. What are the emotions? How do I put words to those physical sensations? I think that’s really important to do so talking with other men about that, beginning to normalize, that the second thing I think men can do is to begin leveraging other media that they consume, so movies, television shows, books, podcasts, and notice when their emotions get activated, and again, try to name what might be going on with me. Feel better now that that movie is over that I did when I started. Why? Why made me cry? Why I’m

Maria Ross 36:59

laughing? Because that was one of the tips in my empathy edge book around strengthening your empathy as a leader, was to explore with your imagination, and it was my license for people to binge on Netflix right and practice in a safe place of what am I feeling right now, and also practicing the what might that person be feeling right now,

Moe Carrick 37:20

totally, yeah, one of my favorite characters around indexing there is Harvey in suits. No, his, you know, his partner, the redhead, whose name I can’t remember, is

Maria Ross 37:33

always Donna. Donna, I’m in the middle of binging it right now. Donna

Moe Carrick 37:37

is always taking care of Harvey’s emotions, and as the show progresses, she gets better at standing on the balcony and allowing him in particular, I’m struck with that show. You might not have gotten to this part yet, but where he begins to heal his relationship with his mother. I haven’t gotten to that part yet. No, and, okay, it’s a beautiful scene where Donna says, this is yours to do, basically, yeah, this is yours to do. Well,

Maria Ross 38:01

that’s a great segue to the second question I asked. Part two of that is, what can women leaders do in the workplace to help men foster that capacity and build that capacity? Because again, it makes our lives easier as women leaders if we’re working alongside male leaders who have higher emotional intelligence. So it’s in our best interest to help each other. So what can we do and what should we not do? Yeah, I think one

Moe Carrick 38:28

thing we can do, of course, make sure we are becoming as emotionally intelligent and resilient as we can be, because we’re not. We don’t have a lock on it, as we don’t know and we’re, you know, we have our own stories of behaviors that limit our capacity. I’ll speak for myself. For example, I do not love being vulnerable. It’s not fun. I don’t like to cry. I don’t like to tell people I need help. So that’s an ongoing journey for me around like, how do I actually let people in my life see me the way I really am, and that’s because of how I was enculturated? So whatever your work is as a woman, I think do that. I think in addition, something that we can do as women is to hold space for men’s feelings without judgment, and also to notice our own attachment to how they’re feeling. And I’ll give you an example. So I’m the mother of grown children now. My youngest is 23 is 23 My oldest is 32 my stepson is 37 and I can remember feeling as a young mother, and I still feel this. Sometimes today, I feel anxiety if they are not doing as well as I think they should,

Maria Ross 39:35

right. Welcome to my world, exactly, exactly. My son’s 10 and a half. And yeah, welcome to Marriage. Just at the beginning. Welcome just at the beginning. Oh, my god, yeah. Well, I have several

Moe Carrick 39:46

of my children have had struggled with substance use disorder, with depression and anxiety, and so one of the things that I’ve had to learn, and I think we learn as women, is how to bear witness, whether it’s, you know, die. Agnostic, or it’s just having a bad day or struggling with a big feeling to bear witness to men’s experience, and boys experiences of that without having our anxiety force them to do a certain thing, and way we do that is with things like when boys are little and they get hurt in a game, we say, brush it off because we’re uncomfortable. Don’t cry because we’re like, I have my kids. You know, he was being Ferdinand in the ball, and he got hit in the head. Like we have our own difficulty. We also, I think, in primary relationships, particularly, I think for people who look like you and I, Maria, as white women, we have learned about this is probably a bigger topic that we can open today, but I’ll just say it anyway. We’ve learned about adjacency to power as part of how we get power. So noticing if a man, if we’re working with someone and he’s feeling anxiety, let’s say about something, we may have empathy for him, but we may also feel like, Come on, dude, get get with it. Get it together. Yeah, we need you to be strong right now, when that puts an expectation on his strength to manage my anxiety, what I’d rather have women do is be like, actually, I’m anxious too. Or what can I do to be in empathy for what he’s experiencing, knowing that he will get strong again, rarely anxious. Yeah, I don’t need him to be the strong one. Dr Brene Brown has this wonderful story. She tells I was certified in her work for many years, dare to lead, and she’s told the story one time about a man who waited in line to sign books, one of her books, and his he was at the end of hundreds of people, and he came up to her and he said, Thank you so much. Dr Brown for your books. My wife and daughter came through the line earlier, and I just have one question for you. And she said, yeah, absolutely. What does he said, Well, I wonder if you could do more research with men. And she’s like, Well, I do research with men. What do you mean? And she and he said, Well, my my wife and my daughter, they’re all about wanting me to be vulnerable, wanting me to show what I really feel right up until the point where I fall off my white horse, then they that much, uh huh. So I think there’s something really powerful there around if we’re going to encourage male vulnerability and male emotions in the same ways we experience and give women permission to express feelings, we need to be prepared to not have to jump into fixing and solving what they’re struggling with.

Maria Ross 42:28

My goodness well, and your example with the nurse leader reminded me of that, of not jumping into fix, as women are conditioned to do, even with our male counterpart, our CO leaders, and letting them deal with the repercussions of their emotional intelligence or lack of emotional intelligence, in a healthy way, like, not in a way that’s going to, like, blow up the team, or blow up the quarter or anything like that, but that we don’t have to be the ones to fix it. We don’t have to be the ones to smooth over a conflict that they have with someone else.

Moe Carrick 43:03

Totally, absolutely. We don’t have to run in between run interference, and I think sometimes we do that by just holding our own curiosity, you know. So let’s say, let’s say I’m working with a colleague, and he says, and he’s really behaved badly in a meeting, and I’m degriffing with him afterwards, and I say, Hey John, you know what’s going on? He says, I’m just pissed. Then instead of being like daunted or intimidated or whatever, feelings come up for me when someone’s angry, what would happen if I said, Man, that sounds tough. What else? Right? Because I know that anger is a secondary emotion, so I’m curious, what else is going on for him, right? What’s the root cause? Yeah, absolutely. Let me stand in that fire with him, right, and then be looking at it and maybe even saying words like that. Sounds really interesting. I look forward to hearing how you work that through, right? No where. I’m not going to take it from him, because he’s uncomfortable because, again, as white women especially, I think we’re we are hardwired to support, yeah, I can remember when my boys were little. One my middle son, he had a really hard time expressing his feelings, and I wanted to put the words in his mouth, yep. Are you sad? Are you mad? Are you this? Are you that? So I ended up because I didn’t want to do that. I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I put a bunch of emotions in. We were just laughing about this. Oh, yeah, emotions on slips of paper, and I put them in a jar, and I said, just pull out the slips until you find the one that you think fits right. And he has benefited. Both of my sons have benefited greatly from working with other men in men’s groups. Just put a plug in there

Maria Ross 44:30

as well. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, finding those groups and finding those trusted those trusted people to talk to, because I feel like women have those groups. We have those social circles of other women that we go to and we talk to, and we gossip with, and we share with, and all those things. And I there’s not a lot of men that I see have that same level. They might go out for beers with other guys, but what are they really talking about? Right? Well,

Moe Carrick 44:56

right? I don’t feel like we’ve been as permission giving, and I think it’ll be. Is one of the wonderful things about feminism that I know has benefited me, which is gathering other women. I’m in a women’s incubator. I I have been in book groups. I’ve been in quilting groups. I ride my horses with my gal friends like those are all communities of women who support me in my own growth. And I think we could do a lot more to facilitate men having those kinds of connective conversations

Maria Ross 45:22

well, and I might just add one thing that might make us take a hard left on this, but hopefully not really. You know, recently, this past year, I don’t even know how many months of ago it was, you know, there was this meme going around about, you know, as a woman, if you were alone in the forest, would you rather run into another, a man or bear? Remember that whole trope that was going around, and most women said the bear, right? And I got it, obviously, as a woman, I understand that, and the way it got really it got so much play, it got so much air time. And I remember my young son seeing those messages, and I didn’t like that he was seeing those messages, because then he got some sort of an assumption that he was inherently bad. And again, I tried to thread the needle of yes, there are men that do prey on women, that take advantage of women, but when we start to lump them all together and say, just because you are a man. A, you are expected to act a certain way, as we’ve been talking about, but B, you are also a danger to me simply because of virtue of being a man. That message to our young boys, I think, if it’s not tempered and it’s not explained, is really dangerous. And I felt like I was in the minority trying to express that as a woman, that I was sort of, you know, I was going against my sisters by saying that. But for those of us who are raising men and boys, we also have to remember that if we’re giving them a narrative that this is who they are, then that’s who they’re going to be. And it holds true whether you know you cannot cry, you cannot have emotions, if we keep telling them that message, that’s who they’re going to be, if we keep telling them that you are dangerous, you are a threat, you are an aggressor, that’s who they’re going to be. That’s right. So I you know this is not to say that women don’t have their right to their feelings around how they feel about men or or the threats they feel from men. But we also have to remember that we are creating those narratives that young boys and men are hearing our future leaders absolutely

Moe Carrick 47:34

and I would say, I would add, Maria, thank you for that wisdom. I would add that it’s not even necessarily only that they will become more like the bear, for example, they will what we’re seeing play out actually is what they will become. Is not that they will become victims of predators on the internet. They will become lonely, isolated, depressed and kill themselves. They will become addicts. They will become people who can’t get jobs and can’t love their partners, they will become beaters, so So and they will become, usually, what we’re seeing, of course, with the rise of the loneliness epidemic, they’ll become really unhappy, sad people. And you know, as I say in my TED Talk, like wherever we go, we go together, whether we are heterosexual or gay, whether we’re trans or cis, we are in community with people who identify as men. We I think our society at large, especially perhaps right now, we have such big examples of a few very bad and very rich men that are not reflective of the experience of the majority of men who are good humans trying to be in community with us, at work and at home. And so I think we have to be really cautious not to over index and like you. I don’t, you know, I don’t disagree that women are vulnerable in some cases, but we also mean to remember that the majority of the people we work with and that we live with are just like us, to connect, seeking to feel seen and to do the right thing in partnership.

Maria Ross 49:14

I love that, and I just, you know, as we wrap up, I’m just going to add that, you know, and that’s where all my men listening, you know, embrace your empathy and your compassion as a strength, not a weakness, and know that it doesn’t have to go completely to the other side of the pendulum, where you are, you know, an emotional mess. To your point about the difference between emotional intelligence and emotionality that you can show your emotions, it will actually benefit you as a leader. It will benefit your team. It will benefit your engagement, your productivity, your output, if you are able to be your whole human self at work. And I just want to encourage men listening to recognize that, and hopefully, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are that kind of man and. That kind of a leader. So yes,

Moe Carrick 50:01

and I would add, and when you do so, you help the world change the messaging away from that those incredibly powerful behaviors are weak, but that, in fact, they are a single and unifying source of strength.

Maria Ross 50:18

Put a pin in it. I love it. Moe, thank you so much for your insights today. What a great conversation. Thank you for having me talking I know exactly so we will have all your links in the show notes. I’ll also put all the links to different things we referenced through our talk today in the show notes. But for folks that are on the go, maybe listening on their treadmill or on their peloton. Where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your work? Thank

Moe Carrick 50:44

you so much for asking. I think the best place would be to find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. If you’re listening and I’m always sharing our resources, our newsletter, our tips and tools for people via that medium. You can certainly go the website too, but LinkedIn is probably the best way to be in community. I

Maria Ross 51:00

love it. And as I always say, if you connect with Moe on LinkedIn, make sure you write a personalized note that says that you heard her on this show. Otherwise she’s going to think you’re trying to sell her something. So

Moe Carrick 51:13

thanks again. Moe, thank you, Maria, so great to talk with you. And

Maria Ross 51:17

thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review and share with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Courage to Advance: From HR Leader to Job Seeker: Mastering Authentic Career Transition with Karen Hague

Welcome to Courage to Advance, hosted by Kim Bohr and brought to you by SparkEffect, in partnership with The Empathy Edge.

Tune in to our subseries every 3rd Thursday, right here on The Empathy Edge! Or check us out at www.CourageToAdvancePodcast.com.

What happens when the HR executive who once handled outplacement for others suddenly finds herself on the receiving end? In a candid role-reversal conversation, Kim Bohr sits down with Karen Hague, a former Head of HR who experienced executive outplacement firsthand and transformed that challenge into an opportunity by becoming a career coach for executives facing similar transitions. Together, they explore how leaders can navigate career disruption with grace, purpose, and strategic vision.

This candid conversation reveals how outplacement—often viewed as an ending—can become a powerful catalyst for professional growth and personal transformation. Karen shares vulnerable insights from both sides of the table: implementing outplacement as an HR leader and experiencing it personally.

Discover practical strategies for building authentic professional relationships, leveraging your network effectively, and aligning your next career move with your core values. Learn why creating a structured approach to career transitions can transform uncertainty into opportunity

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

How to overcome the shame and vulnerability that often accompanies executive transitions
The critical importance of authenticity when crafting your transition story
Why values alignment should drive your next career decision
Practical networking strategies that build genuine two-way relationships
How organizations can approach outplacement with empathy and strategic wisdom

“When you show up as your authentic, transparent, vulnerable self, you’re at your best. And it took me a while to realize what was my best, but I can’t fake it. When I don’t show up that way, it’s not a good situation for anybody.” — Karen Hague

About Karen Hague: Karen is an experienced HR leader and executive coach based in the San Francisco Bay Area. With over 30 years in human resources, her career spans roles across all HR disciplines, culminating as Head of HR for a company that transitioned from private equity ownership to public status during her tenure.

Karen’s unique perspective comes from experiencing both sides of executive transitions—implementing outplacement strategies as an HR leader and navigating her own career pivot. Today, she channels this experience into coaching executives through career transitions, helping them discover authentic paths forward aligned with their values and strengths.

About SparkEffect:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

Connect with Karen Hague:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenhague/

Connect with Kim Bohr and SparkEffect

SparkEffect: sparkeffect.com

Courage to Advance recording and resources:

sparkeffect.com/courage-to-advance-podcast

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sparkeffect

LinkedIn for Kim Bohr: linkedin.com/in/kimbohr

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Kim Bohr 01:20

what if the most defining moment of your leadership journey isn’t when you’re in the position of power making decisions, but rather when you’re handed the decision you never wanted your own outplacement. Welcome everyone. I’m Kim Bohr, president and COO of Spark effect and host of the courage to advance podcast. Today’s guests live this story from both sides of the table and discover that career upheaval isn’t the end of leadership, but often is the most profound beginning. Karen egg has over 30 years of experience in business, human resource management and executive leadership across a variety of industries. Her career journey has brought her to maybe her most impactful role now as a career coach who specializes in working with leaders in transition, whether leaving a company or promoting from within, for those leaders that are impacted by layoffs, her own journey provides a level of empathy and understanding that helps leaders regain confidence and the ability to see what’s possible. Welcome Karen, to the courage to advance podcast. I am so happy you’re here with us today.

Karen Hague 02:25

Thanks, Kim. I’m thrilled to be here. So let’s start by

Kim Bohr 02:29

giving our listeners a little bit of just kind of high level about your journey. And then we I’ve got so many great questions for you that I hope will really benefit those listening today. So please start by telling everybody how you’ve gotten to this place.

Karen Hague 02:42

Okay, so I started my career actually in line business positions, management positions in a Midwest retail organization, department store, and worked my way into the buying office. So spend some time in the buying office as well, and then convince someone to give me a shot in human resources. And since then, for the last oh gosh, 30 years, I’ve had a career in all of the different areas of human resources. And my last role was head of HR for a company that was private equity health, and then went public while I was there. So had some really great experiences throughout my life. And now on this next act I have the opportunity to coach, as well as do a little bit of HR consulting. Very exciting. I love that. So let’s dive right in. So you know, you and I have been talking about this a bit. You many executives really build their identity around the professional role, yeah, and part of why you’re here today is to really talk about some of the challenges that come up in that journey. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit about what was your most vulnerable moment during your career transition, and what specific act of courage did it take to move through the fear rather than being paralyzed by it? Great question, and yes, so identified by the work that we do and the work that we love to do. I think my most vulnerable moment was, well, I’ve sat in the job seeker seat twice, and I’ve sat in the client seat several times as well. I think from the job seekers side, it was realizing that I really didn’t want to be in the corporate HR world any longer. I wanted to do the things that I love to do. I also was really honest with myself and realized I’m not great at everything in human resources, and that was okay, and it was very empowering and made me able to take a risk and feel bold in being vulnerable and realizing I wanted to really focus in the areas that I felt I was really good at, and that gave me a lot of confidence to be able to take that leap.

Kim Bohr 04:51

And just to clarify a little bit further, that was really because of downsizing that needed to take place in your organization. Really being forced to have to make a transition yourself in a way that perhaps wasn’t as expected, correct? Definitely,

Karen Hague 05:07

I think there were also, in looking back, things that, again, I was really good at, but not everything. And it gave me the opportunity to look at that and say that’s okay, because this is really where I want to focus my time and energy anyway. And I don’t know that I would have done that as much having not had the experience of going through a reduction in force, a downsizing, an outplacement opportunity that really made me helped me to realize that,

Kim Bohr 05:40

and it’s so important that we’re talking about this now, there’s a lot of uncertainty in our economy as we record this. There’s a lot of just every day, we’re seeing layoffs through the government. We’re seeing layoffs through, you know, private industry. So you know, when you think about you back at that you could have at the time when you were, you know, maybe even first impacted, how did your identity as a leader shift during your transition from head h head of HR into experiencing outplacement yourself?

Karen Hague 06:07

I think in several ways. I think the first one was realizing that it was okay to be vulnerable, that there wasn’t shame attached to being part of a reduction in force, and that you could grab that as an opportunity. I know, I know opportunity doesn’t always come to mind when you think about being part of a reduction in force, but if you shift your mindset looking at it as an opportunity, and you take that opportunity to really revisit your values and think about who it is that you want to be and what it is that you want to be doing in that moment. Think I also realized that empathy, authenticity, transparency, are absolutely fine in a leadership role. And for me, when I show up as my authentic, transparent, vulnerable self, I’m at my best, and it took me a while to realize what was my best, but I can’t fake it, and if I don’t show up that way, it’s not a good situation for anybody. So I think those were my biggest learnings as a leader, experiencing that you mentioned

Kim Bohr 07:16

the word shame. And I think that’s something that I’d like to just talk a little bit more about, I think that’s something that it is such a natural emotion that people can feel. And sometimes we feel that when things are completely out of our control, we don’t have we really weren’t, we didn’t do anything. From a performance standpoint, this is truly, you know, economic pressure. And so, you know, can you talk a little bit more about that feeling, not only that you experienced, but how you where that shows up with others as well, and some of the work you do now?

Karen Hague 07:48

So probably the biggest place that shows up is when I talk to leaders about what we call their transition statement, how you went from one position to another. And you answer that question, why did you leave your last job, especially if it wasn’t necessarily your choice to leave that last job. And I bring in that authenticity, that vulnerability, that transparency, that suggests to people it’s your choice, but suggests to people to be your authentic, honest self. And I tell you what. The first time I told that story, it kind of got caught in my throat, and I was like, Oh my gosh, am I going to be this transparent and authentic? And I tell you what, it gave me the biggest boost of confidence, and again, helped me be more bold and take some risks. I’ll never know for sure, but I don’t think I ever had a challenge in finding my next role by telling my own authentic, very real, transparent story. It’s up to everyone, but I really encourage my clients to do that. So

Kim Bohr 08:47

when you know when you were

Karen Hague 08:51

going through the experience yourself, was that what was the most challenging part? Was it trying to get to this place of being honest with yourself. Was it navigating that you know, any sense of guilt or shame yourself, or talk a little bit more about you know that as well? I think it was all of those things Kim. It was definitely setting aside the shame and getting comfortable with telling my story in a way that was authentic to me. But it was also realizing that it was okay to ask for help. I had been that person all my life that was helping others, you know, in my personal life and my professional life, certainly as a head of HR and all through my HR career, and to realize that I needed to ask some people for help was the first step. And then the second step was realizing what I was asking for, what I was I asking people to help me with. And when I came to that realization, and I came up with the things that I was asking for help with, I realized how vast my network was and how much. Much people want to help you. You just need to sometimes help them know how to help you in those situations, because people want to help they just don’t always know how that. I

Kim Bohr 10:09

think that’s such a great point. And I think in such our busy time, how quickly things are moving, and then with uncertainty, it can be de prioritized for a lot of us. I think so. If you could go back and you really tell yourself on the day you receive the news, you know, just your best words of wisdom, what would that be? I think

Karen Hague 10:31

it would be, everything’s going to be okay. And just take a pause, take a breath and have a plan. I’m a huge planner. Anybody who knows me is going to laugh their head off at that. I’m a really big when they hear that I’m I need a plan. And when you are a person that likes a plan, being a job search isn’t the time to turn that off and think you’re going to throw caution to the wind, then be willy nilly. It’s the time to really invigorate that side of you. Work with a coach if you have a company that has given you the opportunity. But also think of your plan, but be willing to tweak it as you go and as you learn new things, what works, what doesn’t work, so everything’s going to be okay, confidence. And really also take a look at who do you want to be in this next chapter of your life. You have an opportunity to change some things up, show up a little bit differently, really hone in on the things that you’re really good at, and that’s all values work that you could do on your own or you can do with another partner or coach, and really determine what are your values that you really want to make sure you find in your next company or in your next app. So

Kim Bohr 11:45

one of the things that I think would be great for us to expand on a little bit more for listeners, is when we talk about the type of coaching, not only that you do, but you receive that was so pivotal in this transition for yourself, talk a little bit about the difference between the career coaching aspect and other types of coaching that people may be familiar with, such as executive coaching, of which you really at Spark effect we have both that we bring forward and yet there’s a really important difference. They’re not typically the same types of coaches. So can you talk a little bit about that? I think

Karen Hague 12:19

first and foremost, they both start out knowing that the client, the participant, the person that you’re sitting across from, controls the agenda, and really meeting that person where they’re at that’s not different in either executive or leadership coaching or career transition coaching. It’s all about getting to know your client, getting to know the person that’s sitting across from you, and where are they in this moment, and what do they need? And I’ve had some clients that we’ve spent five sessions in the kind of grief and processing what happened and moving through that what we talked about earlier on, which was shame. But then I think where the difference is is career transition coaching is a little bit more, it brings in a little bit more advisory work for those of us who’ve been here, and the great tools that we have available to us through spark effect, to give some structure to that search, give a roadmap to that search, we can still jump around within that roadmap based on what the client needs are. But is networking your biggest challenge? Let’s jump into that. Is interviewing your biggest challenge. Let’s jump into that and really develop your questions as well as what the questions are that you think this company recruiter or hiring manager is going to ask you. That doesn’t necessarily, of course, happen in leadership or executive coaching. So I think that’s probably where the biggest difference is. Is there a real, tried and true tools that we have available to offer to a client, to use based on where they sit and what their biggest needs are, meeting them where they’re at,

Kim Bohr 13:56

that’s really important and helpful. That’s really, really helpful. So given our, you know, our the the name of our podcast is courage to advance. You know, what is courage to advance mean to you now that you’ve been you through this transition, you know, out the other side now doing this work to help others navigate it. What is what does that

Karen Hague 14:17

mean? Courage to advance was first off taking the opportunity to to move into a coaching and consulting role and getting my certification and doing all the things that I needed to do to set up my business, and then really believing that people would come to me for This expertise and utilize my services. So it was really being bold and making a career choice in that moment, maybe a little earlier than I planned, but the timing was right to take that opportunity. So taking a risk, being a little bit bold and trying something new. Because of that values, work that I had done, that I mentioned in the last question of knowing this is the right time, this is where I want to be, and this is what I want to do. And again, back to our one of our first questions, knowing myself, showing up as my authentic, transparent self, is always important to me, I just didn’t know it early on. I think that’s so important for everybody, and sometimes that’s really scary for people too, to be to feel so vulnerable and transparent when these really just life changing moments are occurring. But yeah, let me add just one other thing that that really was eye opening for me. I’ve always had a good network. You’re talking to somebody who has best friends from kindergarten. So networking has always been an important part of my life, but I didn’t always realize it as a network, and I didn’t realize how powerful my network was until I went to it for some help with my job searches, and then when I went to it, when I started my own, my own business, and the amount of support when I asked for it was, it was, it just blew me away. And everybody has that, and it’s never too late to start cultivating that network, because it will absolutely get you through whatever this channel. Next challenge is, when you turn to your network,

Kim Bohr 16:30

is such an important point, and the fact that people inherently want to be helpful, and sometimes they just help because you don’t maybe know how to ask exactly for what you need, or it’s just you’re afraid to ask, and I want to spend some time on that in our conversation, before we get there. Were there any blind spots that you know you discovered about executive transition that weren’t maybe as visible, that you know for sometimes, I think people, the reason I think that’s an interesting view to have from you is that sometimes I think people don’t know what the real benefits are of engaging in this type of support when it’s available. And I’d be curious if there was maybe some preconceived notions that you had, or blind spots in that way,

Karen Hague 17:16

I think, as a participant, I thought I knew exactly what I needed to do, and I didn’t. I knew how to do it from a hiring manager or certainly an HR perspective, but I didn’t know how to do that from a job seeker perspective. So that was probably the first thing. And then I think I go back to that asking for support when you need it, and getting into that vulnerable place where you say, I need support from my network or from my coach or from a micro session or a podcast or whatever it is. And that, again, the confidence that that gave me and the ability to be a little bit more bold and take a risk was something that was learning definitely for me. And then I Yeah, go ahead. No, no, please. I was just going to say from the other side of the desk, from the HR leader side of the desk. It was really realizing that an organization that that you partner with for career transition, career transition services for people who are leaving your organization through a reduction in force, any kind of a layoff, is that organization and coaches can help in ways that you as an HR leader, can no longer help in. It’s just a different approach when someone is there to support that person that you have just laid off, and the ability to have that support for them. You know, coaches aren’t therapists, but it’s very much a mental health support in that scenario, that as an HR leader or as a hiring a manager or any kind of an executive, you just can’t offer that person any longer, in addition to all of the tools that I talked about. So the practical support, but boy, that empathetic, really heartfelt support that you can get from an organization that’s in this space is really, really beneficial. So

Kim Bohr 19:20

it’s, it’s a bit of that what we all crave is to be seen and heard, and in the most, deepest, darkest moments of our our lives, having that type of resource can be really critical. Yeah, for sure, absolutely. I want to switch and talk a little bit about some of the organizational impacts that we see. I think you know, you obviously know firsthand we experience people who have a range of emotion when they come, and sometimes that emotion is coming from how it was handled, how the separation was handled in the. The organization itself, right, and how that really just kind of carries through with them as well. So I’m curious that you know, when you think about some of that different levels of emotion, and based on your experience of having been on both sides, you know what? What are the outplacement practices that truly make a difference for executives and organizational health to really get it right.

Karen Hague 20:22

I’d say a couple of different things. One from the career transition side, is that ability to again, meet the person where they’re at and tailor the engagement with that person to the needs of that individual. And you know, if I’ve got eight different clients that I’m working with, it’s eight different approaches for what that person needs in that moment. I think it’s also that roadmap that I mentioned of having the ability got a roadmap that starts here and ends here. And the thought is, you work through that entire, entire roadmap to get to the success on the other side of it. But if we need to move around within that mode roadmap, we can absolutely do that. It is. It’s the ability to, again, I keep saying this, but meet that individual where they’re at and fulfill those needs. Not a linear process that a linear, absolutely great point. It’s that model of change, and you could be chugging along through it, and something happens to put you back at the beginning of that process, and we’re going to go back to the beginning of that process again. I think, from a company perspective, it’s the ability to have someone leave your organization knowing that you did everything that you could, to take to take care of them, to help them, give them a landing, give them some support in moving on. They might not feel that right in that moment, but people talk, and they are going to talk about the support that you gave them, and it’s important for the people who are left behind to know that you did everything that you could in that moment. It doesn’t make it any less tough, but it does make it a little bit more manageable to know that this person is going to be able to move on to something. I think Kim, I can almost always say people move on to something bigger and better with that support.

Kim Bohr 22:13

That’s fantastic. So having been ahead of HR, sitting in the position where these difficult decisions you’ve had to face and make what do you feel many organizations just get fundamentally wrong about the approach to outplacement, and perhaps, what could they do to improve it?

Karen Hague 22:32

From your experience, I’d say a couple of things. I think, first off, the value that companies miss or forget or don’t realize in out placement, and that the money that they pay for that is so valuable, one to the individual that’s been affected you’ve just turned their life upside down. Oftentimes, people are blindsided by that, so that support that you give them that they can meet with a coach the next day or the next week or the next month, whenever it works out for them. Is so important to I mentioned their their health, their well being, and their ability to have a support system and to have a road map to know it’s going to be okay and they’re going to land. And I think from the company standpoint, it’s knowing that someone is going to be empathetic and understanding and experienced in this work to be able to help them get to the other side in a successful way that shows them that there is an opportunity there.

Kim Bohr 23:35

So to expand on that just a little bit further right, organizations have the fiduciary responsibilities when you know the perception of hey, when we’re making, you know, cuts for you know, economic reasons, or whatever the investment reasons, sometimes it may not intuitively make sense to maybe a CFO or or others around well, why are we going to pay for individuals? Because I think that’s an important piece. When services are offered to individuals, from an organization’s perspective, the individuals aren’t paying, but the organization is the one sponsoring it. So you know, what do you feel like? How can organizations reconcile that of this investment that you know, and and the organization and the brand and everything like that.

Karen Hague 24:21

I think it’s investment and brand, those two things that you said, and I’d also add the empathy that you want to have towards your employees. These are your alumni. These are people, as I mentioned, they’re going to be talking about their experience with your organization, so your brand is absolutely wrapped up in that and the ability to have that person talk in a positive light about their experience with the organization, I think, is really important. I think we also, as career transition coaches, are very cognizant of the fact that their company paid for this, and we do reiterate that in our conversations that it’s it’s not their expense. It’s a. Companies, and that helps them take advantage of it, probably even more. So it’s a tough decision to make that choice in light of the fiduciary responsibility, but I think having experienced it on both sides of the fence, I can talk to the fact that it really is worth that investment in those individuals who are moving on. We’ve all heard the horror stories. We don’t need to bring them up here, but we’ve all heard of those stories how companies handle transitions, and it doesn’t have to be that way. There can be empathy and transparency and honesty in the process, and that definitely transfers into the career transition work, absolutely. Do you feel like

Kim Bohr 25:44

the organizations when that when it’s when it’s not such a when it’s a terrible experience? Would you say that that’s often rooted in the culture of the organization? Do you feel like there’s correlation there that translates to just that disconnect.

Karen Hague 26:01

I think it’s a lot of different things, complex and simple. I think probably first and foremost, it does go back to the culture of the leadership in that organization, to be empathetic, to be transparent, to be honest, and not to be afraid of what’s going to come from that, but to be caring for that individual that you were affecting their life, absolutely, I think, you know, one of the things we we haven’t talked about yet, I want to just touch on briefly before we we move into some of the areas that individuals can really look to, to prepare themselves and do immediately is really thinking about those who are not impacted, who are left behind, in a sense, and some of that consideration for organizations. Is there anything you can share about the cons, what you took into account when you were in the head of HR role recognizing that you also have this population that is, you know, continues to stay there, and what does that do for them? I think sometimes we forget that organizations forget that there are survivors or people who are left behind by those who’ve exited, sometimes their manager, sometimes a colleague who has become their best friend, and it’s really hard sometimes for them. So the care and feeding of your organization, of people who remain that you want to be great, productive, happy citizens in your company, is really important too, your team members and that, that empathy, that transparency, that honesty, transfers to them too. Town Halls, where people have the opportunity to talk about it, and leaders who are willing to answer tough questions. When these scenarios or situations happen immediately, not days or weeks, but immediately after, whatever the event is, not having it trickle through, you know, multiple days. I mean, there’s just some really simple but complex things that you need to think about and plan for, for the people who are who are still with your organization, as much as you plan for the conversation where someone is going to exit, or as much as you plan for who is going to exit, every single piece of that equation is so important and deserves equal attention. And I would also say, working with a group of transition coaches, a career transition company, ahead of that, we can provide some of that guidance, because we’ve seen it happen really well, and we’ve seen it happen really poorly, and the difference is very impactful to the individual as well as to the organization well. And it matters to the brand impact. It matters to the engagement. It matters to the involuntary turnover that could come after, or to the voluntary turnover that could come afterwards, with people not feeling like that things were handled well. I think it’s it has a very significant ripple effect that organizations need to be accounting for. And it’s beyond just the simple dollars and cents of the immediate, you know, the immediate situation in front of them. So if somebody’s trying to sit and think about what their values are, what might be a question, you’d say, Hey, start by answering maybe not just as simply as, what are my values, but what are some of the questions you might suggest people just reflect on as a good place to start. It’s a great question, values work can be done by saying, by list, saying, Here’s my values. I think sometimes then you end up with aspirational values, which is fine. Values can be aspirational. I like to do values work by telling stories, and I start with, tell me about it. Time when you worked in a position or on a team, when you were at your very best, and and just tell me the story. And then I jot down the words that I hear that lead to values. And then I might go to another one of saying. Tell me the time where it was really challenging for you. Could be your personal life or your professional life, life. Tell me that story, and I again do the work to write down those words. And then after 234, stories, whatever that is, I go back to the person with the list of words. And at that point, it’s probably 20 or 30 words that are values. And then I let them sit with those for a while and really think about the words and what hits them the most, what lands with them the most, and what’s the most impactful to them. And then we mean again, and we narrow that list down. I think that’s the best way to get it values, because it’s what I hear and what I read back to them through their stories. That’s Oh my

Kim Bohr 31:01

goodness, that’s such a fantastic approach. I haven’t thought of that in that way of, of letting yourself just talk and letting somebody else do some of that filtering through because of the intonation and in the way we think about how we’ve taught the story and the and, you know, even the the body, and like how our how our body shifts and our, you know, our features change as we start to talk about something that has excited us, and where

Karen Hague 31:31

do you light up? Where? Yeah, where do you not light up? And those are the things absolutely that I’m looking for, and the number of times that I’ve sent the values list, or I’ve typed it into a to a chat and had a person really think about it, the number of times they’ve said, Oh my gosh, I didn’t. I never thought about that. Of course, that’s one of my values. Is really, is really fun and really exciting work to do and really impactful for the individual. I think they always walk away with a better idea and understanding of what their values are, and then we work to okay. But what does this mean for you when you are looking for your next role? How do you ask questions of a company that help you, you know, dig into that organization and the culture of that organization to determine if this is going to be the best place for you based on those values. So I want such great work. It’s such great

Kim Bohr 32:27

work. It really is. And so what I want to do is, let’s close out by bringing forward some of these, you know, practical nuggets that people can embrace right now. So for those who perhaps are not impacted, I would guess that maybe there’s, but somebody’s probably knows somebody who has been at this stage. So for themselves, like, let’s talk a little bit about what people could do proactively in the way. And you know, one of the things you’ve talked about is the importance of network, and I think that’s where maybe we should start. So what would you advise people to do, no matter how busy they feel life is to really what can they do to address that opportunity with their network?

Karen Hague 33:05

When you asked the question, I was thinking of three things, networking, networking, networking, to be proactive, no matter what you want to do, no matter if you’re thinking about a career change that you’re going to initiate, or you’re thinking about a career change that may come through no no fault of your own, and you’re just caught up in whatever the challenges of the organization are. It’s never too late to start. I’ve talked to so many leaders who come to their first meeting with I have no network. I have no network. Not true. Everyone has a network. Some are bigger than others, certainly, but a network can be six people. You really have to take the time to think about who that is, list it out, take an Excel or Word document and list out who your network is, why you know them. Who are they, what’s their contact info, and how can they help you? But the other thing is, how can you help them? Networking is a two way street. We all know those people that show up in our email box or in a text saying, I need your help. Happy to help them, but they’re those people that come to you only when they need help. What can you also give to your network and before you need it is the right time to do that. I saw an article and I thought of you, I know the last time we talked, this was a challenge you were dealing with. Here’s something that really helped me send a link, something really simple and easy that takes you, I don’t know, what does that take three minutes to go pull a link and send it to someone. The feeling that you have is an individual who gets that from a former colleague, a boss, a former boss, a friend for years, is so good. So be that person that brings that joy to someone. When you look at your phone and say, Oh, Karen had got in touch with me today. I’m really excited to hear from her. So it’s never too late to do that. Kim, I agree,

Kim Bohr 34:53

and I think let’s stay on that topic a little bit more. So we talk about everybody knows LinkedIn, and I want to dive into that in just a moment. But also your community. So whether, you know, if you have kids in school and there’s events around that, there’s community there. In faith based organizations, there’s community. And so I think sometimes people think, Well, my network feels small because we put a barrier between our professional and our personal lives. And I think one of the big opportunities for people is to shift around this, it all flows together in different ways, and your communities, inclusive of all those type of outlets that you touch,

Karen Hague 35:27

yeah, absolutely. Just like most of us are saying, there’s no more work and personal, everything is blended together. I’d say the same thing about your network. Your network can be personal connections that you’ve known forever, or you’ve known for a day. It can be business associates that maybe you’ve never worked with but you’ve interacted with on somewhat of a on a professional level, it can be colleagues. It can be former team members that have reported to you. It can be bosses that you’ve reported to. It is all of those things. That’s why I say start with a blank sheet and write down everyone you know when you’re brainstorming your network, just like brainstorming a business problem, there’s no judgment. Just put down everybody you know. Don’t judge it, and then go back later and prioritize it, because not all networking connections are equal, but all of them are good and all of them are relevant. And it may take you a while to get to the sixth one or the 36th one, but start with those ones that are, you know, more of a priority based on whatever it is that you need in the moment. Do you have a business problem that you’re trying to solve? Go out to your network, right? You have a business problem that you have solved, that you know somebody else is struggling with? Give it to your network. Yeah. And then if you find yourself in the situation, when you find yourself ready to make your next move, your network is there for you. It’s there

Kim Bohr 36:49

for you. And I think it’s, I love how you said that, that it’s there’s so many ways that we can be tapping into that in a so we just have to think a little bit more broadly. And it goes both ways. And I think one of the things that we often, just maybe sometimes human nature, is we don’t assume either somebody is going to have interest in what we do, or that they have, that they have any relevancy into what we do. And I think that’s such a erroneous determination, because really, you never know who knows who. And that’s, you know, being open to what’s possible and what you can give is really important. So I want to talk a little bit about the LinkedIn and a little bit more tactically there, because I think one of the it’s the predominant tool, right? So most people are on LinkedIn. I recognize that maybe not everybody is based on, sometimes even their own, the type of profession they’re in, but by far, most are. And one of the things that I love what you were saying around it doesn’t even have to be through LinkedIn, but an article that you see, or a podcast that you heard, or something that maybe just feels relevant to touch base with. I also in back in the November, December time frame, we we did a gratitude campaign. We’ve been doing this for about the last five years, and one of the things that we really encourage people to do this year was to proactively send a little note to people on things and give them their, you know, a recommendation or a shout out in ways that there’s perhaps really unexpected. As we wrap up, is there a particular way you advise the leaders, you work with the executives. You’ve you support around how to make that two way ask in the most effective way to your point, not necessarily asking for a job, but even asking for a coffee or conversation or anything like that. Is there some tips about that that you would really recommend

Karen Hague 38:40

for people? Yeah, great question. I think the first one I would say, is just start somewhere. Once you get one under your belt, the next one’s going to be easier, and the third one and the 10th one are going to be even easier. So start somewhere. Start with the people that you know, because that’s easiest. But I will also tell you, surprisingly, sometimes it’s the people you don’t know that are the most willing to help you. Sometimes those close connections will disappoint you. You can’t try to figure it out. You just kind of need to move on from it. But don’t be afraid to ask someone that you don’t know as well to get a resume in front of someone or hey, you work for a company that’s a target of mine. Do you have 20 minutes to meet and talk to me about what it’s like to work at that organization? Most people will have 15 to 20 minutes to give you. So it starts somewhere. It’s never too late, and provide a way that someone can help you. People want to help they just don’t always know how. So if you’re asking, example, if you’re asking for an introduction to a hiring manager or a person at a company that you would like to talk to, give them a paragraph about you that they can just copy and paste into their own email and send us someone make it easy and make an ask, and know what your ask is from this individual. That’s why. When you’re coming up with your networking sheet, you’re listing for yourself how this person can help you, because then you can go to that person with an ask that’s very specific.

Kim Bohr 40:09

And I think the other to cap that off, it’s so important for people then to also say, and how can I help you? What can I do to help you? Is there anything I can do at this stage

Karen Hague 40:21

as well. Yeah, yes, it’s critical to be able to say, How can I help? Well,

Kim Bohr 40:27

Karen, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your experience, your expertise, your tips that you are putting implementing on a daily basis for all of these people that are impacted, and hopefully our listeners can take away some of this from a place of of direction and confidence, and organizations can think about this a little bit better. And for our listeners, we have free resources. They’re very relevant to the conversation today that you can download by visiting courage to advance podcast.com and which will that will that will take you to our spark defect, Spark effect podcast page. You’ll be able to see some other previous recordings as well. Again, I want to thank Karen for sharing your journey and your insights. Thank you for the empathy edge, for hosting our podcast sub series, and to its listeners for tuning into this episode of courage to advance where transformation Leadership isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about having the courage to find them

Maria Ross 41:27

for more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slicemaria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

April Hot Take: What’s Next for Empathy and Inclusion in the Workplace?

Here are some reflections and key takeaways from a recent webinar I co-hosted with my brilliant colleague and friend, Minette Norman. It was called “What’s Next: “What’s Next: The Future of Empathy and Inclusion in the Workplace.”

MInette is the co-author of The Psychological Safety Handbook and author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader. And together, we had things to say!

The goal of the session was simple but powerful: to create community during tough times and talk honestly about where we’re at, what’s challenging us, and where we go from here when it comes to empathy and inclusion at work.

Let me tell you—the conversation was real, and it was energizing!

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Even with the current resistance to DEI, there is still a strong business case for it. DEI initiatives are proven to drive innovation, performance, and revenue.
Sometimes, rebranding DEI work as “belonging” or “inclusion” can help get buy-in.
Asking “What are we missing?” can unlock better outcomes, reduce risk, and help teams innovate.

“In these tough times, community matters. Empathy and inclusion are not trends—they’re leadership imperatives.” — Maria Ross

Episode References:

Share your opinion! Please fill out the short survey here at https://bit.ly/edge-feedback

Minette Norman: https://www.minettenorman.com

The Psychological Safety Handbook: https://thepsychologicalsafetyplaybook.com/

The Boldly Inclusive Leader: https://www.minettenorman.com/boldlyinclusiveleader

Medium: The Great DEI Hustle: White Americans Are the Real DEI Hires by Dr. Lauren Tucker

From Our Partner:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for everyone. It’s Maria Ross here, and welcome to another solo episode of the empathy edge. Today, I want to share some reflections and key takeaways from a recent webinar I co hosted with my brilliant colleague and friend, Minette Norman. It was called What’s Next, the future of empathy and inclusion in the workplace. Minette is the co author of the psychological safety handbook and author of The boldly inclusive leader. And together, we had things to say. The goal of the session was simple but powerful, to create community through tough times and talk honestly about where we’re at, what’s challenging us, and where we go from here when it comes to empathy and inclusion. At work, we invited some brilliant HR dei and culture leaders to the conversation, and let me tell you, it was real and it was energizing. So first of all, let’s talk about facing challenges in dei work. One thing that came up repeatedly was how emotionally draining dei work can be right now on, all of these professionals, a participant, shared that many of us are feeling low motivation in this current climate, and I know that feeling is widespread. There’s resistance fatigue, and in some places, a sense of fear about even using terms like diversity or equity. But here’s the thing, community is the antidote. We need to lean into these conversations with like minded individuals, find our support systems and remember we’re not in this work alone. Secondly, the business case is still strong. I shared some insights from a recent conversation that I had with fund advisors. Some companies aren’t ditching dei per se. They’re just rebranding it or quietly still committing to the initiatives that help make their business stronger to avoid regulatory scrutiny. That may sound disheartening, but it means the business case for inclusion still holds. Dei initiatives are proven to drive innovation, performance and revenue. Minette reminded us that many of the reactions we’re seeing are knee jerk. They won’t last forever, and we need to stay the course. And we briefly touched on data showing how white people have gained substantially from dei initiatives too. One article by Dr Lauren Tucker in medium really broke this down in an insightful way with references, and I’ll share it in the show notes she writes. And let’s not forget workplace culture improvements. Many of the workplace benefits we now take for granted, flexible work policies, paid parental leave, mental health support were fought for under the banner of dei but guess who benefits from these the most? That’s right, white men in high paying jobs. End quote. We also talked about the fact that empathy is connection, not conversion. Now, you know, I always say that empathy isn’t about being soft. It’s not about agreeing with everyone or being overly emotional. It’s about connection, valuing diverse perspectives, and understanding where others are coming from, so we can make better decisions. Empathy in leadership boosts engagement, retention and innovation, and it’s a skill you can cultivate. In fact, it’s one of the most important skills of inclusive leadership. Okay, then we tackled dealing with unempathetic people, because, of course, not everyone we work with is empathetic. One attendee raised an important point about the emotional toll of interacting with those who lack empathy. I emphasize the importance of self awareness and self care. Here. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Minette had a wonderful perspective. She calls these individuals empathy teachers. They’re not easy to deal with, but they help us grow our own empathy muscle. I can certainly attest to that listening for what we’re missing. I shared a fun story about using an empathy toy with teams, which underscored the power of. Diverse thinking. I actually had a conversation with the founder and the creator of the empathy toy on a past empathy edge podcast, and I’ll share the link in the show notes. Minette and I both agree, asking, What are we missing? Can unlock better outcomes, reduce risk and help teams innovate and being comfortable enough and willing enough to listen to the answer to that question requires empathy. Finally, we talked about some practical tools for inclusion. We wrapped up by discussing inclusive meetings, making sure everyone’s voice is heard now practically, sometimes rebranding dei work as belonging or inclusion can help get buy in. And in this discussion, we also shared some tools and resources for leaders to run more empathetic and inclusive meetings. My closing thoughts on all of this is that in these tough times, community matters, empathy and inclusion are not trends. They’re leadership imperatives. Manette and I are committed to helping you lead the way with practical tools, inspiring stories and the support you need. Most importantly, please remember you are not alone. We’re in this together, and there is power in numbers. It’s how every major cultural shift has been achieved and protected together. Now for those of you who couldn’t make this talk, please make sure you’re signed up for my email list at Red slice.com so do you don’t miss these invitations and opportunities. I will be doing more of these as the year goes on. So make sure you’re on that list and you can be included. Thanks for listening today. Please don’t forget to fill out my short listener survey as soon as possible. Go to bit.ly/edge-feedback, the link is also in the show notes. Like I said, it’s just five minutes of your time, but it’s so important to help me give you more of what you want and need. Thank you for listening to another episode of the empathy edge. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please share, rate, review and let other people know about the show, and please remember until next time that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Misha Safran: Joy + Empathy + Inclusion = A Winning Team

When you think of workplace wellness, you may picture gym memberships and yoga mats. But joy, empathy, and inclusion also create a healthy and high-performing workplace culture! We need to reimagine what wellness means!

Today, Misha Safran, shares how empathy intersects with inclusion to foster innovation and equity. We also discuss how to reframe the misconceptions about empathy that exist in high-pressure workplaces. With brilliant mindset shifts and practical tips, she shares how leaders can model empathy without feeling performative, and how to navigate conflict using empathy and emotional intelligence. Misha shares the four elements of joy and why you can be more successful when you embrace them so your team can break free from chaos and transform that energy into creativity, problem-solving, and success.

To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

Empathy is love, care, and concern – not agreement. It’s having conversations, it’s listening to know what’s going on, and it’s having healthy boundaries.
Empathy before accusation.
Empathy might look different depending on personality – it doesn’t have to mean being touchy-feely or crying on the floor with your employees.
Especially in conflict, urgency causes chaos – slow down, take a pause, take a breath, and respond, don’t react. Slow down to build up.

“Ask questions for the person in front of you to grow, not for you to know.” — Misha Safran

From Our Partner:

Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.

About Misha Safran, Founder, Center for Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

Misha Safran, an engaging keynote speaker and author, holds a Professional Coaching Certification (PCC) from the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She is the founder of CEEQ, the Center for Empathy and Emotional Intelligence, LLC, and in 2022 was honored with the CEO Award from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for her impactful work on a DEIA training team.

With infectious positivity, intuitive insights, and deep empathy, Misha creates safe spaces for individuals and teams to navigate discomfort while building essential skills. Her unique ability to support organizations in transforming conflict into connection, collaboration, and currency inspires communities to thrive, celebrate achievements, and foster renewed enthusiasm for collective work.

Misha’s passion lies in empowering people to reset their mindset, unlocking renewed energy, improved problem-solving, heightened creativity, and more thoughtful communication. She has dedicated her career to cultivating inclusive, sustainable relationships and fostering environments where everyone can succeed.

Connect with Misha:

CEEQ: ceeq.org

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/misha-safran

Facebook: facebook.com/CEEQempathy

Instagram: instagram.com/mishasafran

Workplace Wellness Program: Laughter to Joy Wellness Experience for Connection, Collaboration, and Sustainable Success – Schedule a consultation: misha@ceeq.org

Book: A Teacher’s Companion: Centering Empathy & Emotional Well-Being for Yourself and Your Students and bonus package for schools!

Connect with Maria:

Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books

Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Maria, welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. When you think of workplace wellness, you may picture gym memberships and yoga mats, but joy, empathy and inclusion also create a healthy and high performing workplace culture. We need to reimagine what wellness means. My guest today, Misha Safran shares how empathy intersects with inclusion to foster innovation and equity. We also discuss how to reframe the misconceptions about empathy that exist in high pressure workplaces with brilliant mindset shifts and practical tips. She shares how leaders can model empathy without feeling performative or forced, and how to navigate conflict using empathy and emotional intelligence. Misha shares the four elements of joy and why you can be more successful when you embrace them, so your team can break free from the urgency that causes chaos and instead transform that energy into creativity, problem solving and success. Misha is an engaging keynote speaker and the founder of CEE Q, the Center for empathy and emotional intelligence. In 2022 she was honored with the CEO award from the National Institute of Health for her impactful work on a Deia training team with infectious positivity, intuitive insights and deep empathy. Misha creates safe spaces for individuals and teams to navigate discomfort while building essential skills. She’s also a musician and is fiercely committed to inclusion and showing how it enhances your team and business. Grab a beverage and listen up. You may even want to take notes, because Misha shares so many mindset shifting gems that will make you a better leader and a human being. Take a listen. Big. Welcome Misha Safran to the empathy edge podcast. This has been a while in the making, and I’m so glad we were able to connect and have your wonderful, beautiful soul on the podcast today. Thank

Misha Safran 02:47

you. I am delighted, and I’m sometimes it may have to marinate things for them to be really, really good. So here we are, finally together,

Maria Ross 02:55

exactly. And I should tell folks, you know, we know each other through a wonderful group of empathy practitioners, I guess you can call us empathy activists, empathy advocates, called the empathy Super Friends, and we’re a variety a collection of people that speak and teach and write about empathy from various perspectives. So we heard a little bit about you in the intro and the bio, but tell us about your particular work and how you got into this work. What’s your story?

Misha Safran 03:27

Thank you for asking. It is interesting to be able to share how I got into this, because I want to make it very clear to people that I’m not a victim, I’m a volunteer in my life, and I’m very resilient, and it’s a lot of forced resilience, but empathy came to me because I have had experiences where there was no empathy in the medical system. I had to advocate for myself over and over and over again that while you are the physician and you have a degree, I am Misha, and I know my body when I got pulled over by a law enforcement officer because of a sign that was only there one week that wanted to force a ticket down my throat. There was no empathy that, you know, I’ve been driving this road for 25 years, when I was in the car accident and the doctors were saying, you should be better. I know like but I’m not. So I found that, and also, as an educator, really wanting to support my families and trying not to give referrals to my students to only to find out that when I did, a student got expelled because it was his last chance. So I I’ve come through empathy in a lot of different ways and reasons, but mostly because I do believe

Maria Ross 04:37

we need more of it in the world. I love that, and I do want to quickly mention to people that not only are you a speaker and a coach and you know, a thought leader, but you’re also a singer and songwriter, and I know that you help express empathy and foster empathy and inclusion through your songwriting. So just like a little bit of a tangent, how does that make? Carry with your work on teaching and training, on empathy. Yeah, thank you.

Misha Safran 05:04

So actually, I got really excited. I got goosebumps when you started talking about that, because I we were going to talk about that. I have a release party coming for a professional my very first professionally produced song. It’s called, Are you willing? And what I’ve done, actually, in the last month or two, I’ve actually been doing presentations with my music, I’ve been giving my talks, and I’ve been incorporating my music. Most of my music is written to soothe my own soul, and what I’ve noticed is that it’s actually supported a lot of other people going through whatever they are. So I’ve written songs around depression, around people I know with addiction, I’ve written songs around social justice, and it’s a beautiful combination. It’s a wonderful marriage of who I am as a person and my own healing and what I get to give to others and supporting them on their

Maria Ross 05:49

journey. I love that. How did the center come to be the center for empathy and emotional intelligence? Is that just something that you created as a container for the work that you’re doing.

Misha Safran 06:00

No, well, let’s see, let me okay, I’ll give a very quick little story about it. So I was working for a company as an independent contractor, and I wasn’t super happy, and I was talking with my teammates, my colleagues, and I said, I don’t think I’m going to stay. I don’t know what to do. And one of my friends said, well, Misha, you are like your superpower is empathy and emotional intelligence. When you come into a room, that’s what shines. So I went home and I played with the wording and the language, and there it was. It’s a different emotional intelligence. And my dad had the Center for parent involvement, so there’s this feeling of it’s a center right, yeah, center around me. And not that I’m the center, but it’s the center right. The other component of that is that I really do want it to be bigger than me. And so I figured, you know, when you build it, they will come Yeah, or build it, they’ll have a place

Maria Ross 06:51

to go. Yes, my

Misha Safran 06:53

hope is that I will continue to create, navigate, meet, cultivate people who want to expand, yes, for greater access, because empathy is not we’ve had this conversation in the empathy activist. Some people think empathy is innate. Some people don’t, you know, and I personally feel like not everybody has the capacity right away to exercise empathy. I do believe, for some people, especially in neurodivergent communities, sometimes that empathy needs to be trained, needs to be really taught. And I know that because I have friends who are married to people who are not empathetic, and they’re working through that. So for me, the center is an opportunity at some point to really have workshops and trainings and coaches and counselors, and who knows what the dream can open up, right? And

Maria Ross 07:43

you already, you know you work with some very specific industries. Can you talk to us about that and why those industries?

Misha Safran 07:50

Yeah, absolutely. And referencing kind of back to what I was sharing the beginning. My three industries are education, medical organizations and law and that could be law students, medical students, and, you know, university human resources in those areas, mostly because I’ve had a lot of experience in all three of those areas, either as a consumer, a client or an educator myself. So I find that those are the three areas where they impact the consumer so intensely and widely that there needs to be some training and some support, and they need empathy. I mean, law enforcement officers, they see horrible things. When you think about, you know, nurses and doctors, they see horrible things. Educators. We’ve had classrooms of kids whose parents are half the parent is in one parent’s in jail, and some parents, you know, they don’t have jobs, they’re not eating breakfast in the mornings. So they’re the people that we those industries serve. Need to have more love. I was working with a company back in April, that was a while ago, but that specific community was talking about how their clients are difficult, and I asked them, what would it look like to actually, maybe you do a little frame switch and say, My clients are struggling, and the room was silent because people couldn’t fathom that. Oh, wow, yeah. Well, we’re struggling. So of course, they’re struggling because a lot of people, and we also had this conversation Maria, we with Rob and other people. Rob and other people in our group. You know, empathy doesn’t necessarily mean agreement. No, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to give in empathy. You’re hearing somebody’s truth, because their truth deserves to exist. So somebody’s hurting. Okay, they might come out and act sideways because they’re hurting, but if we look at difficult rather than looking at them as hurting or struggling, we’re going to cut off the opportunity for empathy or even conversation.

Maria Ross 09:47

And I think that’s, you know, that’s such a great point, Misha, because it’s so true in any circumstance where you’ve got people acting in destructive or, you know, cruel ways, it’s off. And you know, it’s that old adage of hurt people. And you really can feel the shift when you look at them with grace and mercy versus antagonism. There really is a shift in even your own, like heart rate and blood pressure, when you start to think, I try to practice this on the road when I’m driving, and really try to flip the like I don’t. I can’t assume everybody has destructive intent. And so when you look at things like that, or you look at you, we talk a lot about a society. We talk about you never know what people are going through, but it’s really hard to remember that when their behavior is impacting you, especially if you know number one, it’s making your work or your goal difficult, or, number two, you’re an empath, and you’re taking in that kind of negativity and that behavior. It can be really hard to find a center and find the grounding. So I think it’s wonderful that you’re really focusing on specific industries where there’s challenges, and I love how you described it, where these are industries where their end customer, whether it’s a patient or a student or a client, is really going through something, or could be really going through something. And so that’s when it gets harder than versus, like, working in an accounting office where we just got, you know, we’ve got difficult, struggling people in the accounting office. You’re dealing with a population that these folks in these industries are serving that could really be draining if they’re not careful. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Okay, so you also talk a lot and teach a lot about the intersection of empathy and inclusion. So can you talk to us about that intersection, and especially where it comes into play fostering equitable work environments and diverse work environments. We’ve talked a lot on this show about the benefits of empathy, fueling diversity and inclusion efforts, but tell us, from your perspective, how do you see that intersecting, and where is the missed opportunity for a lot of organizations? Yeah, thank you.

Misha Safran 12:02

So it’s funny, I’m still kind of thinking about something that we were talking about before, so I want, I’m going to wrap a bow on that one by saying just real quickly, yeah, please that when I first started really focusing on empathy, I actually had somebody in my life say, Oh yeah, you’re so empathetic towards them, right? And I had to remind them and myself that, and I said this a little bit earlier, and this leads into the question you just asked me, Is that my empathy is love, care and concern, but not necessarily agreement? So in the workplace, when we’re talking about inclusion, we’re not necessarily saying that having empathy for the people in our space is that I’m going to give you everything you ask for 100% I’m going to excuse you because you’re late 15 times. It’s about finding out what is their truth, what’s happening for them and what is within our abilities that to do to support them so they can be successful. I am very fortunate to be working part time for a coaching institute, and the owner is incredibly empathetic. There are people that have missed shifts, that have been late, that have forgotten this or that, and she’s not fired a single one of them, and they are all thriving because she works with each and every person to find out, what do you need to be successful? There’s no anger. There’s no so it kind of goes along with my acronym that I created, which is cape. I tell it businesses to put on their super cape. And cape is compassionate communication, assuming positive intent, the principles of inclusion and belonging and then empathy before accusation. And she is a model of this. I mean, I’m shout out to her. Lisa Fink, she’s amazing. She really honors each and every employee at her company, and make sure she has those conversations. So when we talk about inclusivity in the workplace, we talk about the intersection of inclusivity and empathy. It’s having the conversation. It’s being willing to take the time to find out what’s going on and having really healthy boundaries. Yes, because it’s not that I’m asking what’s going on, because I’m going to fix you, because you’re not broken, right? And you’re resilient, and you can take care of what you need to take care of, but sometimes we need an extra ear to hear it out loud. And amazingly enough, even with my coaching clients, they figure it out. They have all their answers. Yeah, so inclusivity and empathy intersect at that conversation. As far as I’m concerned,

Maria Ross 14:40

I love that. I mean, that’s with my new book, The Empathy dilemma, talking about those pillars of being both effective and empathetic as a leader means we don’t have to choose, and that’s those are the myths I talk about in that book, and the myths I talk about in my workshops, that we’re not embracing empathy at work because we think it’s something else. We think it’s allowing people to walk all over us, or, like you said, agreeing with people or just being nice, like being nice is wonderful, but it doesn’t mean you see my point of view. So I love that idea of looking at it. I like to make empathy accessible for leaders that are a little skeptical by saying, think of it as information gathering. Be a little bit of a detective and find out what’s going on for somebody. I love how you framed it. Of it’s just a conversation. It’s being willing and open to having the conversation. And I need to shout this out, because this is a quotable for folks empathy before accusation. Love that so much. Thank you. Well, you know I

Misha Safran 15:36

that I have to say real quickly that came from and I apologize to the audience who might be listening to this. I don’t remember the young man’s name. I feel like the last name. Yeah. Anyways, it was that actually came. It from the depths of my body. That phrase when I listened to the news review of the young man, the young black man, who was on a white man’s porch looking for his siblings, and the white man shot him without even knowing that this kid was lost. So I immediately like through my body that empathy before accusation, empathy before assumption. Yeah, listen, I’ve got so much pain in my body just recalling that event. So I’m sorry for the trigger warning for anybody might be listening. It’s really in in coaching, we teach our students as they’re becoming coaches, curiosity cures the coach, right? So the conversation and what you just shared as well is like it doesn’t have to be anything more than inquiry, building information, getting more knowledge. I

Maria Ross 16:33

love that so much. And we make a lot of assumptions in the groups we swim in, whether it’s an organizational group or our family or our friends or our neighbors or our, you know, civic group that we’re in, we spend a lot of time making accusations because and making assumptions because it’s easier for our brains to slot people into groups when we make those assumptions, right, and we have to fight against that absolutely.

Misha Safran 16:59

And those assumptions drain our energy. Empathy is so kind and generous and loving, why wouldn’t you want to have more

Maria Ross 17:05

empathy? Right? And it doesn’t, and I love that too, because it doesn’t have to be the touchy feely i You’ve heard me say this many times that I always say you don’t have to be crying on the floor with your employees to show empathy. So if you’re not necessarily a touchy feely, huggy, you know person, it doesn’t mean you can’t be empathetic. It’s just going to look different. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so given that I want to talk about, the common thing I hear when people are being quote, unquote, trained on empathy or learning empathy, is, how can leaders model empathy authentically without feeling performative or forced. And I have, like, a unique perspective on this, but I want to hear how you help people through that, through getting over that fear of, oh, this is going to feel really forced and

Misha Safran 17:52

performative. I don’t know that many people are going to like my answer, but it’s called practice. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and honestly, I will encourage a lot of my clients to work with friends and family members first, to take a few moments at home to ask somebody how your day was and mean it, and listen to the answer, yeah, right, mean it, and then be willing. And what I mean by mean it right, just like what you said is to listen to it, right, listen to it and then be curious about it. And so it really is almost like coaching, where we ask open ended questions, you know, how was your day? Okay, maybe I tell you, well, it was, it was a little hard. And I could say something sincere, like, you know, you seem like you’re tired, and I can hear that it was a hard day. But then you could also ask What was hard about it. And instead of saying, Oh, that’s it, that’s not empathy, by the way,

18:46

just in case, right? But

Misha Safran 18:50

it’s like, what was hard about it? Oh, I that would make sense that that might be hard. Now, if it doesn’t make sense to you, then you don’t say it. So it’s really about being truthful. But back to that, that baseline of curiosity about it, is there anything else you want to you know, anything more you want to share about that? But it takes practice for some people, natural empaths, some people are naturally curious, and some people really struggle or have social awkwardness and feel like their next question might be dumb or not welcome, right? And the fact of the matter is, is that when I’ve had more people in my training say to me that they enjoy being with people when they share vulnerably, but again, like it literally doesn’t mean you have to start crying, right? It’s being able to say, you know, I’m feeling a little nervous right now. Yeah, tell me about that. Yeah. So practice is my first big response. Second is really just maybe learning some open ended questions that could support you in getting more information. In the coaching world, I always tell my clients who are getting their credentials, ask questions for the person in front of you to grow, not for you to know. Ooh, it’s a different level. Love, curiosity. What could I ask that supports you in growing this is really effective in the workplace, because you maybe are somebody who is a direct manager, and you are really good at micromanaging, and you never delegate anything, because you have to have it just right, and you’re controlling the situation. But actually building trust and empathy with your clients is your coworkers and your direct reports, is to really ask them, What do you think should be done in this situation? How would you go about doing that? What would potentially be an obstacle for you, right? And so if you’re asking questions for your person to grow and not for you to know, then you’re giving them space and room, right? That phone, oddly enough, is empathy, yeah, and

Maria Ross 20:46

you’re giving them an opportunity to have their own epiphany. You know, how often have you or I been in a conversation with someone when they ask me a question? It’s like, oh, that’s a really good question. Let me think about that for a second. That’s where the learning is. That’s where people can get in deeper touch with what they’re thinking. And I love your answer, because that’s the answer I give about you have to practice it, and it might feel icky at first, it might feel uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Yeah, it’s memory. One thing I will say that’s kind of funny is, you know, I do tell leaders now, look, if you’ve never been interested in your people before, and just one day you start going, you know, Misha, tell me about your weekend. Tell me about people might be on the defensive. You need to be prepared for that, that they’re going to wonder what’s going on. Yeah, right. But you can also be transparent with your team, and this is where you can be vulnerable. Is, hey, starting today, starting this year, maybe my, you know, my goal this year was to improve my leadership style. You don’t necessarily have to tell someone you’re working on your empathy. You can just say, tell your team, hey, I’m working on my leadership style and working on being a better communicator, if that feels comfortable for you. And so, you know, I’m going to be trying some different things. I just want you to be prepared that I might ask different questions or engage with you in a different way. Nothing to be alarmed about. Yeah, I was going to say, and that also models for them that self improvement is a constant goal.

Misha Safran 22:16

So what that leads me to want to call out is having empathy for yourself, yes, right? So as a leader, if you mess up one day while you’re on this new trajectory of adding empathy into your leadership, uh huh. Hey, to say, You know what, Maria, I did that wrong. I really feel like I might have stepped on a toe or said something that didn’t work. Can I try that again? You know, and really having grace and for yourself and empathy for yourself so that you can keep trying and not give up, because it’s not going to be it’s in order for it really to work, you have to be willing to have it messy at first. Yeah, yeah, like you did the ick. I mean it. You’ve gotta be willing to be messy and but vulnerably, transparently messy. Yes, people know what to expect, and that this is, oh, yeah, okay, sure, let’s try again, and being willing, then to give empathy and grace to others, yeah, so that each person knows that they can make a mistake and survive it, yeah, that they can, you know, have a faux pas and have a conversation about it, so that it can change for The future, but that they not all of a sudden a bad human being, even a bad apple has a lot of good parts still to it. Why do people throw out a whole apple and it’s just a tiny part that’s bad?

Maria Ross 23:36

I love that, and I also just want to Yes and that, because there’s also the perception that if I admit I made a mistake, or I admit I did something wrong, that’s going to weaken me, but you can do it in a way that you have confidence and you own your mistake. So look at the difference between, you know, someone sort of begging for forgiveness, versus wow, I didn’t do that very well. I’m really sorry about that. Misha, let me try this again. That’s a much more confident way to admit your vulnerability. And like you said, I love what you said, because it’s about giving other people permission to do that too, and you won’t lose respect. You won’t be weakened by doing it that way, if anything, you’re going to level up people respecting you by being truthful and owning and being self aware enough that you saw that you made a mistake, versus ignorant about the impact of your behavior. So hiding it under the rug, or hiding it under the rug, because everyone

Misha Safran 24:37

really doesn’t hide very well, no, really gross and big, and he used to trip over it and

Maria Ross 24:43

and it’s a bad look like you know you as a leader, might say, I’m not going to admit that I screwed that up. Everyone knows you did, so just own it. Be like that was not great. That was not my finest hour. Let’s move forward.

Misha Safran 24:55

That’s another element of empathy is really being willing to, like you said, admit those mistakes when. I was working with another company, and we were doing trainings. One of the examples we would bring into the workplace was the Challenger, the person who was working on the, I think they were called the O rings for the shuttle,

Maria Ross 25:13

knew or the space shuttle. Challenger, yeah, yes, knew that something was wrong and tried to tell people, This shouldn’t take off. This shouldn’t take off. This shouldn’t take off. But the President, or whoever it was, at the time, excuse me, said, No, we have to, it’s got to take off. And it exploded. He was being vulnerable. He was sharing, there’s a mistake here. There’s a problem. And so we want to create environments in the workplace where people can say, Stop, there’s this is a problem. Yeah, not wait until something goes wrong to fix it. If somebody is willing to come and say, I’m a little concerned, we need to have the open space and empathy to allow for vulnerable honest Well, I mean, that’s fundamentally the things that have happened at Boeing and how it’s impacting their bottom line, it is impacting that organization to not be willing to take a step back and admit mistakes and do things over and do them the right way. So we’re seeing it play out in real time of the very, very real consequences, not only on your people, but on your industry and on your sustainability as a business, we’re seeing that play out in real time. So appreciate that. Okay, so last question for you is, what are some practical strategies for navigating conflict using empathy and emotional intelligence? Can you give us some examples, or some role plays, or anything like that that can really help people understand the role that empathy can play in conflict, defusement at work or in any organization.

Misha Safran 26:46

And I will tell you right now, type a people who are extremely productive, based, task oriented, they’re not going to like my answer, because it’s all about slowing down, because urgency causes chaos. That is just absolutely bottom line, that’s my phrase. I’m taking it. I’m going all the way with it. Urgency caused the chaos. And what a lot of people do not like, especially in business, is that in order to do this, they have to slow down, they have to take a pause. They have to take a breath and highly encourage inhale through the nose to five, exhale to seven, you know, and exhale through your mouth, because you can, you know, make sure that you’re really supporting your parasympathetic

Maria Ross 27:28

so inhale through your nose to count of five, maybe six, but then exhale at least a little bit longer than that, through your mouth, because it activates the parasympathetic system, which helps calm your nerves and that then already is diffusing the urgency once you have done that pause and that breath, you are much more resourced to have a conversation or even tell somebody you’re not ready for a conversation, yeah, so they can respond instead of react. And reactionary behavior is what tips things over the edge and makes it Messier, whereas being able to pause, take time, reflect, listen to a situation, rather than make those assumptions, all of that is going to create a healthier environment where you have people who are happy to be with you, working with you, working for you. And I will say that when I was a high school teacher, I had parents who were very angry one year, because when I got to that school, their students were far behind others, so I took them back two months in curriculum up in arms. What are you doing? They’re never going to be able to be ready for this that or the other. That class period in particular was two months ahead of all the other classes by the end of the year. So slow it down or to build it up. I love that slow down to build up words of wisdom. What a nice gem to leave us with. And I just want to share too. This is why I loved your work. Is because even you know, when I talk about the self care pillar in my five pillars of empathetic and effective empathy, I offer some actionable strategies and tactics for folks to look at self care, not as a luxury, but as a necessity, for you to be able to show up as the leader you want to be, and as the leader that gets results. So you know, it’s not a luxury. We have to have that capacity full, or we can’t take on anyone’s perspective without fear or defensiveness or anger, and you know, we I talked about this on the show before. Folks have heard me say this. You know, it’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a parent, is I am not a good parent when I don’t take a breath, I am so reactionary and so just not able to listen. And nothing has kind of smacked me in the face about that more than having a child that challenges you every day. He is my biggest, biggest empathy teacher. So there you go. Well,

Misha Safran 29:49

actually, you know, I know it’s so funny how we talk about some things and we don’t talk about other things, and we are truly aligned leader. Care is one of the final. Points of my presentations, and I encourage organizations to do I’m now a certified laughter yoga facilitator. Yes, please

Maria Ross 30:07

tell us about that, because I remember you talking about that the

Misha Safran 30:11

laughter I’ve had people with Parkinson’s. I’ve had people who are elderly and sad and lonely. I’ve had people from all walks of life say this has really changed. In fact, the quote that I want to use right now I just got on Sunday last week, the participant said to me, my myths, m, y, t, h, S, my myths are crumbling. It was powerful. And what I learned from that person was the assumptions and the stories that they’ve been telling themselves. And this goes for all leaders out there, all and every single person in this world is a leader. You just have to decide, you know, are you a visible leader or an internal leader, whatever it is, but having that self care, being willing to take care of yourself, encompassing the four elements of joy, which are dance, play, singing and laughter, that is critical to being able to take care of others, have empathy for yourself and have empathy for others in the way we walk our life together.

Maria Ross 31:05

I love that. And can you briefly describe what the laughter yoga practice is? Because I just think it’s so great. And I’ll put a link to you know, obviously we’re gonna have all your links in the show notes, but tell us quickly what the laughter yoga practice is good. Yes, it

Misha Safran 31:22

feels silly. And a lot of people are like, Oh, I don’t want to be performative or fake it till I make it, but it actually it’s so laughter. Yoga is a unique concept where we participate in deep breathing exercises and laughter exercises, and typically we do it in a group setting where there’s eye contact, because the laughter can become contagious and then authentic. The other part of that is is you, the more you laugh with the deep breath, you bring more oxygen to your brain and your body and the brain or your bodies. Don’t know the difference between simulated laughter and authentic laughter. So it’s a real health benefit. It started back in about 1995 with Dr Kataria in Mumbai, India, in a park with five people. And today there are over 1000s of people with 120 laughter social clubs all over the world. And they have been in nursing homes, in schools, in law firms, in medical offices everywhere that ready needs to lift their spirit, but also have health care for themselves. That may not be that 20 mile marathon, right? And the other thing I want to leave you with is that children, typically, on average, laugh three to 400 times a day, and adults

Maria Ross 32:30

only 15. Oh, that’s so

Misha Safran 32:33

sad, yeah. So think about when you laugh, how it makes you feel, if, when, and the all the other pieces that you’re learning to laugh for no reason at all, no comedy, no jokes, you know, not because of humor, but you’re actually learning just to laugh as a form of

Maria Ross 32:48

exercise. Yeah, I love that well and kind of getting back, putting a bow on that is really that ability to take care of yourself in that way and that unique way helps you show up as the leader you want to be, and I love that you’re doing that for organizations and for teams like we need just like I’ve talked in the past about doing improv exercises as a team to build trust and foster creativity and foster resilience. Similarly, we need to be experimenting with these team building and team bonding exercises that we do. It’s not all just about trust falls, and there’s a way to tap into our ability to get to know each other and understand each other and collaborate with each other. And these kinds of things like laughter yoga, also force us to look at each other, which is what I love about what you just said. So Misha, so many good things. We could talk so much longer, but we have to wrap so I will have all of your information and links in the show notes, as well as links to your workplace wellness program, your laughter to joy wellness experience, and your book and bonus package for schools specifically. So I know there’s a lot of great things. We’ll put all the links to your website and to stay in touch with you. But for folks that are on the go, where’s a good place or two that they can connect with you and learn more about your work,

Misha Safran 34:08

thank you so absolutely. I would love for people to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and that information will also be in the links from Maria and my website is very easy. W, w.ce, eq.org, and that stands for center for empathy and emotional intelligence. Ceq.org

Maria Ross 34:23

love it. Thank you so much for your time today and your insights. What a great conversation. Thank

Misha Safran 34:28

you. And I’m sure you’re a fabulous parent, by the way,

Maria Ross 34:32

thank you. Thank

Misha Safran 34:33

you everyone, and

Maria Ross 34:35

thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review and share with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy Ed. Dot com, there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place. You.

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