Words matter. As a brand storyteller, I have emphasized this in my work with clients. They can be used to provoke or unite us. To inspire or anger us. They can be used as peacemakers or weapons. You can just turn on the news or listen to political talking points to see this in action.
In our highly charged politicized world, and the challenge of ever-changing language, it can be difficult to keep up with what is the current acceptable word and what, just a few years ago, is now no longer socially acceptable to say. But it is about more than just being politically correct, it is about respect for other human beings. Today, I talk about some of those questions that we should all be asking ourselves and how, together, we can do better to understand the power of our words to make the world a safer space for everyone.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
In today’s world, words such as diversity, inclusion, and equity have been politicized and falsely equated to concepts to which they do not belong. Words such as freedom, patience, and love have also been politicized and weaponized.
There is nothing worse than being misunderstood, when others take a whole other meaning from what you said rather than what you actually meant to convey
Discernment is required – when is it worth us attacking each other over word usage, instead of focusing on the cause the word represents?
“We should strive to honor others and use the right words that don’t demean or oppress. If words are being used to do that, we should adjust. We also should not let words stand in the way of or distract us from the real work either.” — Maria Ross
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.
Maria Ross 00:48
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to this month’s hot take on the empathy edge. I’m your host, Maria Ross. And this week, it’s just me no guest just unfiltered and raw perspective and insights about all things empathy. But before I get started with this month’s hot take, which is about how words matter, and how they can divide us, I have a few announcements for everyone. If you’re a business owner, marketer or entrepreneur, please sign up for the waitlist of my next cohort of brands story breakthrough. This is my five week coaching course to help you connect with your ideal clients and customers through the power of empathy. I’m running a cohort right now and it’s going great. And I would love to welcome you into the cohort in the fall. And I also just like saying the word cohort, you can check out details at red dash lice.com forward slash brand dash breakthrough dash course or I will have that link in the show notes for you. Number two is my new book on empathy is coming in fall 2024. Yes, I am gathering data and stories for this book that’s in the works about the shadow side of empathetic leadership, and how to avoid its pitfalls, and I need your help. If you are a leader of one to 10,000 people and can spare five to 10 minutes, please fill out this short survey to share your experiences with the challenges and demands of trying to be an empathetic leader in today’s modern world of work. The more responses the more valid the data, the survey link is surveymonkey.com/are/empathy trap, or again, I will have that in the show notes. And finally, did you know that you can sponsor the empathy edge podcast, associate your brand with the power of empathy, and get your message in front of sea level leaders, ambitious professionals and changemakers in more than 110 countries. Plus enjoy extra promotion and social media and email? Check out the empathy edge.com Click on sponsorship for all the details. So on to this month’s topic of words. I gave a talk recently with my partner from my other podcast Johnny Ressler, we co host Johnny and Maria go there. It’s a Lifestyle podcast for progressive women who have a voice and want to use it. We were at an event talking about the dark side of ally ship sharing our stories as women in tech. And we’re ally ship, however well intentioned, can go wrong, how we need to have empathy and ensure we build connections and relationships first, before going full steam into performative acts of what we called aggressive ally ship. Now, side note, this event was at the wit regatta women in tech regatta in Seattle. It is the brainchild of my good friend, Melody Behringer. She does these events in Seattle, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and smaller events in other areas of the world. And it’s a wonderful event if you want to connect with women or their allies in the world of technology. I’ll put a link to wit regatta in the show notes for you had to give her that plug. But we were honored to be asked to come speak at the event. Now back to the topic at hand, the dark side of ally ship, sometimes your best intention to support somebody can do more harm than good. And that’s why we have to be careful when we decide to just go guns blazing into being an ally in the middle of a meeting or in the middle of an event or in front of important people. So our message was to build one on one relationships first, to better understand what ally ship looks like to and for the individual because you never know what’s going on behind the scenes for people. As many of you know I have interviewed and learned from many D E IB or diversity, equity inclusion and belonging experts on this very podcast. And I had just had coffee with one prior to that talk. Daniel John or DJ as he’s known, who works with soul focused group where he shared that the word allyship was now in some circles frowned upon. DJ explained that the notion of ally ship could imply a hierarchical or Savior role. He is much more about building connections and bridges. So he preferred the phrase building relationships rather than ally ship. But we both agreed the words may change, but the mission of connection still needs to be at the heart of it. I brought this up as a reference in our talk at the wit Regatta, and we got attacked for it. There is nothing worse than being misunderstood than when others take a whole other meaning from what you said then you actually meant to convey. We were told we were teaching other women to despise ally ship, and who did we think we were as privileged white women to be talking about this? Words matter? They do. As a brand storyteller. I have emphasized this in my work with clients. They can be used to provoke or unite us to inspire or anger us. They can be used as peacemakers or weapons. You can just turn on the news or listen to political talking points to see this in action. A few years ago, I had to defend the words diversity, equity and inclusion, which seems crazy to me, diversity is about celebrating and appreciating difference. Equity is about giving people what they need to access opportunity. Inclusion is about helping people belong. What could be so bad about these words? Apparently plenty. In today’s world. These words have been politicized and falsely equated to concepts to which they do not equate that in just saying these words or wanting to start a dei group, I was guilty of nefarious schemes and hidden agendas. When did we get so lost? What’s next saying the words freedom, love or patience or political, but also true? People have used words to dehumanize and offend, and those words are not okay. We have ample proof that words can lead to oppression and violence. My interview with Dr. Suzanne Wirth, I’m on this podcast about inclusive language was an eye opener, how language defines a culture and how it can and must evolve? How some cultures are erased when their language dies out. How groups impacted by certain words have the right to change the way in which they are referred. And yes, things will change. And yes, we have to keep up. The group impacted gets to decide what is offensive to them, not others describing them. It’s not about political correctness. It’s about respect for humans. Throughout history, language has never stayed static. So we should be okay with changing terminology. If it leads to the greater good, and to more inclusivity check out that episode when you can. I’ll link to it in the show notes as well as to DJs episode. So I can’t have it both ways can I? Can I expect others to forgive me for words when I hold words against others? guess it depends on your perspective, and which quote unquote, side you’re on? How about this? Both things can be true. We should strive to honor others and use the right words that don’t demean or oppress if words are being used to do that, even without our intention. Of course, we should adjust. And we also should not let words stand in the way or distract us from the real work either. Discernment is required. When is it worth US attacking each other over word usage? Instead of focusing on the cause? The word represents? I don’t know the right answer. But I’m going to keep exploring the question. And I invite you to as well. Where are you using a word to demean and dehumanize? And when is it okay to let words slide and agree to various acceptable descriptions in order to focus on the work at hand. Thanks for listening. Remember to tune in to the next episode of empathy edge podcast when you can. rate review, share and above all, remember that cashflow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care, and be kind.
Maria Ross 09:26
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™
Divorce. Losing a family member to addiction. The end of a friendship. Empty nesting. Even the loss many of us felt during the Pandemic. These are all examples of ambiguous grief. Today’s guest is Stephanie Sarazin, a writer, researcher, and experiential expert in ambiguous grief. We talk about what ambiguous grief is and how it’s different from grief brought on by death, how different people cope with it, the stages, and the importance of empathy to help people heal and feel witnessed. We discuss the well-intentioned reactions we have that are actually the opposite of empathy, and what we can do and say instead. If you want to be a more empathetic colleague, friend, manager, and teammate to those experiencing ambiguous grief, take a listen to this powerful conversation.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Grief is the invoice we pay for love, and it can only heal if it is being witnessed.
Ambiguous grief is something that nearly everyone will experience for a variety of reasons. We need to build into our benefits and HR policies in our companies ways we can support our team through all of their grief experiences, not just those associated with death.
Empathy is not judgmental and is not resentful. Grief, especially ambiguous grief, shows up in different ways for every single person.
“We don’t have the societal norms for an ambiguous grief experience that we do for grief by physical death. There’s often no outward expression of our grief, yet, it doesn’t make it any less pronounced.” — Stephanie Sarazin
About Stephanie Sarazin, Author & Certified Grief Educator
Stephanie Sarazin is a writer, researcher, and experiential expert in ambiguous grief. Her work began with her own experience of mid-life trauma, which sparked an ambitious journey—spiritually and around the world—to understand, name, and heal the grief she found within her.
Her efforts revealed a first-of-its-kind definition for “ambiguous grief,” whereby grief is onset by the loss of a loved one who is still living and wherein the experience of hope presents as a stage of the grieving process. Stephanie’s work brings new resources to reframe disruptive, activating events as a gateway to discovering your highest self, in turn championing ambiguous grief as nuanced, natural, and navigable.
Stephanie is also the founder of Rise Up Rooted, an online resource center for those navigating ambiguous grief, a grief educator, and a TEDx curator in her community. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and earned a Master of Public Policy from The University of Chicago. Her book, Soulbroken (one word) was published by Balance in October 2022 and has received praise from leading voices including Adam Grant, Elizabeth Lesser, and Maria Shriver.
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cashflow, 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. Divorce, losing a family member to addiction, the end of a friendship, and D nesting, even the loss many of us felt during the pandemic. These are all examples of ambiguous grief. Today’s guest is Stephanie Saracen, a writer, researcher and experiential expert in ambiguous grief. Her work began with her own experience of midlife trauma, which sparked an ambitious journey spiritually and around the world to understand name and heal the grief she found within her. Her efforts revealed a first of its kind definition for ambiguous grief, where grief is brought on by the loss of a loved one who is still living, and where the experience of Hope presents as a stage in the grieving process. We talk about what ambiguous grief is and how it’s different from grief brought on by death, how different people cope with it, the stages and the importance of empathy to help people heal and feel witnessed. We discuss the well intentioned reactions we have that are actually the opposite of empathy, and what we can do and say instead, if you want to be a more empathetic colleague, friend, manager and teammate to those experiencing ambiguous grief, take a listen to this powerful conversation. Stephanie, welcome to the empathy edge podcast, I am excited to have this conversation about ambiguous grief. And it’s just been great. We got connected through a mutual acquaintance. And I think instantly hit it off when we spoke. And your work so strongly resonated with me. And, you know, I would love to hear your story of how you became an experiential expert in ambiguous grief. But also because this is such a timely topic, I think, because we’ve talked a lot in our society, about the collective grief that we’ve been feeling because of the pandemic, and not just loss of life, but lifestyles that people lost freedom that people lost, you know, lost years of kids education that they’ll never get back again. So there’s a lot of ambiguous grief out there. So help us understand how you came to this work.
Stephanie Sarazin 03:37
Yeah, there sure is. Thanks so much, man. Thanks for having me. It. It is timely, that ambiguous grief is, you know, now now in our vernacular, and it’s something we’re talking about. And I’m so glad that it is. When I first discovered ambiguous grief, in my own life, it was because I had found myself suddenly divorcing after 20 years, this came, you know, in a series of unexpected events that led to it, and left me feeling quite alone and isolated. In my own experience. Now, certainly, I understood that I wasn’t the first person to have such an experience. Yet I couldn’t find anybody in my immediate network. Or, you know, when I called upon them, friends of friends, you’ve been somebody to kind of talk to me about this grief that I was feeling this this incredible depth of sadness. And, you know, it was disheartening to say the least, to feel so alone. Now, of course, you know, every relationship is different. Everybody’s divorce story had is different. But I was, I was certain that I wasn’t the only one. So I set about really trying to understand what it was that I was experiencing, and why I was experiencing this so that I could find a way to heal. I have three terrific kids and now suddenly, being a single mother knew that I had to work to heal myself, and take care of my children, right. And so, in my own desperation for understanding the nuance of this grief experience, I learned way more than I ever could have imagined and spent the next several years researching, writing. And lo and behold, binding lots and lots of people who were having a similar experience, and wanted to talk about
Maria Ross 05:28
it. Well, and I think it’s interesting, because the immediate image that comes to our mind, when we think of grief is death, we’re experiencing someone’s death or loss. But grief comes in a lot of different forms in terms of, you know, something else dying, your, your identity, or your the life you thought you had, or all these other things. So can you talk a little bit about how we get to understanding this multifaceted nature of grief?
Stephanie Sarazin 05:59
Right, I think step one is talking about it. Right. And so to order in order to understand it, it’s something we have to communicate about, and listen to one another, having the experience, you know, for me, it was, it was so different. To recognize that grief by death, which we don’t do really well, in our society
Maria Ross 06:24
anyway.
Stephanie Sarazin 06:27
You know, we find all sorts of creative ways to not use the D word or to you know, to gingerly talk about it, that when we don’t have the tools, we don’t have the societal norms for an ambiguous grief experience that we do for a grief by physical death, we all know that we’re going to die. That’s note your listeners will, nobody will be surprised by that. We all first heard it here first, folks. But, and we have a general idea based on our own, you know, family of origin and our own, you know, community, what happens when we die? How do we mark that with funerals, with you know, songs with different rituals, ceremonies, but when you are experiencing a death of another sort those so those that you just alluded to, right, the the death of our, our relationships with one another, whether it’s the death of a partner of, you know, decades, to divorce, or, or a friend, right colleague, it could be a child to addiction, a parent to Alzheimer’s, a loved one, to indoctrination to, you know, a culture again, incarceration, there are so many different activating events that will bring this ambiguous grief forward. And without those societal norms that we have with a physical death. There’s no, there’s no outward expression of our grief. Yet, it doesn’t make it any less pronounced, right. And since there’s often shame and embarrassment attached to all of those activating events that I just mentioned, oftentimes, the person experience ambiguous grief, instead of talking about it, and telling a friend or trusted group of friends, what’s going on. They instead keep quiet, where they minimize, and often isolate and grieve alone. And you think part
Maria Ross 08:29
of that is we we also with each other don’t know how to react to someone else’s ambiguous grief, because it’s not so clear cut as a death, right? So in a divorce, for example, the other person’s still out there living their life, right. And I sense that what you’re saying is a lot of the fear and shame correct me if I’m wrong, is maybe from someone feeling like they don’t have a right to feel sad, they don’t have a right to feel bad about this thing, because it’s not a death. Is that accurate? It that’s one
Stephanie Sarazin 09:01
part of it. It’s kind of two sides to the same coin. So, you know, in one sense, the individual doesn’t feel that they, you know, have a have a right, as you said, they don’t have the it’s not, it’s like it’s not so bad for not so bad. This isn’t a death. And so they don’t feel permission to grieve. They don’t understand that it’s grief is something I found in my research. But the second side of that coin is that the activating events that trigger it can be internalized, as shameful or embarrassing. Oh, my child who is addicted. And on the streets, I don’t know where they are, you know, that might not be something a person might want to share. I interviewed a woman who had shared with me that her husband had been incarcerated for three years. And she had told nobody. Now he had a five year sentence. And this was during COVID which was a big relief to her because it allowed her to kind of keep up the guys and not have to You know, find excuses which she had done, you know, for the first year. But, you know, she wasn’t sharing her grief. In this case, she recognized that this was a grief that she was experiencing. But that internalized shame and embarrassment of her husband situation? Didn’t, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it with others. So it’s kind of, you know, this two sided coin? And of course, the answer, certainly one helpful answer, as far as I can tell, is empathy. You know, so if somebody, what I came to quickly learn is that people aren’t talking about ambiguous grief in their lives, because they don’t want to be talked about. And if we could learn to do a better job of, you know, first of all, identifying what ambiguous grief is what it looks like, in ourselves and in others, then we can be more empathetic, compassionate friends, family, members, neighbors, colleagues, you know, it goes on and on. And, and instead of, you know, hopefully, if that could build, then, of course, individuals would feel more comfortable coming forward. Because, you know, being met with empathy is such a beautiful way to relieve your grief.
Maria Ross 11:15
So, I think that that’s such an important point, because many of us try to be empathetic to people we see are in crisis, or we see are experiencing a loss. And is it is it just harder for people to understand what someone is going through when they’re experiencing ambiguous grief? Or are we just sort of doing empathy wrong when someone is dealing with ambiguous grief?
Stephanie Sarazin 11:42
Well, I’ll let you answer the empathy part. You know, I don’t know if we’re doing it wrong. But I think there’s definitely room for improvement. Right. And I think in large part is because we’re, you know, we’re learning really what empathy is, this isn’t something that, you know, most of us grew up understanding, at least, at least intellectualizing what it means, you know, but for an ambiguous Griever, somebody who’s grieving the loss of a loved one who is still living, but not as they once were, it can be such an isolating event in a person’s life. And it’s not something everybody relates to, you know, the specific event won’t be the same as my specific event. And then it kind of goes even further into that is sure. So if I’m talking about a group of people who are all experienced, ambiguous grief activated by divorce, versus a group activated by dementia, or addiction, even the layers within those same kind of silos will be different, because the relationships are all different, right? And the strength of the relationship, the strength of the love will inform the girth of the grief. And so when somebody’s coming to us, to show their compassion, I think
Maria Ross 12:53
they do their best I’d like to like to believe people do their are doing they have good intentions to Yes,
Stephanie Sarazin 12:59
and say, Oh, I had a divorce as well, I went through a divorce, you’re going to be better off, hang in there. Trust me, it gets so much better. Well, okay. That’s your experience that may this might be devastating and horrific to me or, okay to me, you know, without understanding where somebody’s coming from, in their biggest grief, we often miss a sign and kind of project our own experience onto there’s
Maria Ross 13:23
completely and I mentioned to you that I call this empathy, hijacking, because it is from a good place. It’s the desire to connect and a desire to make somebody feel not alone. But in doing so it makes the conversation, not about that person anymore.
Stephanie Sarazin 13:40
Right. And so the Griever is in this funny, you know, experience that they’re
Maria Ross 13:45
either justifying, or trying to console. Exactly,
Stephanie Sarazin 13:48
exactly. And that doesn’t feel good.
Maria Ross 13:51
That doesn’t feel good. And I think I may have told you when we had our pre call. The reason I even came up with that term of empathy hijacking, because it’s something I’ve done many times in the past, in an effort to connect of, I want to feel like I want you to feel like I understand what you’re going through. But the thing is that we don’t understand about empathy is that you can be empathetic with no knowledge or experience of what that other person is going through, because it’s about being with the person and not necessarily having to have had the exact same experience as that person. But we’re such a fixit culture, that we think if someone’s talking to us about their grief, or their pain, or just what they’re feeling in general, we have to somehow fix it. And part of our desire to fix it is to offer a solution that worked for us, right? Because when I had my brain injury years ago, I had a lot of cognitive deficits from and I still do but immediately coming out of that, and people were trying so hard to connect with me because they couldn’t even relate to what I had gone through. It could relate to that There’s just these little minut moments of like, oh, I have to write everything down to, you know, that’s just you getting older, that’s just, you know, I’m never good with names either, and minimizing the experience of going from one thing to another in an instant, right, so that, but they were trying to relate, but in trying to relate, they minimized my experience.
Stephanie Sarazin 15:22
That’s right. And I think a good indication if you’re not sure if you’re doing this, right, and I tried to catch myself as well. So this is, you know, a little tool for anybody who likes to use it and becoming more self aware, is, are you using an if statement? Right? Are you saying, Oh, I can’t imagine I just can’t imagine. Well, now you’ve, that seems benign, that doesn’t, you’ve not necessarily, you know, just verbally vomited your own personal story, which we’ve established isn’t the best answer. In fact, you’ve you’re saying i, which is telling the person, you’re comforting that you’re not thinking about them, because what you’re doing is your brain is processing, what it would be like to be in their shoes, and to experience a brain injury, to experience a divorce to experience your loved one’s addiction or incarceration. Oh, I couldn’t imagine I can’t imagine. Well, that’s what they’re doing is they’re imagining themselves in it. And then they’re saying I can’t, because it’s painful, or if they’re saying, Oh, I don’t want you to cry. Oh, well, that’s another signal of their discomfort with your emotions, reactions. Yeah, right, right. Or, of course, the third one, which we’d already touched on, which is I went through a divorce too, or as you said, I also am bad with names and have to write things down.
Maria Ross 16:44
Okay, not the same. You know, it’s a, it’s really interesting, because as I’ve been studying empathy for these years, I’ve changed my very intentionally tried to change my default around that when someone is confiding, or if I’m trying to be there and actively listen, to say, instead of like, I can’t imagine because I used to do that, too. And sometimes I do it when I forget. But more focusing on that must be really hard. Or, Oh, you must be feeling really alone. Right now. I’m here for you. Like, yes, being able to make those statements exactly what you said, like making sure it’s not about I, but about you. And I think, again, that the myth is that unless we can have experienced exactly what that person has experienced, or bring in a similar situation, which that helps with empathy, but we don’t have to, because right is about seeing things from someone else’s perspective. And if I’m going to talk to a Syrian refugee, I’ve never had that experience, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be empathetic to that person.
Stephanie Sarazin 17:50
Absolutely. And no matter who you’re speaking to, you know, somebody’s having a grief experience. And, and going through some really hard things, whether it be at a Syrian refugee, or you know, any of the other activating events that I had shared, it’s not our place to deny them that experience of feeling that emotion, any more than it would have been our place to deny them the love that built the grief. Right. And so instead of trying to fix it, because it is so uncomfortable, I understand everybody to be happy. Yeah, yes, yes. But that, you know, grief is love. This is the invoice we have from love and how lucky we are to pay it. And so if we can find a way to you know, hold space for that person talking about their experience, and say just what you said, Maria? Oh, that sounds really hard. I’m here. I’m here for you. Yeah. And you’re not asking what they need. They don’t know what they need a lot of times, you know, that’s adding that’s kind of just heaping on more to do on an already confusing time. Right. So I think just I think saying that sounds really hard. That sounds so hard, is helping the person be witnessed and in grief. Healing is not possible if our grief isn’t witnessed. And I went through, I have a Master’s in Public Policy. That’s my background. I had in no way set out to research or write a book about grief, much less the subset of grief that’s unrecognized. And yet, you know, it’s, it’s been something I’ve learned along the way that without grief being witnessed, healing can’t happen. And if we think about all of the ways that our love is witnessed, and that we celebrate our love with, you know, I mean, gender reveals weddings, all the ceremonies, birthday parties, engagement events, bar mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, all these things that we do in life to celebrate miles stones and, and celebrate our love. What do we have on the other side of that for grief, you know and to be able to create a ceremony on your own that helps allows grief to be witnessed, you know is ideal. We have funerals of course when there’s grief by death, ambiguous Grievers have to be a little more creative. I call it a faux funeral, you can still create your own ceremony and work in your own rituals. But witnessing grief being with that Syrian refugee being with the daughter whose mother has dementia, and saying that’s really hard, right? I love you. I’m here for you. Right? And I want to talk about
Maria Ross 20:39
how or why grief is actually a great teacher for empathy and meaning when you experience it. But when you also witnessed it, how is that helping us build that empathy muscle? Well, I
Stephanie Sarazin 20:51
think it’s a great teacher, as long as we are willing to allow it to be right, because we just said it’s so uncomfortable. Depending on how we were raised. Grief can be something we just want to get rid of. I call it the grief cooties, you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly who in your circles, you know, don’t want the grief cooties. It’s almost as though witnessing your grief some way transmutes it to them. And now they’ve got the grief and nobody wants the grief, right. And so if we allow it, if we can lean into it a little bit, when it happens around us, then we can learn how to be how to show up for our colleagues or our neighbors or our children, whomever in our life. And we can learn by seeing empathy and action. How we can show up for others, right? And and contrast is a great teacher too. So you’ll see an empathetic friend, and later go Oh, that was Yeah, okay. And reflection. That’s how I want to show up for people, right? That person was modeling empathy, whether we have the language to identify that or not, and maybe we’ll model and, and try to emulate. But contrast is great, too. Because we can say, oh, man, that person made it all about them. And I’m bringing them a casserole now, right? And, you know, their loss was five years ago, and now I’m resentful, and judging and you know, all of the things, but, you know, if we allow it, if we are accepting of our own grief, then it is just a playground of learning empathy. You know, it’s just so it’s just a wide open field, to learn how to bring yourself in an empathetic way. And also how to, can we give empathy to ourselves? You know, it’s like, how to show up with an with empathy for our own heart, you know, and say, you know, it’s, this is okay.
Maria Ross 22:55
Well, and I’m going to shift gears just a little here, because I think, you know, the relevance to our workplaces. And our Dynamics, as we’re colleagues or as managers to employees, is that it is a little bit because there are known rituals and duties around a death, right? But if someone in your workplace is experiencing ambiguous grief, that’s going to come out in some different forms. So can you talk a little bit about what what are kind of the effects of ambiguous grief on someone experiencing it?
Stephanie Sarazin 23:27
Gosh, you know, it’s widely different for everyone. You know, I’ve interviewed folks who are going through incredibly difficult challenges and layered, ambiguous grief, with multiple family members. And they’re showing up to work every day, because that is the only constant they have. They’ve not shared it with their management team. Because they don’t want anybody to know, they’re holding on white knuckling. This is that stability is the only stability in somebody’s you know, in their life. Conversely, somebody may come in and say, I’m going through a divorce or my mother was diagnosed with dementia, my husband’s just been incarcerated for five years, I need to tell you what’s going on, because I’m needing to take some time for myself. Right. And, you know, bereavement policies today are not as great as they can be. I think there’s a long way yet to go on that. I know California. They’re not as great as they could be not as good as they could be. I mean, it’s three days, five days, California now has a new law which is just been signed in which is making strides going forward, but speak up, you know, because something about ambiguous grief depending on whether or not this was an activating event that happened all at once, you know, a diagnosis and you’re really shaken by it or, you know, a slow progression of decline such as dementia, and you know, and your loved one and you’re a caregiver now and finding care for your The primary caregiver for your loved one with dementia or a diagnosis, you know, speaking up to your HR team, to somebody trusted at work, where you can say this is what’s going on, advocate for yourself, find out what your company offers, in terms of leave what qualifies what part of you know, FMLA might be available to you paid time off whatever it might be, understand what your resources are, and don’t be afraid to use them. It’s okay, that’s what they’re there for. If your company doesn’t have a bereavement policy that, you know, in place, or one that could use some work, you know, raise that flag and champion that that policy to change. That is how they’re being changed.
Maria Ross 25:42
Do you think that society’s view of ambiguous grief is starting to change? Do you think that the pandemic helped with that at all?
Stephanie Sarazin 25:50
That’s the reason? Absolutely. I think so many people experienced ambiguous grief, didn’t know what it was. And it was this collective of other saying, me too. Oh, my goodness, you know, what is this? No, you’re not, you know, mentally unstable, you’re not having a mental health crisis, grief, ambiguous grief, grief of any kind, is a normal, nuanced and navigable human experience. It’s what happens when you go through a pandemic, and you’re isolated, it’s what happens when your relationship changes with a loved one. With you know, when your identity changes, something that I hear a lot of, in August, most years, is parents, mothers, specifically, feeling ambiguous grief over empty nesting. Who am I now? What is my role in life? What is my purpose, I’ve given so much attention to mothering, it’s my calling. And now they’ve flown and this ambiguous grief sets in. And we have to be careful, I say about judging. And this especially is, you know, keen for the workplace. But it really holds, you know, throughout, when you see a colleague who’s not coming in, because they’re going through a divorce, or because they’re moving their mother into assisted living, whatever the case might be. It’s so important that as we learn empathy, we also understand that empathy is not judgmental. Right? Absolutely. And so if you find yourself saying, Oh, well, you know, there’s Maria, she’s taken five days off. And, you know, in a day beats the purpose. Yeah, my dad was sick, too. But I didn’t take any time off. So, okay, Maria, I guess here’s what I’ll do for you. I can do you know, and the person might feel like they’re really showing up, and they’re gonna take your workload for five days. But they’re bitterly resentful about it, because they didn’t take five days. And I think we just have to do our best to understand that. Grief is so individualized, and people grieve differently. And just because Maria’s taking off five days, and Susie took off one for none, nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong. If we can just show up for one another and say, That sounds really hard.
Maria Ross 28:10
Mm hmm. Do you see like leaders of teams or managers being able to play a good role in helping someone through ambiguous grief?
Stephanie Sarazin 28:20
Well, I think that it depends on the person in that position, it’s such a top down. And you know, as empathy training continues in those top spots, it’s a thing. It’s a wonderful opportunity for, for leaders to practice empathy, through grief. And that’s circling back to grief and empathy being, you know, great training partners, because we’re all going to grieve. And we all at least, the large majority of us have the capacity to learn empathy. So let’s put those tools to use when inevitably, those around us are grieving. And then when it’s our turn to grieve, may we be as lucky as to have empathetic folks around us too.
Maria Ross 29:05
So I know you wrote the book soul broken a guidebook for your journey through ambiguous grief, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But where has this work taken? You? What kind of work are you doing now? And are you working with individuals? Are you working with community organizations? Are you working with companies? Where are you taking this work next?
Stephanie Sarazin 29:25
I’ve not worked with companies and I’ve done some community panels, which was, you know, really enriching, mostly one on one and small group individuals who are experiencing ambiguous grief and feeling like they are out in a boat in the middle of the ocean all alone, you know, which is understandable place to feel like you are in the beginning. It’s certainly where I was. And you know, what has taken an interesting turn for me is in the ritual and reconciliation component, which is one part of the process model. One chapter that kind of came from you No healing, ambiguous grief. So this is what ambiguous grief is. And here’s kind of the process model I co authored with another with a therapist who’s terrific. And we were able to identify kind of what was happening in model form. But when we talk about how are we, so here’s what it is, how do we heal? How do we move forward with it. And, you know, it’s, it’s incredible to me to see how impactful a ritual can be, in lieu of a funeral where, you know, there, eulogies are given and all these beautiful rituals are under the umbrella of this ceremony. You know, we don’t have our last witness on that grand scale. So I’ve been working with individuals, when they get to that point of creating their own funeral. Creating what for them, gives the opportunity to invite others to witness their loss, to honor their love, and recognize their grief so that they are able to move forward.
Maria Ross 31:03
You mentioned a process is this mapped to Kubler Ross’s, work about about the stages of
Stephanie Sarazin 31:10
grief, it isn’t But similarly, right, so tell us what those are. Yeah, so Elisabeth Kubler Ross, her seminal work, the stages that she identified are anger, bargaining, denial, depression, and acceptance. But those are nonlinear. Those aren’t meant to be we bounce it, I’ve done work exactly. And, and worth noting is that just two years ago, David Kessler added meaning to that group as well with the permission of the Kubler Ross family. And what I found in my surveys and my research, absolutely, these emotions are experienced for somebody with ambiguous grief with an ambiguous grief as well. However, there was one wily emotion that kept popping up Maria and I couldn’t quite name it, but I could see it. And I would see it in myself, and I would see it in others. And I couldn’t quite name it until I recognized it as hoped and so forth. And
Maria Ross 32:17
I totally thought you were gonna say shame, but no, so Okay, great, right.
Stephanie Sarazin 32:21
Yeah. So hope shows up for an ambiguous Griever in a couple of different ways. You know, if you think about if we were grieving the loss of our loved one to a physical death, nobody is hoping that they’re going to ring the doorbell and show up on our doorstep, ever. That would be very frightening. Nobody is hoping for that. But for an ambiguous scraper for that mother whose child is addicted and on the streets? Yes, you better believe those parents are hoping for their child to return return, right? So for the the child caring for their parents with a traumatic brain injury or dementia or Alzheimer’s, hoping for a cure, right? And all of these different activating events that I named, there’s hope, because the person is still alive. And so we are hoping they come back to us right now, the problem with that is that hope kind of plays the role of a double agent. It’s good, and it’s not so good. And this is tricky, because we know hope to be a wonderful, glorious thing that we need. And I always say don’t misunderstand me, I get it. Hope is a wonderful thing. It is a virtue it is. It’s something that I want for everybody. Emily Dickinson, I love her one of her most famous works is Hope is the Thing With Feathers that perches in the soul and sings the song without the words and never stops at all. Oh, well, that’s just so light and beautiful. And who doesn’t want something perched within us that, you know, sings the words are things the tune without the words and never stops at all. And it’s this beautiful, you know, image of a Cinderella bluebirds that comes to mind for an ambiguous Griever that sees that bird that never ceases to stop tweeting is more of an Iago from The Lion King like the squawking parents, right? You don’t want that parent in our ear. Right? But when we’re when hope is all we have. And we cling to it so desperately because we want our loved one back. Hope in that form is external hope, as opposed to internal hope or we’re hoping for ourselves and too much external hope is as dangerous as it is good because there is in the DSM five prolonged grief disorder, which is something that is, you know, pretty much where you’re in such a deep grief. It’s defining you, right. You’re obsessively thinking about it. It is all consuming and it If you’re in prolonged grief, if you’re experiencing a prolonged grief disorder, that’s something that needs a clinician practitioner, and professional help to work you out of that. It’s like a quicksand really. So by being able to identify when we’re hoping, and to say, okay, am I hoping for myself? Is it healthy hoping? Or is it right? So hoping Yeah, exactly. Is this internally driven? Is it externally driven, because I can’t change another person, I can only change and work toward my own healing. And so hope can be tricky, but just like empathy once we learn to identify it, and we know better than we can do better.
Maria Ross 35:43
I love it. Thank you, Stephanie, so much for sharing these insights. And I hope this episode will help so many people listening and also be able to help all of us leaders, colleagues, show up for our workmates that might be experiencing these issues, and we’re just glossing over them. And to you know, I always say, you know, we spend the bulk of our time at work. In some weeks, we see our workmates more than our family. And so we should hold those relationships sacred, there shouldn’t be love in there, right. And so this is part of that is yes, we’re all there to do a job. And we have a mission. And we have performance benchmarks and all those things. But we also just need to care about each other as people. And if we can’t, in that particular workplace environment, maybe we need a different one, maybe we need a different culture where we can find that support. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking, oh my gosh, every HR department needs to add some sort of resource around ambiguous grief to its bag of, you know, benefit tricks for people, whether it’s, you know, resources, have specific therapists to talk to about ambiguous grief, whether it’s educational resources, because I think, even though, and this is just me waxing on about this, but, you know, like you said, everybody experiences death, and we still don’t do that very well as a culture anyway. I almost feel like many more of us experience ambiguous grief in certain forms, like you said, an empty nester, you know, someone who gets divorced someone who ends a relationship or ends a friend relationship. I feel like that happens more often to us than the significant big deaths in our lives.
Stephanie Sarazin 37:28
Absolutely. And I’ll add to that familial estrangement. Yeah, you know, in a growing culture of divisiveness, families, you know, maybe aren’t coming together around the holiday table as they once did. Right. And so, losing your family members is incredibly painful, and being cultivating a workplace environment where we recognize that these are hard life events. And you know, as an employer, we can show up for our employees or employee family a little bit better, I think is a noble task to take on. I love it.
Maria Ross 38:04
Thank you so much. We’re gonna have all your links in the show notes, including a link to your book, but for people on the go, where’s the best place? They can find out more about you and connect with
Stephanie Sarazin 38:13
you? Sure. My website Stephanie sarazen.com.
Maria Ross 38:16
Wonderful. Thanks, Stephanie, for joining us today.
Stephanie Sarazin 38:20
Maria. Thank you for having me. And thanks for the important work you’re doing. I’m so glad to have chatted with you today.
Maria Ross 38:25
Thank you, everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. You know what to do. If you like what you heard, please leave a rating and a review and share it with a colleague or a friend. Until next time, remember that cash flow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
Maria Ross 38:52
For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access shownotes 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™
Your organization is not just some static, monolithic thing. It’s actually a forest – living, breathing, adapting, full of evolving biodiversity. Often leaders get stuck, focusing on our productivity and numbers, and end up underperforming as a result, causing disengagement and mental health crises in their wake. Today, Catherine Bell shares how integrating consciousness, empathy, and relationship-building creates an Awakening Company that combines profitable performance with conscious purpose.
We discuss what an Awakening Company looks like, how empathetic leaders can be more self-aware and conscious in the moment – leading to higher engagement and performance – and she shares an empathic practice to bring you home to your body in a nanosecond. She fuses compassion, relationships, and consciousness with tangible business performance and transformation – your invitation today is to be brave enough to transform your leadership style to reap all the rewards!
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Focus on creating healthy, vibrant cultures within your organizations. In the connections, the processes come alive. Our beingness and our ability to relate to one another is where the awakening is. You cannot check your being at the door when you get to work. We all have a sphere of influence. You can create a microculture around you that encourages empathy and connection, without waiting for the decree to come from higher up in your organization.
“We need seasons in our organizations. We need quiet time. We can’t just be relentlessly on the go and at the mercy of productivity. An awakening organization pauses, takes a breath, and then something more creative and dynamic can come in.” — Catherine Bell
About Catherine Bell:
Catherine is a successful serial entrepreneur, business leader, and best-selling business author who focuses on awakening the fire within as Founder of The Awakened Company. She’s also the author of the revolutionary business book, Awakened Company. Her focus is on helping ignite and sustain the fire within by helping organizations create healthy cultures through her practical experience, wisdom traditions, and business research. She has taught the Awakened Company process in 23 different countries. She was recently recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the top 10 innovative CEOs revamping the future.
Previously, Catherine founded BluEra, a Profit 500 executive search firm. As a top-200 growing company in Canada and top-10 in Alberta, BluEra was a successful example of the Awakened Company System in action, one that is being integrated into the Smith (Queen’s) School of Business Masters of Entrepreneurship. She now helps organizations develop culture strategies.
Catherine has been published in Fortune, HBR, Profit, Conscious Company Magazine, Women of Influence, and has written for the UN. She has worked around the globe from the UK to Cuba, with Fortune 500 companies, and serial entrepreneurs.
Connect with Catherine Bell:
The Awakened Company: https://awakenedcompany.com/
Enneagram: https://awakenedcompany.com/enneagram-courses-awakened-company/The Empathy Edge podcast, Chris L. Johnson, When Leaders Pause, They WinCarol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cashflow, 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.
Did you know your organization is not just some static monolithic thing, it’s actually similar to a forest, living, breathing, adapting full of evolving biodiversity. Sounds about right since organizations are made up of living, breathing, adapting human beings, but so often leaders get stuck, focus on forcing our productivity and numbers and end up underperforming as a result, and causing disengagement and mental health crises in their wake. Today, my guest Katherine Bell shares how integrating consciousness empathy and relationship building creates what she calls an awakening company that combines profitable performance with conscious purpose. Catherine is a successful serial entrepreneur, business leader and best selling business author who focuses on awakening the fire within as founder of the awakened company. She founded blue era, a profit 500 executive search firm, as a top 200 growing company in Canada and top 10. In Alberta, blue arrow was a successful example of the awakened company system in action, one that’s being integrated into the Smith Queen’s School of Business masters of entrepreneurship. She now helps organizations develop culture strategies. She’s also the best selling author of her book, awakened company. We discuss what an awakening company looks like how leaders who are empathetic, can be more self aware and conscious in the moment, leading to higher engagement and performance. And she shares an empathic practice to bring you home to your body in a nanosecond. What I love about Katherine’s work is she like me, fuses compassion, relationships, and consciousness with tangible business performance and transformation. Your invitation today is to be brave enough to transform your leadership style to reap all the rewards Take a listen.
Maria Ross 02:20
Welcome, Catherine to the empathy edge podcast here to talk about what it means to be an awakened company and how to leverage empathy to build better relationships. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Catherine Bell 02:33
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you to everybody who is listening as Yes,
Maria Ross 02:39
thank you. Bye, awesome listeners. So I want to talk a little bit about your both your company and your book called The Awakened company. Tell us what an awakened company is. And what does it look and act like?
Catherine Bell 02:54
An awakened company is an organization that solves a problem. And then solving a problem does not cause harm to either the environment or to humanity. And awakening organizations, I use the term awakening because I don’t believe it’s a conclusion. Whereas awakened, it sounds like it’s concluded, whereas awakening awakening organizations are like a live forest. They have diversity, they have different experiences, and they’re all allowed, and they’re alive and vibrant. Whereas, you know, when we go into organizations, often we can feel like they’re like sludge, they feel they feel slow and stuck, and not alive and vibrant. Not the opposite of an awakening organization. An awakening organization is like seeing all the butterflies in the forest and smelling that great, wonderful air when we walk in the forest. So it’s vibrant, it’s emergent. It’s not something that static or stuck in the mud.
Maria Ross 03:59
I was gonna say it really it really reminds me of, you know, versus some other terms I’ve heard, which is like a conscious company or purpose driven or other terms that are out there. What I like about that is, is that analogy really speaks to how a an organization, like you said, it’s not a static thing, but it needs to ebb and flow. It goes through seasons, it goes through phases, it goes through rebirth, then it goes through death, and it goes through all of these different phases. And it’s okay because it is sort of a living, breathing thing, because it’s made up of people who are living breathing things.
Catherine Bell 04:35
That is so accurate. And in my upcoming playbook I actually talk about the playbook is like how do we create awakening organizations? I actually talked about the seasons, that we need seasons in our organizations. We need quiet time. We can’t just be relentlessly on the go and at the mercy of productivity. That’s not what in a way Any organization is an awakening organization also pauses, takes a breath. And then something more creative and dynamic can come in. So there’s, you know, there’s kind of three pillars, if you were to imagine a drop in an ocean, so we’re dropping a drop of water in the ocean. First we awaken ourselves, then we awaken our relationships, then we awaken our teams, our organization, our communities, but the ripple extends, and it’s alive and it’s moving. The first drop, though, is with ourselves. And that’s where empathy comes in as like, how do we awaken ourselves and one of the tools, because, you know, when you look at the data, the majority of people are disengaged at work. And that’s a real challenge, a real challenge. So how do we wake up something new, and I just want to touch in on empathy, you know, there’s cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, empathetic concern. And what I love about those three things is they tap into the three centers of the Enneagram. And I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Enneagram. But it’s something that every leader should know about, because it talks about the heart, the head in the gut. And so yesterday, on one of our webinars, I’m gonna give like a real example. I had somebody who was just down in the dumps. And I noticed I’m an Enneagram, type eight, I immediately wanted to fix it wanted to, like, you know, get in there and, and, and kind of do oh, here’s the things you need to do. Is that God Cheever,
Maria Ross 06:35
no, okay. Or I don’t know which one that is. But yeah, oh,
Catherine Bell 06:39
okay. Well, let me quickly go through each type. So when we think of cognitive empathy, those are the head types of the five, the observer, the six little loyalists, the seven, the enthusiast, and you can go to our YouTube channel, we have a whole bunch of free videos, and people can learn more about it. Then there’s emotional empathy, which is our hearts, which is the to the help of the three the achiever, which is you the for the individualist, and then there’s the more body centered types, which is me. And that’s the eight, nine and one challenge or peacemaker, and Reformer. So the invitation is to get in touch with, you know, our self wisdom, our self knowledge, so that we can understand where our biases may be in terms of how we’re going to act from an empathetic perspective. So some people will be biased to be more like empathetic from a head perspective. Others will be empathetic from a heart perspective, and others will be empathetic from more of an action or inaction perspective. And so to really get in touch with that, so knowing that my bias was towards action, and I literally felt my body go to wanting to act well, have you tried this? Have you done this? Have you done this? I’m like, No, that’s not what he needs. He needs you to sit and be with Him, in His challenging in his hardship. So that’s what I did. But if I didn’t know what my bias was, in terms of my Enneagram type, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
Maria Ross 08:14
Right, right. Yeah. And you know, when I did my research for my book, The Empathy edge, it talks a lot about the differences. And when I do leadership trainings, it’s talking about the difference between cognitive empathy and affective or emotional empathy. And then, both of those leading to action, or could lead to action, which is compassion, compassion is empathy and action. And so I love that you’re relating this to understanding your own leadership style, so you know where to lean in, and where you need to sort of watch yourself and tread carefully, or you might not be giving the person what they actually need in that moment. And so let’s talk a little bit about that. Well, first of all, I’m just so curious, because you seem to blend business performance with these, these almost spiritual ideas. So what brought you to this work where you’re we are fusing those two things together?
Catherine Bell 09:07
What a great question. Thank you for asking it. No one’s ever asked me about one before. So thank you. And it’s a brilliant question. So the awaken company merges wisdom traditions with practical know how and business research. And the book was written was published over seven years ago. And it took me seven years before that, to write it. As you know, being an author, it takes a heck of a lot of time. And just now it’s being re released. And so what brought me to it is practical experience. So creating an organization that was one of the most profitable companies in Canada, and also recognizes the best workplaces and my partners and I decided we do things radically differently. So we are doing mindfulness in our boardroom decades ago. And we are doing unlimited vacation decades ago. are doing. And by doing that, and kind of trusting people and doing all these little hacks, it’s all about the little hacks. And I was like, oh, I need to write a book. But how the book came to me is very, very interesting. I was with my colleague, Carolyn, and we are sitting in a dimly lit cafe in New York City. And it was like a lightning bolt shot through the top of my head, and said, You’ve got to write a book called The Awaken company. So I immediately turned to my colleague, Carolyn, I’m like, Carolyn, I’m thinking I’m supposed to write this book, The Awaken company. She looked at me and she’s like, Yes, you are. And that’s how the book began. And it originally began as actually a recruiting book, because I was, it was an executive search firm, that I co founded. And the we were just doing things radically differently. But anyway, when I wrote the book as how to recruit great people, well, well, that got terrible reviews. My business partners were like, Kathy, this is so boring, and so dry. I kept at it kept at it kept at it. And I knew I wanted Eckhart Tolle, his publisher to publish it. Constance Kelo, because I thought it would be a radical statement to have an organization that’s all about consciousness, bright, you know, publish a business book. And when she first got it, she’s like, No way. I’m not going to publish this. Well, I just kept at it, like the little, you know, like, I’m like, the little engine that could, you know, I’m like, I’m just gonna keep trying and keep trying. Well, I asked her probably four times, and she finally agreed she would publish it. And at the same time, I was soliciting opinions from other people like Otto Sharma from MIT, Rose, Macario, Patagonia, and they didn’t know me. So just listeners, get out of your comfort zone and ask people and who cares if they say no. And then eventually, the book was published, became a bestseller won awards, but what I’m most thrilled about is the impact it’s having on people’s lives.
Maria Ross 12:06
And what is it? You know, let’s let’s, for our listeners, business leaders, aspiring leaders, what is the benefit of being an awakened company? What we’ve talked a lot on this podcast about the benefits of empathy to your organization, but you’re talking about even something bigger? So, you know, what are some of the benefits to an organization of operating this way? And can you give us some examples? Who were some of your bright lights that you look to in terms of like they’re doing it right?
Catherine Bell 12:34
Yes. So the benefits are, when we’re aligned with our vertical, like our actual beingness, everything becomes more sacred. So when our engagement goes up, our performance goes up. And I also would invite everyone to think of their organ their organizations as almost like organisms, so that they become alive entities in and of themselves. And what’s been shown is when we focus two thirds, on creating healthy cultures, and 1/3, on financial results, that is where alchemy happens. Now, so often, I’ll meet with CEOs and like, hey, Kath, can you take take my organization from zero to 1.6 billion, like you did in five years? Like you did that other organization? I’m like, That’s the wrong mantra. That’s the wrong approach. Right? It’s, it’s like how do we create the healthy cultures, the healthy, vibrant forests in our organizations where there’s connection, as recently where we were working, it wasn’t me, it was, it was me and my colleagues, we were recently working with a company who had amazing processes, but there was no connection between the people. So our very little connection between the people so where do we focus our energy, creating connection between people, because it’s in the connection, that the processes come alive. Whereas if they’re just processes it, we’re not automatons. And I believe any organization can become an awakened company with the right intention. And with the right leadership, so I don’t you know, I think the time has gone to kind of hold up certain companies, I think we can learn from everybody and everything. And that’s the invitation with awakening companies is like, oh, that company is doing this. Isn’t that interesting? How do we apply that to our organization? I interviewed Zappos for the book. And one of the things that they do that I loved is r&d, which is rip off and duplicate. And I think that’s just so smart and wise, like, how are we learning emerging organizations? And that’s the invitation and also to view it as a grand experiment, because what will work for one company won’t work for another company, and to really kind of consider it visually, our corporate cultures, that’s why I don’t believe in cookie cutter culture. I think our cultures have got to be diverse for us to have a healthy, healthy world, and also healthy organizations.
Maria Ross 15:13
And so what, you know, you’ve talked in the past, about the highest performing leaders are self aware. And so I know you have opinions about how empathy makes people more self aware. Can you share that with us? And maybe some examples of clients you’ve worked with who’ve made that transition?
Catherine Bell 15:29
Well, so one of the things I speak about, is, are we coming from our weak place? Or are we coming from our asleep place? So I often think people won’t like me, I have a rejection structure that’s pretty strong. And so when you can’t, when I come in with that attitude, oh, they’re not gonna like me, I’m too strong, I’m too bossy, I’m to blah, blah, blah, you know, I have these kind of negative things that I see about myself. And that’s coming from my asleep place. That’s not reality. And when I come around that asleep place, what’s interesting is it reinforces itself. So how do I come from my more awakened state, that just being with somebody just relaxing, just relaxing into being, and really thinking about, like, putting myself in the other person’s shoes, instead of worrying so much about myself, really am not that interesting. Other people are far more interesting to me than me. And to come from that place that life is happening actually, for me, rather than life is happening to me. And I think the key ingredients in this in our relationships, and I talked about this in the book, are how are we being heartful? How are we being mindful? And how are we being spacious? So heartful? Like, how are we really connecting at a heart level with the other person? And super interestingly, the most engaged group of people are those who are positively noticed. So how do we here’s a hack began to just positively notice those around you. It’s a simple, simple empathy slash leadership hack. Notice the good things people are doing?
Maria Ross 17:21
Well, that’s a very, you know, reinforcement of a more positive narrative that you learn with raising children you learn about, like, don’t just be on them, when they screw up, make sure you’re catching them doing good, make sure you’re catching them being good, being positive, being helpful. And, you know, we don’t, we don’t evolve that much in terms of those needs from childhood. We need those because we are setting those scripts and setting those narratives. And if we’re getting that positive reinforcement, along with, you know, the thing I often hear from leaders is, well, I don’t want quality to slip, if I’m going to be doing all this conscious work. And being empathetic, you don’t have to, because being empathetic means you’re really clear. And it means you help someone when they trip and they don’t meet those expectations, where they don’t meet that performance level, the empathetic leadership style is to figure out what’s going on for them. And not It’s not to lower the bar. It’s to help them reach the bar that you’re setting.
Catherine Bell 18:22
Very, very much so very much so. And also, what I love about your perspective is it’s learning. So I love Carol Dweck research, which I’m sure you’re familiar with,
Maria Ross 18:32
you know, growth mindset,
Catherine Bell 18:34
the growth mindset versus the closed mindset, that it’s not a conclusion. It’s not just about getting the gold star. We all have gold stars and negative stickies all over us. It’s more about what are we actually learning? How are we present to the here and now with our colleagues. And we so often put old narratives on on people and old stickies on people. When the focus really okay, we’re here together now. This is what’s in front of us now, what are we learning? Where are we growing? Where are we experimenting? And to have that frame of kind of how in our relationships, are we hurtful? How are we mindful? So how are we considering, you know, each other intellectually, and that’s really, really important. When you look at transformational leadership. One of the key aspects is intellectual stimulation, that we need to inspire each other through good questions like you’re asking right now to to get people thinking in different ways. And then how we spaces and that is recognizing that we’re actually autonomous, that we’re together and we’re autonomous, and it’s really, really important to honor people’s individual journeys in our organizations, that it’s not a cookie cutter approach. quote. And that’s another aspect of transformational leadership, which is one of the most well researched business models, or leadership models is individualized consideration. We need to consider people as individuals. So all these kinds of ingredients put together a healthy soup for our, for our organizations, and also for our lives. Like we can pretend that we’re not that we’re working home or separate. And that’s simply not true. If we’re checking our being at the door, when we come to work. That’s a problem. And if we’re checking our work when we come to home in terms of No, that’s a problem to where we are all our sense of time. And we do need boundaries. However, our beingness. And our ability to relate to each other is where the alchemy as in awakening ourselves, awakening our relationships and awakening our collective field. And I do think that there is we’re at a point in time where it’s very interesting, because I think many awakening organizations are feeling this sense of oneness that I haven’t seen before. Yes. Which is really, really exciting to me.
Maria Ross 21:15
It is and I know, you know, the pandemic accelerated a lot of these conversations. And, you know, I’m sure you felt this, too. I’ve shared this on the podcast before with listeners. But you know, when I was first chopping my book around to agents, they didn’t get it. They were like, I don’t understand, is it a business book? Or is it a self improvement book, and I’m like, it’s a business book. But it’s aligning our connections and our and our compassion and our humanity with our work. And actually, there’s a business case to be made for that. And so yes, sometimes, you have to convince people, the skeptics with the business case, and that’s what I did with the book. But my my sneaky goal was just to help create a more empathetic society because it you know, we talked about before we started recording, it spills over, you know, you practice at work, you make work your laboratory, your playground, because you spend the bulk of your time there. But you can’t tell me that’s not going to impact the person you are when you go home to your family and your friends, you’re not going to you’re not going to switch off that empathy. And so collectively, if we if we can say, okay, the moral arguments to be more empathetic and compassionate might not be working for everybody. So let’s figure out a way to look at at the benefits this offers, and it offers to an organization. And what I love about your work is that you are tying it to performance to excellence, to transformational leadership, not just, you know, something woowoo out there that people can embrace, but something that they can tangibly see in their organizations, if they’re willing to try if they’re willing to get curious. And they’re humble enough to say, I don’t know how this is going to go, but we’re going to try.
Catherine Bell 22:58
Well, and let’s talk about this trying, because decades ago, I’d be in the boardroom and begin with mindfulness. And I would literally be sweating, because it would be so it’s it was something nobody had heard of. And so it’s that willingness to try and to risk ourselves and to risk kind of falling flat. Or, however, if we’re aligned with the vertical dimension or with presence, we’ll always be learning something. And let’s talk about some data on relationships and organizations, because I’m really big like you are in terms of marrying all these different dimensions because it, it’s at the intersection where I think reality is, so in terms of relationships, the majority of people, right, the worst time of the day is their time with their bosses. So we have a whole bunch of boss holes. And it’s tragic for the leaders and tragic for the employees, because no leader wants to be known as a boss all and nobody wants to work for a boss. Whoa,
24:01
I love that term. That’s great.
Catherine Bell 24:04
Well, and so the invitation is like, Okay, we need to do something different in our relationships, and to try and to get vulnerable, and maybe sweat a little like I did at the beginning. I’d really literally be in a room full of men and sweating talking about let’s do a centering practice. And then we can also look at the data in terms of our organizations and the majority of businesses don’t survive past 10 years. What more do we need? We have people who are disengaged. We have people who write the worst time of their day is their time with their bosses. So that’s individual relationships, then collectively, the majority of our businesses don’t survive past 10 years. So the invitation for the work we’re doing is there. People it is needed and required to create a more compassionate, grounded world. I am very big into time it needs to be grounded. It can’t just be all woowoo no No, we need the essence, tech ideas to come to life, and how we’re working together and operating together. And that’s the only way I see. As US, the only way for us to be able to solve the challenges that we’re facing is for this more global collective consciousness in a very grounded way, come to life. And it’s all by our simple day to day interactions. And so we can’t pretend we’re gonna save the world. No, it’s like, what am I doing today? What am I doing right now to be of service to help humanity or help the planet? And or help the planet?
Maria Ross 25:39
So that brings up an interesting question, because I’ve talked to a lot of organizations where you’ll get folks that are not in leadership positions, saying, but what can I do? I’m not the CEO, I’m not the person setting the tone for the organization. And I have an answer I give them but I want to hear what your answer would be to them.
Catherine Bell 26:01
Okay, I will say it and then I want to hear yours because, okay, interested. So we’re all leaders, is what I say. And I truly believe and I think the moment we think we’re not a leader, that is the moment we aren’t of service to ourselves, actually, I believe everybody is a leader. And I also really believe that everybody should have a personal aim. So that is an intention, I believe we lead with intention, then we place our attention on our intention, and being very receptive with that, and then we action or inaction. And those three pillars are very, very important. And often people don’t have personal aims. So I’d say okay, what’s your personally, and to really focus because it elevates us when we have personal aims? And then I’d also talk about, are we coming from our weak place? Are we coming from our asleep place? And how does this play out with our self awareness? And what is our Enneagram? Type? And how does that how’s that working into it? So now, how would you respond because I want to hear what you
Maria Ross 27:06
what I often talk about, and I talked about in the book is that we all have a sphere of influence, whether it’s 10,000 people in our company, and I’m the CEO, or I’m an individual contributor, just out of college, and I work on a team of five people. And I have my family and my friends that I influence. And so by adopting the method of work that feels more compassionate to you more empathetic, that is more about connections, you create a ripple effect. So even if it’s not a decree coming from on high, from the CEO, even within a very negative culture, you can create a micro culture. Because if you operate this way, and you succeed, that’s contagious. And people will go well, wow, I really like the way Katherine operates and her how she builds relationships, and she’s killing it. She’s meeting all her goals, how does she do it, you become a model for people to go, I can succeed that way. And so it can start, it can start a groundswell, it is easier if the top leadership is modeling this behavior, recognizing this behavior, putting their money where their mouth is, in terms of the company’s actions, policies, ethics, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t influence your sphere of influence. So you don’t have to wait for that decree to come from on high. So it sounds very aligned, it sounds very much like you’re about the same thing, which is, and I love that you’re adding in this element of if even if you think your organization now it doesn’t mean you stay in an organization that’s toxic or negative, or if you’re not happy there. But it also doesn’t mean you have to give up on an organization. If you love your job, you love your team, you can create that micro culture. But what I love that you’ve added to this is, what is that intention? What is that aim, almost like a mini mission statement. For your group of five or your group of 10. You don’t have to wait for the official mission statement and purpose statement from your organization. You can create one for your team. And I love that and for yourself.
Catherine Bell 29:13
Well, and it begins with ourselves. And you I love what you just described because it kind of showed the drop of the awakened company and the ripples that you just described it so eloquently. And beautiful. And yeah, begin with our individual aim and then get a group of people. And what’s important, what I’ve learned from a lot of practical experience when creating a group vision is something that Margaret Wheatley says, which is people support what they create, so ensuring that it is a group process and learn from my mistakes. So I’ll give you I’ll tell you a story of when we started blue eye we had a team meeting and I was like okay, here’s our vision and I kind of rammed it down everybody’s throats
Maria Ross 29:57
right and I’m like Aaron was your was your staffing firm yes,
Catherine Bell 30:00
yeah was the was the was the executive search firm? Yeah, I’m a serial entrepreneur, as you know. And so then we had someone come in from Denmark because we weren’t doing. We were doing work that nobody else that we are aware of in North America was doing. So we wanted somebody else’s perspective and another VISTA, another country’s Vista, too. And the first question he asked was, What is your organization’s vision and nobody raised their hands. And that night, I freaking cried myself to sleep. I was just like, I have failed epic leadership failure, like, and so leaders don’t repeat what I did. And I realized this because I didn’t get people involved. I did not get people involved. So once we moved from that kind of individual mission, and I believe everyone should have a mission statement, or vision statement, and or an aim, depending on what you want to call it. And then if you’re going to do it with a select group of people create it together. Same with values create together, so the pillars at the organizational level that I used as energize, sustain, regenerate, and to really use those pillars to build your organization. So the waiting company is very practical, and our how to book that’s coming out. I don’t know when but when it comes out, it’s very practical. I also have, I’m going to be doing a whole partnership webinar series with Dr. Deborah Egerton. And that’s going to be amazing, because I think partnerships are the way to go in terms of the future. And this growing this, the growing of this collective consciousness, this community consciousness, I think that is the future, I think we’re moving away from our individual kind of individual egos, maybe two, how do we create healthier collective? That I really think is the future? So the next step? Yeah,
Maria Ross 31:56
yeah, we need that. Because we have, especially in the US, we’ve become such an individualistic society. And we need to move more towards the collective, and the community. And if we can, even just again, one of those things, learning these lessons at work and within our organizations will hopefully carry over. So I love I love this work that you’re doing. As we as we wrap up, I want to give people a very practical action they can take so can we discuss an empathic practice to bring us home in our bodies, again, starting from the individual, something that any listener can can keep in mind? Or can do, what are what are some thoughts you have on that.
Catherine Bell 32:39
So back to my example, yesterday of just noticing how I wanted to jump into action, so the first thing is to not to notice. And then what I do is I do a deep belly breath, because often we’re just breathing from the top part of our lungs, I feel my feet on the ground, then I feel my right hand, my right arm, my right leg, my left leg, my left arm, and then I let my body just relax. Like a body. So that body, it’s like a mini body scan. But it’s very deliberate. And you can do it in a nanosecond. And it brings you right into the present moment. So that you can operate from your three centers. So the from those three portals of empathy, and I really see them as portals of empathy. And to come from that more present place in our relating, and relationships.
Maria Ross 33:35
I love that. And just, we’ve done episodes in the past, I’ll put some links in the show notes where we’ve talked about the importance of the leadership pause. And that we can still be productive, we can still get stuff done, we can still, you know, perform at a high level. But just like, you know, recharging our phone at night, we’ve got to take that pause, we’ve got to be able to slow ourselves down enough or we can’t hear or see anybody else. They’re just a blur if we’re moving too fast,
Catherine Bell 34:06
so true. And just checking in what’s my gut telling me what’s my heart telling me what’s my head telling me? And if you get different responses, that means you’re not aligned. So don’t say anything? Yeah. Apps until you get alignment in your three centers or the three forms of empathy, to stillness, pause, nothingness, and relaxation. Because often that gives the universe time to actually respond on its own. I love that.
Maria Ross 34:41
Well, this has been such a great conversation, Catherine, thank you. We are going to have all your links linked to your organization link to your book, the link to your YouTube channel, in the show notes as well as some of the other resources we mentioned in here today, the Enneagram and Carol Dweck book and some past episodes of the empathy edge. But for folks on go or who might be listening while they’re walking or working out? Where’s where’s one or two places that folks can get in touch with you.
Catherine Bell 35:07
Instagram, awaken company and Facebook awaken company and Twitter awaken company. And we really see our social media as public service. So there’s tons of helpful hints, helpful practical hints on there. So join our social media get, you know, tell us what your impressions are, and share with us your thoughts. So, yeah, social media is the best way to connect.
Maria Ross 35:34
I love it. Thank you so much, Catherine. And thank you everyone for listening to another great episode of the empathy edge podcast. Please remember to share it with your friends or colleagues if you like what you heard, and don’t forget to rate and review if you get a chance on the podcast player of your choice. Until next time on my next amazing guest. 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 shownotes 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™
Are children more or less empathetic than they used to be? We adults, parents or not, should care about the answer since younger generations are our future corporate, government, and civic leaders. How important is empathy to their success, and how can empathy be increased and stretched?
Today, I talk with Dr. Michele Borba about the value of empathy and why it’s crucial we teach character to our children. She shares research that empathy has been on the decline for children since 2000, and what effect the pandemic had on their empathy and resilience. But don’t lose hope: We also talk about the amazing ways young people are building empathy and changing the world. Michele shares the 7 most crucial character strengths that boost resilience, peak performance, and wellbeing – and how they work together for both children and adults.
Finally, she shares practical, evidence-based, SIMPLE ways to cultivate children’s empathy and resilience – and yes, these can work for you and your team, too!
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
We need to be more intentional about teaching our kids character and empathy, now more than ever. It doesn’t mean we need more tutors, tech, or classes, but it does require conversation and leading by example.
Behavior is always changeable – be very clear about what you want to switch, then do a little bit every day to make that change and create the new habit.
Our empathy goes dormant when all we see is the bad stuff. The news that you are watching and consuming does affect your emotions and your empathy levels.
“Empathy, right now than any other trait we have, particularly in an AI world, is probably the #1 trait that’s going to help us raise mentally happy, aware parents, grownups, business people, and children.”
— Dr. Michele Borba
About Michele Borba, Ed.D, Educational Psychologist
Michele Borba, Ed.D. is an educational psychologist and former teacher recognized for offering research-driven advice culled from a career of working with over one million parents, educators and children. A frequent Today show contributor, she is the recipient of the National Educator Award and Character.org’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. Michele is the author of 25 books -her latest: UnSelfie, The Big Book of Parenting Solutions, and Thrivers: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Shine. She also appears on Dr. Phil, The View, CNN, The Doctors, Dr. Oz, and featured in numerous publications, including U.S. News & World Report, The Chicago Tribune, TIME, and The NYTimes.
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cashflow, 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.
Our children more or less empathetic than they used to be. We adults parents are not need to care about the answer since younger generations are our future corporate, government and civic leaders. How important is empathy to their success? And how can empathy be increased and stretched? A few months ago, I heard this force of a woman named Dr. Michele Borba on my friend Adam Dorsey’s podcast Supersite and I immediately texted him for an introduction. The shell is an educational psychologist and former teacher recognized for offering research driven advice culled from a career of working with over 1 million parents, educators and children, a frequent Today’s Show contributor. She’s the recipient of the National Educator Award, and character.org 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. Michelle is the author of 25 books, including unselfie, The Big Book of parenting solutions, and thrivers the surprising reasons why some kids struggle and others shine. Today we talk about the value of empathy and why it’s crucial we teach character to our children. She shares research that empathy has been on the decline for children since 2000, and what effect the pandemic has on their empathy and resilience. But don’t lose hope. We also talk about the amazing ways young people are building empathy and changing the world. Michelle shares the seven most crucial character strengths that boost resilience, peak performance and well being and how they work together for both children and US adults. Finally, she shares practical evidence based simple ways to cultivate children’s empathy and resilience. And yes, these can work for you and your team to take a listen. Dr. Michelle, welcome to the empathy edge Podcast. I’m so glad we finally made this interview happen.
Dr. Michele Borba 03:38
Oh, me too. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. So thank you. So I want to get
Maria Ross 03:44
right to it. Your work is fascinating. Your books are fascinating working on all aspects of helping children thrive and helping them be emotionally intelligent. So let’s talk very specifically about the value of empathy. And why character is crucial to teach our children because I think we think about the ABCs we think about math and the standardized tests, and all the things and I feel like there is a movement to teach children more emotional and social and character building learning. But what’s your perspective?
Dr. Michele Borba 04:15
Oh, gosh, let me count the ways and how much time do you have? I think it is probably the most crucial trade empathy right now than any other trait we have, particularly in an AI world, which is accelerated fast paced, driven, but now we have something called research to prove it. Harvard Business Review says empathy is the top leading employability factor. We’re looking at Fortune 500 companies over and over saying this is absolutely essential. I just got back from Saudi Arabia about four days ago. They were bringing me in with professors from all over the world, realizing that they could not invent something unless they made sure that their students could step into the shoes of the client or the customer. And then let’s go one step more, how about our mental health and well being seems to be at a little bit of a plummeting level these days. But we do know if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic and COVID that relationships and belonging are essential. And fact, it’s probably the number one trait that’s going to help us raise mentally happy, aware parents, grownups business people, as well as children. We just have to add it intentionally to our parenting and business plans. What I
Maria Ross 05:31
love this, and I even I even wrote in the book that I hope someday we get to a world where books like the empathy edge are not necessary, because it’s such a part of our DNA and who we are sort of like breathing, right? So I love the work that you’re doing. And I love that you’re starting with children, because they are going to be our future leaders, they are going to be our future adults, citizens, what have you. And so helping them at, you know, for us adults,
Dr. Michele Borba 05:55
all hope is not lost, as evidenced by my work, we can strengthen that muscle. But how much better is it if we’re able to create and nurture children for whom that muscle is really strong? And what I love about your work is it’s it’s identifying and, and it was thrilled to find all the research and the data around this about why it’s important, but just building that muscle. So as I spoke to one person that I interviewed for my book, it’s just part of these kids identities to be empathetic. Yeah, as long as we stretch it and strengthen it, yes, the problem that we don’t know, I think that why I wrote on selfie is that many parents didn’t realize that the majority of our children are hardwired to care. But unless we nurture that it lies dormant, also finding as a spillover effect, that empathy is actually decreasing in American youth, and narwhal narcissism is going up. So in all fairness, it means that we just need to be a little bit more intentional about it. And it does not mean that we need, oh, gosh, new tutors, fancier programs. It’s just looking at simple, proven evidence based ways to weave this into our everyday living, whether it’s as parents, whether it’s as a business people, whether it’s spouses, whether it’s partners, whether it’s grandparents. The other thing I think it’s critical is make sure it’s evidence based, I’m seeing a lot of things out there that look cute, but they’re touchy feely, and they don’t have the impact on really stretching our children’s empathy or nor ours.
Maria Ross 07:29
Yeah, and I love that. And we’re gonna, we’re going to talk about those simple ways as well, in this in this interview, I often talk about it as as going to the gym and getting in shape. Once you have the six pack abs, you can’t stop going to the gym, you can’t stop working out, you can’t stop taking care of your body. And it’s the same thing with empathy, that muscle can atrophy if it’s not nurtured and stretched, like you said. So I want to talk about something you just said, because I, I’ve seen conflicting research on both sides. And I would love your perspective, because some research says, you know, Gen Z is the most empathetic generation that we’ve had. And they’re they’re much more appreciative of diversity and different points of view and all that. And then there are other studies that show that empathy is waning in younger generations. So can you talk a little bit about that research that talks about empathy being on the decline?
Dr. Michele Borba 08:19
Yes. And it doesn’t mean that generation Z is not a wonderful caring generation. It just means the culture we’re raising them in, is taking down their empathy and their concern themselves. The work came from Sarah Conrad and Jean twing. And I love them both. Actually, what they did is they started this quite a number of years ago, like 30 years ago, when they started doing narcissism personality tests. Barry’s simple little like 10 questions to incoming college freshmen across the United States from every demographic and every zip code. We’re talking 1000s of kids, and they began to see a trend that really started to hit around the year 2000, where empathy started to go down 40% in 30 years, and narcissism I’m better than you went up 58%. And they’re realizing that it wasn’t their DNA that was making a difference. It was very often the culture, we were raising our kids so that they started to look at so what the heck happened around the year 2000. And they began to see a seismic shift in culture. It was really the year where our kids started to looking down at screens as opposed to up at each other and you don’t learn empathy from an emoji. We started to look at just the culture of character, beginning to be dormant. We’re looking at David Brooks studies that showed that even character in literature, terms like caring and kind and responsible was going down in our children’s books. And the novels we read. Well, narcissism was going up, it isn’t one thing. It’s a multitude of factors that’s creating this. Why is it and now all of a sudden, it’s a red flag for us to go. If it’s going down, then we also can take it up. So what do we do? Well,
Maria Ross 10:00
I love that. And I love that perspective of, and this idea that looking at not just talking to people and asking them, do you feel less or more empathetic than other people, but looking at all these social and media factors as well, and seeing, you know, tracing back what was going on at that time, so that I can understand how we got into this for exactly the reason you just said, so we can get out of it?
Dr. Michele Borba 10:25
Well, the thing that we also have to keep in mind is that the culture is not going to change and go back. Right, you know, Mayberry RFD is gone. So now we need to look at if the culture is definitely switching. So to our parenting on our relationship skills need to switch with it, because we are clearly in an accelerated fast paced, digitally driven world, and it’s here to stay. Therefore, what do we want, we want the human side of us all to remain. And that means we need do a little bit more work. When I wrote the unselfie, I didn’t realize the impact of all of this until I started digging and digging deeper and deeper. And I began to realize this is extremely doable. That all we need to do is weave it in and make sure we’re looking at evidence based proven simple strategies. In all fairness to a parent, it’s like, oh, my gosh, I don’t have time to do one more thing. And I realize that we’re all stressed to the max. But what I also will tell you, I don’t care if you’re in a business, or you’re in a home or you’re in a corporate world, these are very simple things. And behavior is always changeable. The key is being really intentional about what’s the one little thing you want to switch. And then every day work on that one little thing, even if it’s one, two or three minutes, make it simple, think big, start small, get your foot in the door, but keep doing the same thing over and over again, you create a new habit, then you can add the next and the next.
Maria Ross 11:48
I love that. So in thrivers, you talk about the seven most crucial character strengths that boost resilience, peak performance and well being and how they were selected. That applies to children that applies to adults or adults, we want folks to check out your book thrivers. But can you give us a little taste? Can you give us an amuse boosh on one or two of them, and why they’re so important? Well,
Dr. Michele Borba 12:09
the first thing is when I began to see I wrote thrivers, it came out, actually the month COVID hit. And I had been interviewing hundreds of kids and I began to see a trend at the CDC said that one in five American kids was going to suffer from some kind of mental health disorder, we’re now looking at one in three, a crisis only amplified a pre existing issue. So don’t go blaming COVID for it all, he was already there. My next thing does to look at what I don’t think is in enough of our parenting or our business books of what really does boost resilience. And there’s phenomenally fascinating research that looking at from me Warner just so you know, there’s real life names of these researchers for their entire life on norm Gurmeet, Z, Michael Rutter, and Madsen who had been looking at cohorts of children, despite homelessness or poverty, or sexual abuse, some do endure, some do bounce back. And they’re looking at the same kids me wonder for 40 years. And she’s looking at them as they grow up and go, Oh, my gosh, some of them did make it now the key question is the why. And what I did simply is keep looking at though, what do all of these studies have in common, and that’s what I chose seven strains, they had to all be teachable, they were not locked into DNA. And it was never too late. I don’t care if you’re 45, or you’re three, you can still teach these things to kids. It starts with confidence and knowing who you really are and what your strengths are. But the second one, in no order, by the way was empathy. It kept coming up that resilient people are socially competent, it does not mean that we have 50,000 friends, but we have the ability to connect with others. And we now know that not only here’s the other thing does that help us just boost our well being. But it also to a teacher listening helps the kid become more engaged and a deeper learner in the classroom. Number three, for a business person, that’s the exact kind of person you want to employ. Because that’s the person who is going to be able to step into your clients shoes, your customers shoes, and create this culture that’s more conducive to the workplace. And mainly you worried about mental health. Even the Surgeon General right now will tell you it is probably the most highly correlated trait of what’s going to help us all get along the happier and live a longer life. It’s empathy. 101
Maria Ross 14:32
Do you see where I lose heart is seeing what’s going on with adults that are modeling down behavior for children right now? And what’s going on in our media landscape and our political landscape? Yes. Do you have hope? Do you feel like
Dr. Michele Borba 14:48
this is like oh, yes, yes, yes. And the only reason I have hope is that I don’t listen to the adults attack to the kids at every single time. I mean, even yesterday, I was talking to two teens and I went oh my god. yourself, you’re gonna save the world. Yeah, they were they were Philadelphia, they were concerned about violence and shootings, one of their sisters had been stabbed at a school. And what they are doing as a project at their school is studying how to rectify it. And they said, we’ve listened to every one of your tapes, we’ve listened to out, read all of your books. And now we want to figure out how do we help our generation I said, you’ve already helped me because there is hope. They actually came up with solutions and ideas. Every single week, I talked to teens, they’re there, they also tell me, you know, we are the most stressed out generation. And I want to mention this, because stress has a lot to do with empathy. If stress continues to build, and you don’t have healthy ways to tune it down, what happens you dial your empathy down, to be in survival mode to help your stress. And then after a while, what happens is, the stress keeps building until burnout is the outcome can because you’ve left empathy, dormant. So notice, that’s what the other thing that’s happening across the board, the final thing is, we know something else about empathy and stress. And that is the news that we watch can really impact our view of the world and our optimism and hope for the world. Our empathy goes dormant when all you see is the bad stuff. But I always say, number one, I finally did something profound, and subscribe to a newspaper. Because all of the research was telling me if I watch the videos and the late breaking news, they’re the reason why the reporters will say, We warn you that the now it’s I like rats, and they are what they actually do is take your empathy and your optimism down your newspaper, read it because and read it with your kids expose them to the world, but it’s less graphic and less damaging to your empathy. The next thing is I always tell I don’t care if you’re again 93. Or you’re dealing with a five year old, cut out the good stuff that’s happening in the world is on the back pages of the newspaper. And it’s called good news. I talked to two teens a day or so tired of the dismal news. They convinced their superintendent, this is in Long Island to put a plasma TV as you walk in the front door. I said What the heck are you watching on TV says don’t worry about Dr. Ball are about watching Good stuff. She’s putting good news videos. So every day when we walk in, we just walk in, we look up, we put our arms around each other thumbs up, keep on going. Because it’s news about crisises. I don’t care what the crisis is. But there’s always in a crisis, the good stuff of people, and we never see the good, we only see the dismal. That’s one thing we got to do for our empathy. And it’s real simple. Watch what you view. Be selective. Middle school kids say that that late breaking news is the scariest thing that’s happening to them if there’s not an adult there to watch it. But it’s also the scariest thing that’s happening to the grown ups to Oh,
Maria Ross 17:47
completely. And I did a I did an interview with Gina Valaria that I’ll link to in the show notes where we talked about the state of journalism and the role of empathy in journalism. And that was another big part of the finding, obviously, bad news and fear drives ratings. And so that’s why you see so much of this drives eyeballs, it drives clicks. And so it’s a game for US companies. But if you are if you are more intentional and thoughtful about where what you consume, and the sources from where you consume it, yes, you actually can strengthen those ties strengthen those that that feeling of community with other people, and not feel so like, well, it’s every man for themselves or every person for themselves. Look at the thriver
Dr. Michele Borba 18:27
traits, there’s seven of them. We talked about competence, we talked about empathy. Number seven is optimism and hope. Empathy and optimism today together are real change makers. But if you’re only seeing the doom and gloom, it’s going to take your empathy down. So that’s why if you pair any of these character strengths together, you it creates what I call a multiplier effect. I always thought one trade alone was gonna do it, when I realized empathy by itself doesn’t help. But number three of the seven traits of self control, if I can find ways to reduce my stress, it’s going to keep my empathy open, that’s going to help me be healthier, as well as relate better to others. It’s always two together, Curiosity is number five. If you’ve got empathy and curiosity, you are a change maker be crazy, because it’s going to keep you open to ideas and possibilities. I always tell kids, you don’t have to agree with what the person is saying. But try to hear where they’re coming from.
Maria Ross 19:23
Right try to understand their context. Yeah, I will step into their shoes and
Dr. Michele Borba 19:27
be a little bit more aware of where they’re coming from an empathy by itself or appear in Lagos or a business person that can’t possibly agree with where he’s coming from. Right. Right. But you can do a deep canvassing, which means try to find one thing that’s common. If you are a struggling student. You want somebody to empathize with you. But the kid who’s a straight A student is not going to empathize with a struggling kid. So you did you flip it a little more and you go, Okay, well, let’s stretch that think of one moment that you did struggle, maybe it’s when you took the dance class. Or maybe you weren’t so good at art, there’s where you struggled. And that’s the same struggle that that kid is facing, but he’s facing because of his math class. Now, all of a sudden, it opens it up. And then you can do the same thing, as a business person, or as a parent, you may not be able to step into the shoes right away with that with your child, or your spouse, or your, you know, your business associate, then dig a little deeper, do a little more canvassing, try to come with one commonality and it’ll start you being able to come to grips with, I guess we’re a little more together. And with
Maria Ross 20:42
absolutely, it’s stating those obvious, common shared goals, I often talk in my workshops, when you I’m saying you’re having a contentious conversation with someone or you have to work on a project with someone who you don’t agree with. First of all, the goal of the conversation doesn’t always have to be conversion to my point of view, it can be just understanding what the other person’s context is, and say, I still don’t agree with you. But I do understand now where you’re coming from. And then you can find common ground and stating that common ground out loud, even if it’s completely obvious, we’re both here, because we don’t want to get fired tomorrow, right? Like, can we agree that we’re both on the same team, right, answer that. And so it’s those little moments of finding that commonality. That just, I feel like change the tenor of the conversation and the exchange, so that you can start to put your defenses down, and not say, I have to be right, and here’s why you’re wrong, and, you know, pushing against each other all the time. So I think that’s, you know, I spend a lot of my time busting myths within the workplace, that empathy is not agreeing with people. It’s not caving in to crazy demands. And it’s not even just being nice. That’s not the same thing as empathy. So I love what you’re saying about this idea and applying this to children. And I do want to give another shout out to a past episode, I did that I will also link in the show notes with Eric Dawson, the founder of peace first, which is a global nonprofit devoted to empowering youth changemakers, to come up with their own solutions and build their own projects in their community. And he often talks about the fact that, you know, when you’re looking for solutions to problems in the community, ask the young people, they have the ideas,
Dr. Michele Borba 22:16
because they’re all i Listen, I have ever Dawson’s work, I’ve worked with him in the past. And when we look at a thrivers. And we look at a kid who has resilience, the commonality to me when you say what that driver is a kid who has agency, he does it on his own. It’s not a kid who’s waiting for mom to rescue me or dad to do it for me. And one of the best ways you can develop agency is Be the change maker, find the project that drives you just like I was talking to the two kids last night, they were passionate about figuring out how to solve a violence in schools, because it had driven them their own sister was attack. So there’s where your purpose and your passion is. Your purpose is what also drives your confidence level. That’s number one, see, all those traits start to work together, they really do have a spillover effect. And in the end, what you have is a child who thinks we not me, because not there to say I can make a difference of the world. And there’s no better stress reducer than you go, I got this, I can do it. raves will only begin to see I can make a change.
Maria Ross 23:22
Right? I can be in control of the situation. Yeah. So that leads me and this is a great segue into the last question and one I personally am interested in as the mom to a nine year old boy, who I keep trying to get to see other perspectives and get involved and find projects, things like that. What are some, as you said, practical evidence based simple ways to cultivate children’s empathy and resilience. But we know we’re also talking about adults as well. Oh, absolutely. Let’s look at let’s look at what are a few of those. Yeah, well, the number one is
Dr. Michele Borba 23:53
what’s the gateway to empathy, and its emotional literacy. You can’t feel with somebody else unless you go, he looks sad, and she sounds frustrated and he looks upset. So the first natural thing to do not at six o’clock when you’re doing motional literacy, but weaving it in is to naturally talk feelings far more with your kids. As you watch inside out as you read a book, how would you feel if that happened to you? You start with a How would you feel? What does he What would you need? What does he do? And then you can switch that up a notch? I love Martin Hoffman’s work, because he said once you ask the How would you feel and what would you need? You take it up a notch and that is what does he need? How does he feel? What can you do and you’re now on a different level. Inductive discipline seems to be highly correlated to raising children who are more empathetic and also better behaved. Every time your child crosses over the line is your wonderful moment. I don’t care if your child has a toddler routine to say an inductive discipline is I’m really upset with that particular behavior. Behavior, not the trial, because in this house, he is Here’s what we expect, remember our rules? How would that other kids feel that you did that? So what are you going to do differently next time? Timeout doesn’t work, because you’re not talking about what are you going to do differently next time. But if you draw the empathy towards your discipline, Martin Hoffman says, from 40 years of research, you actually have a child beginning to think a little stronger and get into the shoes of the other. Here’s another one, this is York University. Read, read, and don’t stop reading to your children. Or get yourself into a literary book club, or just read good literary fiction. And I’m not talking 50 Shades of Grey, on out all the light, you cannot see our Belcanto they have found that when you adults get into the shoes of someone else, what begins to happen is your own empathy levels go up. But you can do the same thing. Ask yourself as we if you are a parent, why do you think that children love the book, wonder and Harry Potter better than any other books out there, because they’re very empathy driven. And it’s helping a child step outside his shoes into the shoes of others. Here’s another tip, there are so many tips, don’t try them all. Or your kid will never let you lead listen to another podcast. But go one step at a time that you’re more likely to empathize with those like you, my race, my gender, my age, my culture, what we’ve got to do if we want we kind of thinkers is helped stretch our kids too. If you’re reading books, and you’re you’ve got a son, and make sure that those books also have a different gender. If you have a you are Catholic, and make sure you’re exposing your kids do to Jews or Muslims step outside different food groups, different museums are wonderful, because they’re emotive, you can go to so many wonderful museums, and you can actually step into the shoes of someone, Mike, my favorite museum that every year, I’m in Washington, DC, I go to the Holocaust Museum. And I do it because one, one room that’s called Daniels row, I go to that room each time, I already know what’s going to be in it. I go there to follow kids who haven’t been through the museum and watch them physically change and what they’ve created. As for children walking through that museum, they don’t understand what it was like to be Jewish and live during the Holocaust. And so the whole museum is set up looking like it’s Daniel, he’s about your age. And here’s his room. And here’s his toys. And here’s his classmates. The first thing is, it’s quiet and you begin to go, Oh, he’s just like me, he reads the same stop, he’s got the same bed, he’s got the same thing. And now all of a sudden, you keep on walking in. Now there are signs that say no Jews allowed and you begin to go, Dan is not being treated fairly, until you go to the next room. And there’s Oh, Daniels told to pack up until at the very end, it’s quite a distance. The whole museum gets colder. This the lighting gets down. And now you’re at the Holocaust. And every single time I hear kids in front of me start to shutter, oh, my gosh, Daniel didn’t go there, Diddy, they start to hold on to each other. There’s Kleenex and the kids start to cry. And the last room is pencil and paper, write a note to Daniel. And every single time kids go, Daniel, this should never have happened. Not on my watch. It won’t happen again, Daniel, I’m there for you. And what happens is kids begin to step into something outside themselves, they begin to see a different view and they want to make a change. That’s what we need to do. I’m not saying you have to go to a museum, right. But I am saying we need to expose our kids to differences. And we need to expose ourselves to differences, right? We also finally need to be aware of the people we’re around and examples. Because one of the best ways to cultivate empathy. I learned this from looking at phenomenal research from Samuel holiner. He looked at people who are all through us. And he found three things, what creates a real owl turret? How about Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust? Three things they all said, I was raised to either have empathy or social responsibility. But in my home, there was always examples of it. I watched my mom or dad and they showed and demonstrated kindness or your children seeing that in you or in others. It was expected in my home that you are expected to be kind is that your expectation? Or is that expectation in your business. And third is their worst experiences. I didn’t start by trying to save a life. My parents said let’s bake some cookies for the neighbor next door. Or let’s give a quote to the man who’s homeless down the end of the street. And it was always the look in the person’s eyes of gratitude that I said I had to do it again and again. And what you do is you create a little change maker, and it’s not too late for any of us simple little things we can do to make a difference in the world.
Maria Ross 29:53
I love it. Thank you so much, Michelle, for your insights today and for spending some time with us. Talking about these valuable lessons of how to teach children empathy. But as I said, we also can learn from this ourselves. And it’s never too late to strengthen that empathy muscle, even if it’s atrophied a bit, depending on your upbringing, or your job environment, or wherever you’ve been. So, thank you so much. I hope everyone will check out the books thrivers and unselfie. I’ll have links in the show notes. I’ll have all your contact links in the show notes as well. But for anyone listening to us on the go, where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your world?
Dr. Michele Borba 30:31
Well, thank you for that my web. I’m Michele Borba. I’m a one Alma shell and my last name Bordeaux. Right. So just go to Michele borba.com. And you’ll find dozens of lengths videos and handouts that you can
Maria Ross 30:43
use. And we will have a link to that to one hour. Michelle, I love it. Thank you so much for your time today. You’re welcome. 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 and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, remember that cash flow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
Maria Ross 31:13
For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access shownotes 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™
The data show that diverse leadership teams and inclusive cultures deliver better performance and engagement. So why are so many diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) initiatives stalling out? My guest today, Cynthia Owyoung, shares where mistakes are being made and whether public pledges of anti-racism support and proposed changes to corporate culture have made a difference. We discuss what brought Cynthia to this work and how her experiences as a Chinese-American shaped her perspective. We also talk about the real-world challenges of DEI initiatives she outlines in her book, why change is hard even with good intentions, and the backlash certain company leaders have publicly had against DEI initiatives. We also explore whether the public commitments made after George Floyd’s 2020 murder have really made a difference to corporate culture.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Be the person who opens the doors to opportunities for others.
We are all human. Most humans are not able to compartmentalize life events from work. Leaders need to acknowledge that and not be afraid to have the tough conversations.
You need to keep your DEIB long-term goals in mind as you make the smaller, everyday goals. Without that, you will sabotage your DEIB goals without meaning to.
“It takes commitment and discipline. A lot of people can be committed, but they don’t necessarily follow through with the discipline to implement. That’s where it all can fall down because strategies are nothing without action.” — Cynthia Owyoung
About Cynthia Owyoung, Founder, Breaking Glass Forums, AuthorofAll are Welcome
Cynthia Owyoung is the author of All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion that Delivers Results, a playbook for driving progress in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) inside organizations. She has established and led DEIB initiatives for 20 years as an executive at organizations across tech, media and financial services, including Robinhood, Charles Schwab and Yahoo!. In addition, Cynthia founded Breaking Glass Forums, a boutique agency developing strategies to accelerate diverse leadership and inclusive organizations. Entrepreneur Magazine recognized Cynthia as a 100 Women of Impact in 2021.
Prior to her work in human resources, Cynthia built a decade-long career as a Brand Strategist for leading global brands and advertising agencies, developing campaigns for Microsoft, Levi Strauss, and Apple. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for AbilityPath, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering people with special needs to achieve their full potential. She earned an MBA in organizational behavior from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and Bachelor’s degrees in marketing, finance and psychology from UC Berkeley.
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.
Maria Ross 01:35
The data show that diverse leadership teams and inclusive cultures deliver better performance and engagement. So why are so many diversity equity inclusion and belonging or D ay b initiatives stalling out, many companies ramped up initiatives pledging to improve hiring practices and they even hired C suite leaders to create cultures of inclusion in recent years. But have we made progress? My guest today, Cynthia Oh Jung shares where mistakes are being made. And whether public pledges of anti racism support and proposed changes to corporate culture have made a difference. Cynthia is the author of all our welcome how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results, a playbook for driving progress in D E, IB. From the perspective of those in the trenches doing the work. She’s established and led de IB initiatives for 20 years as an executive at organizations across tech, media and financial services, including Robin Hood, Charles Schwab and Yahoo. In addition, Cynthia founded breaking glass forums, a boutique agency developing strategies to accelerate diverse leadership and inclusive organizations. Entrepreneur Magazine recognized Cynthia as a 100 Women of impact in 2021. We discuss what brought Cynthia to this work and how her own experiences as a Chinese American shaped her perspective. We also talk about the real world challenges of dei initiatives, which she outlines in the book, why change is hard, even with good intentions, and the backlash certain company leaders have publicly had against dei initiatives. We also explore whether the public commitments made after George Floyd’s 2020 murder have really made a difference in corporate culture. Such a juicy episode, take a listen. Big Welcome to Cynthia. Oh Jung, thank you so much for joining us on the empathy edge podcast today to talk about all things, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
Cynthia Owyoung 03:39
I’m so happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Maria Ross 03:42
Well, and I’ve been very eager to have this conversation with you after you came on my radar through a mutual friend. And I attended one of your breaking glass forums, summits, which was amazing to hear from leaders and women of color talking about their experiences, and, you know, attending as a silent ally, to just really listen and learn. And the conversations were amazing. So well, you know, we’ll definitely have a link to breaking glass forums in the shownotes. So other folks listening can check out the summits and the events that you put on. But first let’s talk about you, you and I share a little bond here of being you know, brand strategists, but being called to this work of all things empathy, inclusion, belonging, all the things So just quickly, tell us your story and how you got to this work.
Cynthia Owyoung 04:36
Yeah, you know, it’s both a long and personal story, but I’ll try to condense it as much as I can. I actually started my career in advertising, doing consumer research and brand strategy work. And I did that for about a decade and while it was like fun and exciting and great and use sort of my educational background and marketing and psychology I wasn’t feeling really fulfilled through that work. And after a while, it got to be like, oh, you know, I’m just selling widgets for no real purpose in making the world a better place. And I decided it was time to kind of stepped back and reevaluate what I wanted to do with my career. And that’s when I sort of reflected on the work that I felt the most engaged in and got the most sort of gratification from. And I realized it was a lot of the pro bono work that I had done. I was working on different campaigns. And so I decided I was going to go back to school, get my MBA. And you know, at the time, I thought I was going to launch a nonprofit. But in school, a couple of things happen. First, I ended up taking a diversity management course, and heard the speaker come in who had that as a job in at Toyota, actually. And I was like, Wait a second, you get paid to help people get jobs and thrive? And
Maria Ross 06:10
what does this mean? Yeah.
Cynthia Owyoung 06:14
This birth, right. And that turned me on to diversity and inclusion as a career potential. And then the second thing that happened was, I have a brother who is developmentally disabled. And he had lost his job, pretty much when I was about to get out of grad school. And I was tasked with finding him a new job, which was incredibly difficult. It actually took me almost three years to do Oh, yeah. And that experience just made me it just opened my eyes and made me think you know, what, if I need to, I could do one of two things, I could either be the person knocking on people’s doors, asking them for help for people like my brother, or I could be on the other side and open them. So that’s what I decided to do, I decided to go into diversity and inclusion, take an HR Human Resources route to that because at the time, and keep in mind, this was 20 years ago, I’m, I’ve been doing this a really long time now. But back then, while the field has evolved, incredibly, not a lot of companies were doing it back then. And so it was definitely like in the Human Resources realm, and in the world of compliance. And, you know, I decided to kind of get into it from that angle, because that was really one of the few angles you could write. And, you know, now it’s been 20 years, and I’ve hopped from, you know, tech company, to tech company to financial services to like doing my own thing. But all of it is in service to helping people no matter who they are, where they come from, be able to fulfill their own potential. Right at work. So that’s my story. I love it.
Maria Ross 08:08
I love it. Definitely, as we mentioned, before, we started recording a very similar track to where I’m, I’m being pulled as well. So thank you for sharing that. Now, you wrote a book, called All are welcome how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results. And what I love about this is there are many of us out there talking about these concepts of Compassionate Leadership, conscious leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion, no longer trying to make the moral argument for it, at least me personally, I just realized the moral argument wasn’t working. And so I decided to build a business case based on results and performance. And I feel like that’s as sad as that is that we have to do that sometimes. Sometimes we also have to be empathetic and meet people where they are. And if that’s where they are, and that’s going to help them, you know, drink the Kool Aid. You know, in the end, it benefits everybody. And so tell us a little bit about your book, why you wrote it? And how is it different from so many of the D E IB books that are out there today?
Cynthia Owyoung 09:20
Great question. So I think that, you know, when you think about the world of, you know, corporate, right, And to your point, right, like you to get anything done in corporate, you have to have that business case, there has to be a reason why some incentive for people to want to engage in the work that they do. And that is very true for the IB. I mean, if moral arguments were enough, everyone would be doing right. And since everyone’s not we know, we have to do more. And so one of the reasons that I wrote the book was because in the 20 years that I have been doing this work, I’ve encountered so many people who are really well intentioned, right? They want to do the right thing. They know they should do it, and they want to do more, but they just don’t know how. Right they they’re worried about offending people, they’re worried about doing the wrong thing. They’re worried about, you know, spinning their wheels, and, and just, they need more guidance. And so, you know, after the events of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, it became like, there was an explosion of demand and interest in figuring this stuff out. Like we know, we have to do better, right? Everyone came to that realization at that point. But how do you do it? So I wrote the book to be a playbook for employees and leaders of companies to understand what it actually takes and how to implement a plan to drive progress in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And I think the the reason that this is a little bit different than a lot of the books out there is because it’s written from the point of view of a practitioner on the inside. You know, there’s a lot of consultants out there who do this work. And what’s wonderful about Consultants is that they can give you that outside in perspective, they can give you best practices and expertise, but oftentimes they don’t get to implement. And when you implement, you run into issues and systems and processes and budget things and like lots of problems that you have to solve to actually get to the outcome that you want. And, you know, necessarily anticipate and so this book gives you that internal perspective of trying to anticipate those things before you actually have to deal with.
Maria Ross 12:03
I love it. Well, I mean, it’s like, it’s like reading a book about skiing, versus getting on the slopes and going skiing, and realizing all the things you’re gonna run into, right. So I, I want to just pick up a thread from there, because there was a big push after the George Floyd murder. That, you know, sadly, there have been so many murders like that the country has overlooked. And there’s been different theories about that of like, well, it was during the pandemic during lockdown. And so it got a lot of focused attention. And because there was video and but there was a big push by a lot of companies and brands to say, we are really going to double down and commit to this. Do you think that’s lasted? Or do you think that the appetite has waned? since then?
Cynthia Owyoung 12:48
And I think that the intention is still there. And you know, in the first couple of years, you saw a lot of companies put in more resources, right, invest in hiring people to do this full time on their teams invest in black owned businesses invest in, you know, putting more capital towards racial justice initiatives and things like that. And that’s progress. Right. But I would have to say that, especially right now, in this moment, with we were almost, you know, we’re more than two and a half years out from that moment. And, you know, we’re across a lot of industries, we’re facing an economic downturn, and there’s layoffs happening across so many companies, and you see leaders having to really tighten their budgets. And because of that, I think they’re having to prioritize, you know, what other things inside their businesses. And that means, you know, when you’ve got a very small pie, right, and that pie is already starting to shrink, then a lot of initiatives in the D EIB realm are going to be under invested compared to the levels they were a few years ago.
Maria Ross 14:13
Yeah. And I’ve even you know, as of this recording, I know, I’ve read articles about the fact that even though there was so much hiring for Dei, full time practitioners in the last two years, there’s also been a huge percentage of those jobs that have been cut, as companies have made those prioritization decisions. And so, you know, I’m wondering, do you think some of the things that were put in place around that time and I’m not talking about the surface things like all the social memes and all that kind of stuff, but do you think that those those big company promises, those pledges, those initiatives they were able to put in place? Do you think they’ve made a difference?
Cynthia Owyoung 14:55
I do, I do not as much of a difference rinse as I think everyone would have liked, though, but I do think that you know, things like companies like Netflix that funnels $100 million to black owned banks, right? Like, that’s a big deal for them. That is something that is going to make a difference. You have companies like indeed, holding, you know, diverting some of their capital to support bipoc filmmakers, right? To expand more jobs in Hollywood, for people from different backgrounds, right. So like, that makes a difference. But does it move the needle necessarily, you know, the the 10%, or more that we’d all love to see in terms of representation in those industries, and, you know, across those different channels that they’re touching? I don’t think they necessarily are. And I don’t think that that can happen, frankly, without a broad cross industry coalition that’s all driving towards the same thing, as opposed to optimizing just for my company or just for my audience.
Maria Ross 16:07
Yeah, it’s about creating that groundswell. So that becomes the norm, rather than the exception. You know, you’re citing all these things that aren’t, you know, are wonderful, but unfortunately, are the exceptions to what’s happening on a day to day basis with these companies. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are about the companies that have backlash against their employees Dei, grassroots efforts, companies, like last year, coin base, and base camp where they outright don’t, you know, got rid of those groups and said, This is not the place we need to get to work. We need to not be having these these quote unquote, political conversations. You know, everyone thought that that was going to be a huge pendulum swing as a backlash. Do you think that it has? Or do you think that those companies have actually been hurt by the fact that they made those decisions? And I know, you don’t, you can’t speak directly to what those company’s performance has been. But do you think that that’s becoming more common? Or do you think that that was an anomaly?
Cynthia Owyoung 17:09
You know, I think that that’s always been actually there’s, there’s always going to be like a set of companies across the spectrum of like, we really believe in this stuff. We want to champion it. We want to drive change, like maybe the Netflix’s of the world or two companies that are just like, you know, what, this is all outside of us just trying to do our business. Right? We don’t want to dedicate any time or energy to this posits feels irrelevant to us. And I think you know, and of course, I’m biased, right? Because I think that’s a mistake. Right? That that’s not acknowledging that we’re all human beings. And as human beings, most of us aren’t really able to compartmentalize to the extent of if, you know, I am experiencing trauma, because I saw the latest news report about somebody in the Latino next community, you know, being shot in my neighborhood, like, I’m, I’m not going to be able to operate at my best when I go to work the next day. Right, right. And I think leaders need to acknowledge that, and, and honestly, not be afraid of sort of having the conversation in this space, I think, I think leaders who, who try to paint this, as you know, it’s a political conversation. And therefore, that’s not something that we want to engage in, are seeing the point, I think it’s you know, about having a human conversation, right? being empathetic to each other, as people who bring all of these, you know, the context that they’re in with them to work like you don’t just sort of leave it? Well,
Maria Ross 18:59
that’s I always say that you don’t park your humanity at the Office Store, when you go to work. And so if you really care about productivity and performance, then you actually should care about this. I think a lot of it is also driven by fear, because these leaders are, like you said, they think they’re going to do the wrong thing. Or they fear they’re going to be seen, you know, their own, their own biases, and whatever are going to be brought to light. They don’t even want to go there. They don’t even want to examine their own ways of thinking and their own biases that they might have. And so they don’t want anybody to, and I think there is a lot of fear. And, you know, it’s so interesting what you said about like, I don’t think it’s political. It’s human because I did an interview with at the time he was CMO of Ethan Allen, Rodney Hutton, about two years ago. And he is a black, very senior executive at Ethan Allen and they made public statements after the George Floyd murders, which in hindsight, seems like Oh, of course, everybody did. They were one of the early He wants to come out and talk about it. And he said, You know, I had the conversation with the CEO. And it wasn’t really a tough sell to say that we were going to do this. And we knew we were risking customers, we knew we might be risking offending people. But it was a risk we were willing to take because we didn’t think it was a political issue, we felt it was a human issue. We weren’t taking a political stance, we were taking a human stance. And I think the companies that get that are going to win long term, they’re going to win not only with employee loyalty and performance, but customer loyalty. And so I want to pivot to that, because, you know, there is so much data out there, right? Like I’ve, I’ve found the data for my book, I know, you’ve found the data for your work, that diverse leadership teams and organizations deliver better performance, and on many different vectors. And also, if you look at, you know, related vectors of engagement, and loyalty and morale, right, so why do so many dei initiatives still continue to stall out for organizations?
Cynthia Owyoung 21:07
You know, because it takes commitment and discipline. But you know, a lot of people can be committed, but they don’t necessarily follow through with the discipline to implement. And that’s where it all can fall down really easily. Because, you know, strategies are nothing without action. Right? And honestly, what a lot of the EIB work asks of us is to do things in a different way, not the way that we’ve always done them in the past. And we all know, like human beings, like we don’t like to change, change is hard. And what we’re asking people to do is change. And so you know, there’s that sense of like inertia, that that prevents a lot of people from actually doing that follow through, right. So I’ll give you a really good example. That happens all the time in hiring, right? We know from lots of really good scientific studies out there, that part of what hiring, what we have to do in hiring is to pull out as much bias from the process as possible, right to be able to ensure that it’s, you’re actually hiring the most qualified applicants, right. And yet, so often, you see people who who go through the the effort of creating a very structured and disciplined process. And then when they’re actually trying to hire because of lots of various outside influences, right, maybe they’re under pressure to deliver on a product deadline. And you know, that it’s taking too long to interview candidates, right? Or maybe, you know, somebody came to them referred by a really good friend, so you know, they’re good. And, you know, you’ll find a whole host of excuses and reasons not to follow this very disciplined process. And then you’ll get to the outcome of you know, I just hired somebody who looks like me. And typically, that’s me being the white male, majority able bodied straight person. And so we we’re not being disciplined about following our own commitments, our own processes, right, even when it when we’re under pressure to do otherwise, right. That’s the thing that we have to do not just across hiring, but across how we promote how we develop products, you know, we actually do have to trade off either time, effort, or budget for equity, in a lot of cases. And that’s a hard equation for a lot of people that follow.
Maria Ross 23:56
Okay, I love everything you just said, and it brings to mind another episode with a guest, Melina Palmer, who I had on a few months ago who had written a book called what your employees want, or need, but can’t tell you. And it’s all about, she’s a student of behavioral economics and a teacher of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics is all about the way our brains actually make decisions. Economics is about like a rational process for making decisions. But behavioral economics is what really happens in the brain. And she talks a lot about the fact that the reason change is hard. And I 100% agree with her as a former change management consultant is because we’ve got our conscious brain and our unconscious brain. And the goal of our brain is to move as much into the unconscious brain as possible so that it doesn’t have to expend itself. And the scenario you were just describing. There’s so many points in that process where it requires additional labor. And just one example is like when you think about talent, pipeline, and recruiting pipeline, well, we’ve always gone to these schools and we’ve always gone to these sources to yet new candidates, wow, de IB initiatives are requiring me to think of something different, and go somewhere else and make new relationships with new schools and new recruitment agencies. And that’s a lot of work. And I want to get home in time to take my kid to his baseball game, right? So it’s just so interesting, because I think this is the thing we rationally know what we need to do. But when our lazy brain kicks in, it’s oh, this is gonna be so much easier if I just do it the way it’s always been done. And maybe next time around when I have more time, we’ll do it.
Cynthia Owyoung 25:34
Yes. Yes. It’s always about, you know, like, what can what is going to work for me right now? Right, as opposed to seeing how all of these small short term decisions really start to add up. And if you don’t have that long term goal in mind, right, and you’re not making decisions that are incremental towards that long term goal, then you’re going to screw yourself over what we’re really trying
Maria Ross 26:04
to do. There’s no nicer way to say that. Yeah. Well, I think also, you know, what I, what I’m encountering, as I get more into this work, and one at learning more, and the learning more is making me want to do more, is you become sort of seen as this activist or radical by other people sort of going through the motions. And not all of us. And I don’t say this, condescendingly because I am that person, too. I’m just on my journey, right? Not all of us are built to be activists. And not all of us are built to just be willing to fight the fights to make change happen, some of us are just trying to go along to get along. And so it’s even a struggle, like I have found where I find I’m having conversations with people, and some of them get it. And they’re the ones that light me up and excite me and motivate me and inspire me to want to do more work. And then you have these other conversations where people just think you’re crazy. They’re just like, why would you make things so hard for yourself? Or, you know, well, that’s great, but that’s somebody else’s issue, or, you know, I’m thinking of like, my son’s school, for example, like, we’re all fine, we have a diverse, diverse student body, and everything’s fine. Like, we don’t have to do more, there’s no problem that needs to be solved. And so it’s even hard when you’re in the position of, of wanting to make the change, when you’re surrounded by people who I don’t know, if they don’t see the depth of it, of the issue. Or if they’re not as moved by it, or like I said, they just are trying to like live their lives and make themselves as comfortable as possible. And so that’s a friction there, I think for a lot of people. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen that in your work, where I know, I’m asking you a row question here. But, you know, have you seen your relationships change with the colleagues or the friends that you surround yourself with? Because of the work that you’re doing? Has that changed the dynamic of the way that you interact with people before? You know, when you are in your brand strategy world? I know, it’s a very personal question, but I’m just a you don’t have to name names, but I’m just curious if that has been part of your journey.
Cynthia Owyoung 28:06
Most definitely. Thank God. You know, and when I was in my brand, marketing roles, this, this was not a word I thought about internally, like in the teams that I was working within, right. It was definitely something that I remember thinking about from an audience perspective, right? Because you have to I mean, in marketing, you have empathy is the key. Yeah, exactly. Understand your audience know, what they want, where they are, and how to reach them. Right. That’s the key. And so I really sort of took that more into like, the employee context by going this going the HR route, but you know, once I made that, that shift into this doing the work this way, then you really start to notice, like, who cares about it? And who does it? Right? Because you see who’s what leaders are actually taking action? Who’s a silent in the room when you talk about this as a topic? And who really engages with you? And I definitely recognize, again, that you know, every, you’re gonna meet people across the entire spectrum. And, you know, they, I respect people’s choices, and I respect their beliefs in Nigeria, but I expect the same respect in return. Yeah, right. Yeah. And so if you’re not going to be an activist, that is your choice, and that is okay. Right. But don’t stand in the way of progress. At the very least,
Maria Ross 29:52
I love it. I love it. And I’m, I’m curious you know, if you identify as Asian American, do you identify as Korean American or Japanese American, I’m so sorry. I’m not sure what background you are. But I’m wondering if that if that influenced your perspective on this work? I’m thinking that it probably did.
Cynthia Owyoung 30:11
Yes, yes, you’re right on. And please never apologize for asking the question.
Maria Ross 30:17
I probably should have asked you before how you identify, but see, we’re learning. We’re all learning. Yes. We’re
Cynthia Owyoung 30:22
all learning, I actually identify as Chinese American, maybe American, from China, southern China. I’m a first generation born in America. Yeah. And that really does inform a lot of the work that I do and why another big reason why I ended up in diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, or because growing up in, you know, my parents have very traditional Chinese cultural values. And a lot of American us values run counter to what my parents were trying to teach me. And so I’ve always felt like I’ve been navigating this line of one foot two worlds. Yeah. And never really feeling like I fit in either. And it didn’t help when, you know, I grew up in San Francisco, and I grew up in a neighborhood that was primarily black people. And so I identify really strongly with the black community because of that. But, you know, when, when I was probably in, when I hit high school, I started to realize that I wasn’t one of them.
Maria Ross 31:33
And then you’re like, Where do I belong? Yes, yeah. Because you’re like, I’m not quite I mean, I not as close to I’m the granddaughter of immigrants from Italy. But I always felt that push pull of like the Old World and the New World, because my parents were a lot older when they had me. So they were the first generation but from like, the 1930s, right. And so there was always that, like, I’m a little bit different from every group that I’m trying to identify with. I’m not 100% Italian. I’m not even 100%, like, first generation immigrant. But I’m not people don’t see me as American, they see me as ethnic, you know. And so it’s very hard. And then we’re recreating those environments in a workplace, where people are expected to perform at their best. Yes. So it’s the same dynamic as when you’re seven year old and you don’t know who you’re supposed to be. And then now you layer that in with now there’s expectations on your performance.
Cynthia Owyoung 32:29
That’s right. And there’s power differentials, yes, that you have to navigate as well. So, you know, I think you know, who I am that background, that culture that I come from, it really has informed a lot of why I do this work, but also how I approach it, because I recognize that, that there are, you know, you can’t always be the person marching in the streets and pounding on the table. And if you look back on Asian American history, particularly Chinese American history, and you know, back to the days of the the Chinese Exclusion Act that limited the number of immigrants that could come to the US and the racism that we faced, right, and back then and still do, because of COVID. You start you understand that, you know, a lot of our activism back then was through the legal court system, right, where we, we work to change laws that prevented that created exclusion, right, than an inclusion. And so there’s just there’s so many different ways to tackle it. I think there are all needed frame. We need to have people working at all different levels to be able to drive change in in all different sectors. Right? This isn’t something that I don’t think anybody can expect just corporate America to lead the charge on even though
Maria Ross 33:52
no, because it’s a societal challenge that we face as well, as we’ve seen the last few years. I mean, we’re, you know, some days, it feels like we’re getting we’re going backwards. And it’s scary. And it’s figuring out, like, I think you said it really well, you can’t kind of fight this battle on one front, we sort of got to have a multi pronged approach to dealing with it. And that’s like, for me with with the empathy work it. I liked the data, I liked being able to show the data and to make a business case for it. And that’s what I’m excited about. For Dei. And you know, I mentioned this to someone I interviewed recently. I don’t really care how people get to it as long as they get to it, whatever, helps persuade because I think once they see, they can’t unsee so even if they’re, you know, I’ve always talked about empathy, for example of like, if you’re a company and you’re trying to act and create an empathetic culture because it’ll give you good PR. Great. You’ll be transformed from the inside out, because you will actually be in the room with people you never would have been in the room with, except for the fact that you were kind of going at it for selfish motives. And I feel like maybe this is kind of controversial. I know it was in terms of how people reacted to my TEDx talk about it, saying that it was like, Oh, you’re just convincing leaders to be more horrible by being fake. And it’s like, no, it’s not about being fake. It’s about actually being empathetic to meeting people wherever they are. And if what they need to feel safe enough to embark on this journey is data and research and KPIs. And that’s like, we’ve got that for you. So it’s kind of nice. And I feel like your work is very similar,
Cynthia Owyoung 35:40
very similar. And, you know, I love what you’re talking about from the empathy and data perspective. Because, you know, I think that’s a lot of what we’re the D Id work has actually evolved to where it used to be a lot of people just saw it as like a warm, fuzzy morally right thing to do. You know, we what we’re seeing in more recent years is that there’s a heavier usage of data, to drive strategy to understand where bias can be impacting how we, how we work, right, and who gets in and who doesn’t, right, and things like that. And so definitely, like needing to look at your data and understand what it’s telling you where you have gaps. And that might be where you end up prioritizing is so necessary to be able to actually drive progress. But you have to pair that, like it can’t be its own thing. It has to be paired with empathy, with perspective taking with proximity to different perspectives, right, and the curiosity to want to understand that, yes, though, that is going to be the key to being able to open people’s eyes and their lenses up. So that you know what, maybe people’s experiences are different from why.
Maria Ross 37:04
And they’re not better or worse. They’re just different. They’re just different, just a different approach. And
Cynthia Owyoung 37:09
they’re just as valid. Yes. Right. And so I should probably think about, like, how do I actually honor that perspective in the way that I would want my own perspective honored by other people?
Maria Ross 37:25
So as we wrap up today, Cynthia, I would love to leave on Well, hopefully a hopeful note. But what do you think will be the most important issue for the future of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives? I
Cynthia Owyoung 37:41
think that getting to equity is the future. Right? I think we’ve gone through the diversity piece around representation we were we’ve really focused in more recent years around inclusion and belonging,
Maria Ross 37:55
if you want it, you want to keep those people. So just hiring them is not enough and hiring them into an environment where they don’t feel safe or seen or valued, is not going to do anyone any good. Right.
Cynthia Owyoung 38:06
Exactly, exactly. And so I think the next sort of piece to that is, is how do you actually do all of that with equity as the outcome? Right. And I think that, you know, when, when we think about sort of the future of work today, especially in the wake of COVID, where where everyone had to work remotely. And you know, now you’re experiencing a lot of companies trying to bring people back into the office, and what does that mean? And if I have a hybrid work, force, kind of plan, how do I maintain equity across, you know, people who are in the office versus people who are not? Right, you know, and I think that that is a really hard challenge for for companies. And is, you know, you see some companies, companies like Dropbox, actually tackling that in a really different way, just reimagining how they work, and all the work processes and all the tools that they use, and redefining their policies, so that people can have a more equitable experience no matter where they are. Yeah, right. Yeah. And then you see other companies that are kind of going backwards, like, you know, the Goldman Sachs of the world. Just like everybody just needs to be in the office.
Maria Ross 39:25
The Twitter’s of the world. Yeah. Yeah, well, and also, you know, the hybrid work environments forced on us by the pandemic actually benefited many groups of people in different ways, people that were taking care of elderly parents, people that were introverts people that were neurodiverse and couldn’t concentrate in a large chaotic office. And so that’s also that part of diversity, equity and inclusion, which is these these unseen things that people are dealing with, and creating an environment Again, where those people can do their best work and thrive is really the ultimate goal for everybody, like those people want to perform just as much as their employers want them to perform.
Cynthia Owyoung 40:10
That’s exactly right. And we have evidence to that says all of that, right and supports all of that, that, you know, when people move to the more remote work model, more people with disabilities were employed, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities went down. And now we’re going back, we can see it rising again. Right. So it’s like people, like you know what it takes? Right, right. I’ve already done it. Right.
Maria Ross 40:39
So what else I know? Well, like, I think it goes back to what we were saying is like, change is hard. And some people were making change, because they thought it was temporary. And that was the only reason they were resilient. You know, we talked a lot about resilience in the last few years. But they weren’t really resilient, they were just waiting to bounce back. In terms of the way they used to do things, that they were just biding their time. Cynthia, this has been such a great conversation, and I’m gonna put links to your book, obviously, just for folks, again, it’s all our welcome how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results available on all the places that you get books, and I will have all the links in the show notes. I’m also gonna put links to some of the episodes that I referenced today in our talk. But this has just been such a joy to connect with you and the work that you do. And I feel like I’ve made a new friend today. So thank you, for folks on the go, even though again, all your links will be in the show notes, where’s the best place they can stay in touch with you or find out more about your work?
Cynthia Owyoung 41:41
They can definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. So look for that. I’m also still on Twitter for the time being at Cindy. Oh, Yang,
Maria Ross 41:51
as of this recording, you are still on Twitter. Me too.
Cynthia Owyoung 41:55
And I do these weekly jams, which are audio snippets are amazing.
Maria Ross 42:01
Your weekly jams are awesome. Thank you. Do you only promote those through LinkedIn? Or are they promoted and your other social channels as well
Cynthia Owyoung 42:08
in Facebook and Twitter as well? Awesome.
Maria Ross 42:12
Thank you so much for your time today.
Cynthia Owyoung 42:14
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a wonderful conversation. I am I’ve been my cup has been filled today.
Maria Ross 42:22
Wonderful. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. As always, please share it with a client or a colleague or a friend. And until next time with our next wonderful guest. Please always remember that kashflow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
Maria Ross 42:48
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™
Porsche and Honda both make cars. They do NOT have the same brand story. They are not selling to the same people. Customers buy from them for very different reasons – not simply “because I need a car.” Your business, no matter what industry you are in, needs to understand this.
People often ask me, “How the heck did you, as a brand strategist, come to now be an empathy advocate, author, and speaker?” And I tell them the truth: Empathy has been the success secret of my marketing career.
Marketers get this. You can’t influence or persuade someone – or build right-fit offerings for them – if you don’t understand them. You must peek into their lives, see things how they see them, and ensure your solutions meet those needs, address those goals, and fulfill those aspirations. Or quite frankly, they should not be doing business with you.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Your messaging needs to be about more than just the product. Your brand story should connect and engage with your audience.
Research proves we often make decisions with subconscious emotion, then justify them with logic.
Good marketing is not sleazy – when done right and genuinely with offering value as the intention, it’s a way to let people who need you the most find you.
“Empathy in marketing is understanding the goals, desires, fears, values, and needs of your ideal audience and creating products and services that speak to them.” — Maria Ross
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.
Maria Ross 00:49
A small business owner asked me the other day, what do you mean by brand story? Is that website copy? I said, Yes, sort of. But it’s bigger than that. It’s not just one sentence, but it’s also the vibe and value promise of your business. Your brand story is not simply what you sell. It’s your purpose and what you believe how you’re different, what value your offerings ultimately give to a buyer, portion, Honda both make cars, they do not have the same brand story. They’re not selling to the same people, customers buy from them for very different reasons. Not simply because I need a car, your business, your organization, your cause, no matter what industry you’re in, needs to understand this. People often ask me, How the heck did you as a brand strategist, come to now be an empathy advocate, author and speaker, and I tell them the truth. Empathy has been the success secret of my marketing career. And marketers get this, you can’t influence or persuade someone or build right fit offerings for them. If you don’t understand them, you must peek into their lives, see things how they see them, and ensure your solutions meet those needs, address those goals and fulfill those aspirations. or quite frankly, they shouldn’t be doing business with you. Sometimes empathy gets a bad rap when used by marketers or sociopaths to manipulate if it’s used in that way. That’s just lazy marketing. In my book marketing should be about elevating the truth of your story. So the right people can find you and achieve their goals or solve their problems. Empathy has always been the key to successful advertising. You’ve seen it, it’s never about the product is it? Subaru showcases its cars as dirty and beat up in some of their ads to show they understand the desired lifestyle of their ideal customers. They want cars to take into the woods on adventures or transport their dog from the beach. And in some ads, they want a safe car that withstands an accident keeps your kids safe in a crash and can be reliable enough to hand down to future generations. Okay, a 1995 Nike campaign that’s always stuck with me, which I mentioned in my first book, branding basics for small business was called if you let me play, and I’ll link to it in the show notes. The ads showed bright eyed young girls playing sports. And each intern said, if you let me play sports, I will like myself more, I will have more self confidence, I will be 60% less likely to get breast cancer, I will suffer less depression, I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me, I will be less likely to get pregnant, I will learn what it means to be strong. If you let me play sports, I’m actually tearing up just reading this to you right now. This ad was not just about the features of their shoes or athletic clothing. It was about empowerment, about safety about strong mental health for girls. They got me as a just out of college woman back then they knew exactly what engaged and connected with me. They knew who I wanted to be and what I wanted to stand for. And they likely grabbed loads of parents who felt exactly the same way. That’s empathy and marketing, understanding the goals, desires, fears, values and needs of your ideal audience and creating products and services that speak to them. But one step further. A good marketer or a good business owner has to be able to communicate that in their marketing and sales copy, in their ads in their everything. And that’s where brand story comes in. Many business owners and even marketers can speak eloquently about the features of their products, but they might not be as connected to the story they can share that will inspire, engage and influence their ideal customers to join their community and stay loyal to the brand. Sometimes this is because we get so caught up in jargon. We don’t speak in the way our customers actually talk. Yes, I’m talking to you tech companies, which is the cornerstone of empathetic marketing sometimes times they think customers want to hear only the facts. When research proves that we often make purchase decisions because of emotion, but justify that decision with logic. Yes, even our most skeptical data driven buyers do this because Hello, we’re all human. Don’t believe me? Check out my past episodes with behavioral economist, Melina Palmer on all the research proving we don’t buy for the reasons our conscious brains tell us we do. We respond to other cues we’re not even aware of. I’ll put a link in the show notes for you. But what to say and your brand’s story right how to say it? How do we even know what our ideal customers really want and need? Well, as some of you know, I have shifted from pure brand consulting to focusing on empathy as a competitive advantage to help leaders teams and brands. I’m out speaking doing workshops, keynotes, etc. But this year, I’m unveiling what I hope will be a signature course to help marketers, business owners and even agency professionals such as PR and design experts who need to help their clients nail their brand story and may not have a good process. On May 1, I will kick off brand story break through a digital course you can take in five weeks, along with weekly live coaching with me for feedback and guidance. This is my way to help people at scale, uncover the magic of their brand story, and build all the tools for their messaging toolkit, so they can attract their perfect customers stand out and grow their revenue and impact and the root of the entire course on process. You guessed it, empathy. Empathy is too often what’s missing from messaging. I actually had a corporate client once a VP who sincerely disrespected their target client base, calling them arrogant, entitled and not interested in the data. You cannot successfully market your offerings to those who need it, if you despise or disrespect them. Sorry, not sorry. Together, I’ll show you how to understand yourself your vision, goals and values. Understand your ideal customers through easy research and interviewing and craft a brand story that marries you and your different with them and their needs to instantly connect and engage. When you finally nail your brand’s story with empathy, three magic things happen. Number one, clients believe in you they see themselves achieving their goals with your offerings. Number two, they subscribe to your community and become raving fans. And number three, they hire and buy from you and tell their friends. If you’re struggling to get attention from right fit customers, you know you can impact because you know you’re delivering something valuable. I would love love love to help. So please check out the details at red dash slice.com forward slash brand dash breakthrough dash course. The link will of course be in the show notes and sign up before April 28th. And if you sign up before April 15. Just use code earlybird to save $50 Let me guide you through everything you need to know to research uncover and articulate your unique brand story and connect and engage with the people who matter most PS this process works whether you sell products or services b2b or b2c, nonprofit or for profit, because it’s about flexing your empathy muscle and communicating in a way that resonates with the right people and ignites them into action. Not to lie to them, not to deceive, but to connect with them in a genuine and value driven way. And whether you work with me or not, or take this course or not. Please take a look at the free video masterclass on that page. To get some great tips on how to nail your brand story with empathy, you’ll get a lot out of it. Bottom line, we’re all human. And if your mission is to have an impact and offer genuine value to customers or clients, you deserve to reach them and they deserve to know you exist for them. Marketing, good marketing is not sleazy. It’s a way for you to let the people who need you the most find you. So get excited to share your story. If not you than who chat GPT can only get you so far. First, you have to emotionally connect with the people you serve. I really hope you’ll check it out if you’re at all interested in crafting a brand story that connects and engages and as I said this works for for profits. This works for nonprofits. This works for someone just trying to connect and engage with people for a cause or a project. So check it out, check out the free video on that page. And I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast until next time, please remember that cash flow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.
Maria Ross 09:59
For more on How to Achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access shownotes 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™
You’re an executive who believes strongly in creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. Now what? Many executives fear taking action in this space because they are afraid to fail in public. My guest today is Renée Freeman, Principal and founder of Freeman Consulting, a DEIB expert who coaches executives on fostering a nuanced understanding of the importance and value of inclusivity and belonging in the workplace. Renée conducts workshops, focus groups, and listening sessions for local and global organizations. Today we talk about effective frameworks for DEIB, visible and invisible diversity, what are microaggressions, and the difference between leadership and management when it comes to people.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Race is a social construct. You do not know what race somebody identifies as until you have a conversation and they choose to tell you their identity. The same goes for neurodiversity.
The brain has both judgments and curiosities, but it cannot do both at the same time. We need to be mindful and aware of the questions we are asking, the biases we have, and the assumptions we are making.
When you are in communication, there are more nuances than just the words being said. What is being verbalized is important, but how those words are landing with the other person is equally as important.
“Shame and blame is not an access point to belonging. If what we’re trying to create inside an organization is belonging and innovation, and all those yummy things that come from inclusivity, being able to create a space where folks can process is important.” — Renée Freeman
About Renée A. Freeman, Principal & Chief Diversity Officer
Freeman Consulting & Associates provides cultural competency coaching for executives. It also conducts workshops, focus groups, and listening sessions for local and global organizations. The company’s purpose is to help its clients foster a nuanced understanding of the importance and value of inclusivity and belonging in the workplace.
Renée A. Freeman is the Principal and Owner of Freeman Consulting. Before forming the company, she spent more than a decade working for IKEA and other global and multinational organizations. She is a Pepperdine University Master of Science in Organization Development alum and serves as Executive Co-Chair of the MSOD Alumni Council. She is an expert in various group dynamic methodologies, including Future Search, and is MBTI and Human Subjects Training certified.
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.
You’re an executive who believes strongly in creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace. Now what many executives fear taking action in this space because they’re afraid to fail in public. My guest today is Renee Freeman, principal and founder of Freeman consulting, a diversity equity inclusion and belonging expert or D IB, who coaches executives on fostering a nuanced understanding of the importance and value of inclusivity and belonging in the workplace. Renee conducts workshops focus groups and listening sessions for local and global organizations. And today, we talk about effective frameworks for D E IB in your organization. We discuss visible and invisible diversity, what are micro aggressions, and the difference between leadership and management when it comes to people. Before forming the company Rene spent more than a decade working for IKEA and other global and multinational organizations. She’s among a select group of professional facilitators used by the Museum of Tolerance to address highly publicized anti semitism incidents, and viral acts of online hate and bias. She’s a Pepperdine University Master of Science and organization development alum and serves as executive co chair of the ms o d Alumni Council. Renee is also an expert in various group dynamic methodologies, which serves her well in her work, and is MBTI and human subjects training certified. If the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging strikes a little fear in your heart, in terms of how to apply it to your everyday work, this episode is for you.
Maria Ross 01:54
Welcome, Rene Freeman to the empathy edge podcast, we’ve been actually talking for a half hour before we started recording. But we definitely need to have a real live coffee date sometime.
Renee Freeman 02:05
I’m up for that. Good.
Maria Ross 02:08
It is so great to have you on and to talk to us a little bit about your work in dei be and and what you’ve seen from executives that you’ve worked with, especially. Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about your story. And what brought you to this work?
Renee Freeman 02:28
Absolutely. And just before I start just for those who can’t see me, let me just describe what I look like. So I am a five foot four woman as somewhat medium build. I have a burgundy sweater on. I have a short cropped hair I self identify as African American. And I’m sitting here in Southern California. I work for premium consulting. And I’ll talk about that a little bit in just a moment. But I do want to do a land acknowledgement. And so I am sitting here in the Los Angeles area on an succeeded unseeded land of a Tonga. That’s a little bit about me.
Maria Ross 03:04
Thank you. And so how, what brought you to this work? You’ve been doing this for many years, you’ve worked with a lot of companies, a lot of executives, on on, you know, I don’t even know how to say it getting a handle on D IB, embracing it, creating cultures that where people can thrive and feel included. What brought you to this work?
Renee Freeman 03:25
Yeah, that’s such a good question. And there’s so many different ways that I can I can answer it, but the one that I’m going to answer for this particular point is just kind of the inspiration of my father. And so I was born in Los Angeles area, but right after the first set of Watts riots, we moved to the Redlands area. And so I was raised around Victorian houses and orange trees and all of that. And my father back in those days started one of the first African American history courses back in the days when there weren’t ethnic horses available. And so fast forward, I eventually went into really wanting to understand humans and dynamics and how to groups interact with one another, and had had a long history of working with companies that were either multinationals or large brand names like Ikea that were global. And the aspect of diversity and inclusion became really understanding the entire wheel of diversity, equity inclusion, including global aspects of how we interact as countries and individuals within countries.
Maria Ross 04:33
I love that. And so what are what are some of the tools or frameworks that you use that have been really effective in helping helping leaders on their personal journey of embracing de IB but also being the catalyst to create inclusive cultures?
Renee Freeman 04:50
So one of the things that you know that I’m a big fan of is it’s important to create safe spaces that are also brave. Where executive skin do you want to call Ball in private. So this aspect of so often we’re asked as leaders to be perfect. Right? Right off the bat. Yeah. And being able to have somebody to talk to and be able to challenge our ideas is important. I mentioned IKEA a little bit earlier. So one of the things that one of my early leadership memories is, and one of the things that I hold with me to this day, is we used to talk about, we manage things, we lead people, and so that there’s this big difference between management versus leadership. And so anytime you’re able to look at and be able to go, okay, is this an individual I’m interacting with? Or is it a thing, right? So we manage spreadsheets, when we have projects, we manage all these different things. But when we’re interacting with individuals, it’s all about leadership. And we talked about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, it’s a leadership skill. And so going into your question, there’s multiple different things that we use. So one would be selfless instrument, circled a little bit back to that in just a moment. Another would be really looking at the entire aspect of the diversity wheel. And so what does it mean to challenge yourself as an executive to really do deep study in various areas of diversity, so that when they come up, you’re not having that awkward feeling of, like, LGBTQ, like, I don’t feel safe in this space, I’m afraid that I’m going to stumble, I’m afraid I’m going to say the wrong thing. Right. And so having a coach is really helpful in that space, because so much of it is those appreciative inquiry questions of what does that mean to you? What did you mean by that, and being able to process that information, both on paper as well as outloud?
Maria Ross 06:57
You’ve mentioned in the past the diversity wheel as a de IB, continuous improvement model. I think it’s based on the work from Maryland loader and Judy Rosen Rosenthal, can you tell us a little bit about that and why that’s an effective framework.
Renee Freeman 07:12
Yeah, it’s a great framework, because on the outer end of the circle is going to be organizational dimensions. Beyond that is your your global dimensions. But as we come closer into the circle, you’ve got external dimensions of diversity will be things like marital status, parental status, things like that. One more circle in are the ones that most common we think of is associated with various laws, or, as most common talked about within diversity. So things such as race, ethnicity, physical abilities, things like that. And our personal identities are created around these, but also the intersections of these. Also, when we’re thinking about these, we want to talk about what aspects are visible, and recognize that and what aspects of these are invisible. And what are our assumptions that are connected to those that we have, that we that they are visible. And so one of the things that you and I talked about is that there is an assumption quite often that race is visible. If I look at somebody, I’ll know what race they are. And the reality is that race is a social construct. And so you don’t know what race somebody socially identifies as, until you have a conversation with them. And they choose to self identify to you.
Maria Ross 08:33
Well, and you making me think of also diversity vector of neurodiversity. And as someone who who had a brain injury in the past, there’s things people can’t see, because from the outside, someone might, quote unquote, look fine. And there might be things in the way that they work or the way that they’re able to meet goals, the way they interact with others in their workplace that could be impacted by neurodiversity issues. But maybe they don’t feel comfortable enough in that environment, to admit to people that they have this challenge. And so I love that you’re, you’re talking about this from both the visible and the invisible, because that’s where it gets really complex. And it gets so complex. I think for people sometimes that they want to just sort of go well, there’s no way to know what everybody needs. And it’s going to take, you know, especially leaders, it’s going to take so much time to figure out the individual needs and motivations and challenges of every single person on my team. What do you say to a leader like that? I mean, I know what I say is that’s kind of why you’re the leader. That’s your job. You’re no longer just doing the work. You’re meant. You’re like you said you’re leading people now. So what do you I’m sure you you deal with executives that get overwhelmed by what they deem as like, how am I gonna get any work done? If I’m dealing with all this other stuff and trying to get to know people and understand all their individual needs? What do you often say to them in response to that?
Renee Freeman 09:59
On my face, first response is dei can be really fun if you’re doing it right. Doing it right. There was probably not a lot of fun, right? Um, and that’s what I find happens with with most executives, right? It was just this aspect of Oh, like, I didn’t know that. Or I didn’t even know that. I didn’t know that. So I couldn’t ask a question about it. Because I didn’t know that I didn’t know it. The other piece is oftentimes when we’re talking about business pieces is we can talk about money as going in a barn door, right, like horses going into the barn, in the back of the barn is the door that you want to keep closed, right, so that money stays in. So oftentimes, we think of things like HR departments as the ones that are in charge of keeping the barn door closed, right? legal departments keeping the barn door closed, so that money doesn’t leave out the bat. Dei, to a large extent is about being culturally competent, so that you don’t get those lawsuits, right. So it’s about many different things. But that is one of the things. And when we’re not culturally competent, we unintentionally create microaggressions. Let’s pause on that word microaggressions. Because oftentimes, folks will say, Well, why is it called micro, it’s hurting people, when the reality is that a macro aggression is something that’s very intentional. And overt micro aggressions, generally are unintentional, and oftentimes, well intended. And so it’s about recalibrating language and bringing your awareness. The other aspect, I would say, before I drop this analogy of the barn door, which is, historically, we know that a lot of money has been lost from products that have been brought to market. And those are products that are not culturally competent. And so when we think of the famous Gucci sweater, for example, this is the ski sweater that had a turtleneck, and somebody at some point decided, wow, would be really cool, since it’s gonna, if you pull up the top of it would be really cool. Since it’s going to be keeping the lips warm, we should put lips on the inside, we should make that sweater black. And we should make the lips red. Oh, my, at some point, somebody should have felt safe enough to be able to say, Oh, that looks a little bit like blackface, that might not be a good idea to bring the part. Right, right. Our job as executives is a to create that space so that those voices do get heard. But also to culturally be aware, and I’ll just do one more example. Because there’s so many. There’s a famous, very famous example of a children’s shirt. And somebody said, Well, what would be really great is to have these gray and blue stripes going down. And oh, I know what we’re gonna do. We’ll put a A star A sheriff star on it. At some point, I’m wearing January, decorative team. Yeah, somebody you know, that’s working in the organization, should your job as an as an executive is to create a safe enough space that somebody is able to go, Hmm, that looks a little bit like a holocaust shirt, that might not be a good idea. Again, when we think of diversity, equity inclusion, oftentimes we think of this aspect of heart, hands. And when we think of heart and hands, and we think of
Renee Freeman 13:46
part of our job as executives is to understand when individuals are speaking from head, arms or hands. There’s conflict that occurs in those areas. So hard people come in going oh, yeah, like, it’s all about the people. Right? And this is the reason that we have to do it. And head folks were like, We want to know the numbers. Hands folks are like, what are we going to do about it? Right? It’s okay to and I think of them as doorways, it’s okay to speak from any of those three, but you then need to visit the other two. Right? So it’s not okay to speak just from the heart. You do need to know the numbers in business. It’s not okay to speak just from the head. Because you do need to know what the people aren’t, you know, is there harm that has been done? All of that as part of executive coaching. All of that is responsibility for your leaders to obtain cultural competency at every level.
Maria Ross 14:45
Now, you’ve talked about your approach and what was really fascinating to me about our pre call discussion was something you mentioned at the beginning was which was giving executives a safe space to fail in private and You know, there’s many different approaches to this work, some, some are a little more in your face, some are a little bit more, you know, you figure it out, talk to us about that component, and how effective that has been for you. Because another thing that you’ve said in the past is that guilt and shame doesn’t get you to belonging. So talk, talk to us a little bit about the empathy you’re meeting these executives with, as they as they embark on this journey that for many of them might be new and uncomfortable.
Renee Freeman 15:30
So remember, a few minutes ago, I said, we don’t know what we don’t know. And so it’s difficult to ask questions around something if we don’t even know that we don’t know it. And so my job is an executive. And again, if we go back to the models of diversity, we would say that we have an executive that that has chosen a particular area, let’s say they want to learn more about what it is like to be Asian, right? My job is to help the aggregate that information, right and ask questions. What is Asian mean to you? What intersectionality of Asian here in the States, you’re in another country? Being Korean being made? So what what does that mean to you? And what is the nuance? So di at its best, is a search for nuance, and helping the brain think through all the different ways in which it is using one swipe to cover an entire group? And what does it mean to have fun in the curiosity? I oftentimes say to folks that in business, we’re taught so often to judge and we did we need to make judgments at certain points. But what does it mean to kind of look at, okay, the brain makes judgments, and the brain has curiosity. But the brain can’t do both at the same time. So what does it mean to be mindful of at the point in which I make a judgement, whether that’s on a group or a topic or anything else, that have actually cut off those curiosity questions? And are their curiosity questions that I can ask in a respectful way, that will help inform my, my process as a leader? The other aspect is having an understanding of what aspects of so when we think of diversity, right, it’s the full spectrum of diversity? What aspects within that space? Am I part of the majority group? What part say my part of a minority group? Or an answer served group? And to what extent when I’m sitting in a majority group, is that cutting me off from new voices that I need to hear? So in other words, for me as I’m just going to choose one of my my group identities where I’m part of the majority, As a cisgender? Person? What am I not hearing that I could really learn from, from folks who self identify as transgender? If I’m not asking that question, and self reflecting, I lose out on all that information.
Maria Ross 18:19
That is, that is such an interesting observation, because I also think back to your analogy of the open barn door. One of the other things we’re losing out on by not addressing this and and educating ourselves and getting curious about it, is what goes out. The other side of that barn doors talent, is innovation is is the contributions that people could make if they felt like they belonged. And so, you know, there’s been there’s been a lot of studies around the fact that like more diverse leadership teams, for example, make better business decisions. Have you been privy to any of those research studies? And what’s your thought on that? How do you how do you make that case for executives that this is important from a bottom line perspective as well?
Renee Freeman 19:10
Well, as I mentioned, a lot of my work is global. And I’m doing anything from executive coaching to helping folks with diversity, equity, inclusion roadmaps, and one of the processes is really being able to show whether that is, you know, what’s going on in your handbooks? What are we communicating on the website? How was that landing with various constituencies that a that we have? But also, who do we not have? And how can we reach out to those folks? How are we reading our website as an individual? So I’m going to pause on that for just a moment. I had a this was coaching somebody who was a coach, and they were projecting out on another group saying, you know, diversity, equity inclusion is really important. Like let’s reflect on that, let’s look at what your team’s website looks like. And the team’s website was not diverse at all. And so what does that mean for us to just kind of sit in reflection as far as our own self as instrument, we use the term self as instrument, that aspect of as a coach or as a individual inside of an organization, all the things that we do all the interactions, whether that’s a facial movement, or something that we say verbally, all of those have an effect on the client group. So as good practitioners, we need to constantly be honing that craft. Because at the end of the day, we should be making progress and not do harm inside the client.
Maria Ross 20:46
They think that’s such an important message of we want to, we don’t want to do harm as we embark on this journey. And I think you’ve probably gone into companies where their previous DEI efforts that may not have been so successful are littered with good intentions. What is it the road is, you know, the path to whatever is littered with good intentions? What are some of the what are some of the biggest stumbling blocks you come across? As you’re as you’re helping these organizations, as they can, you know, as they might be confused as to what they think dei is and what it actually is, in practice, what are what are one or two of the most common ones as we wrap up our conversation, so that we can give listeners just a little little caveat to be mindful of.
Renee Freeman 21:34
So I always say that there’s no such thing as a dumb answer. But my job as somebody who’s coaching you is to help you reframe it, right? So shame and blame is not a access point to belonging. And if we’re trying to create inside an organization is belonging in innovation, and all those yummy things that come from inclusivity. Really being able to create a space where folks can process is important. And as we said earlier, they can fall in private. And you do need a coach for that. Right? You do need to be able to have somebody that goes, Well, I would phrase it like, what is the core of your question? What is it that you really want to know? Okay? Well, you said it like this, here’s what I would suggest, right? If you say it like this, you’re still gonna get the information, and it’s not going to cause harm with your employees, or it might land better with your employees.
Maria Ross 22:32
And you’ve also talked in the past about confusing communication channels. So we saw a lot of this after the George Floyd murder, for example, and I commented on this as a brand strategist, the social memes are great. And that’s really great that you’re showing your support. Now, what now? Are you actually having a conversation? And is that conversation, translating into action? So tell us your thought on where people think they’re having? They think they’re, they’re quote unquote, doing Dei, right? But yet, it’s not a conversation. I know, you have thoughts on that. I have
Renee Freeman 23:09
very strong. So I’m a big believer in it doesn’t matter how many books you read on the AI. It’s really about knowing what to do when everything goes wrong. Right. So when somebody feels hurt or feels pain from something that somebody has said, the other aspect is really understanding how to diagnostic diagnose what’s going on inside of a, let’s say you’re doing a learning circle. If your diagnostic as a practitioner is Oh, like, there’s racism that’s happening in the group. But really what’s happening is colorism, then your intervention is going to be the the wrong intervention. The other aspect of this is this piece of making sure that when we are I lost my train of thought sorry.
Renee Freeman 24:17
The other aspect is really understanding what when you’re in a conversation, and what is the conversation. So we have lots of different this is a wonderful thing right now, right? We have lots of different communication styles, and communication channels. We have social media. We have writing an email, we have podcasts, we have all these different spaces. But that’s not a conversation. When we’re talking about diversity, equity inclusion, it’s the nuance and the search of nuance, and the being able to hear what’s being said by another individual and be able to respond to it and say, Well, this was what I heard you saying, and that other individual being able to go well, that’s not really what I meant. But really what I meant was something more like this. That’s what a conversation is, so that you’re verbalizing, but you also know how that’s landing with somebody else. And that they’re able to give you feedback on what it is that that that that they’re hearing.
Maria Ross 25:23
I love that, because I’ve talked about on the show many times and actually interviewed a gentleman named Edwin Racz, who runs the Center for building a culture of empathy. And he does trainings for people worldwide on this facilitation technique known as empathy circles, which he has taken to some of the most divisive political rallies in the US in the last few years, and got people actually listening to each other. And I went through the training, and it’s a very, it’s a very intense exercise in isolating your active listening muscle. And it’s all based on you talk to me, and I reflect back what you say, without discernment without judgment, just to make sure I heard you, right. Because I could go flying off in the conversation, reacting to something that actually was not what you intended to say yes. And so it’s this ability to check in and it it takes more time to have a conversation. And I know I do these in my empathy trainings, when I do leadership workshop trainings, we do it it kind of as a joke of people talking to each other about one of their favorite hobbies, and having someone reflect back and you know, nine times out of 10. When I do them, the person goes, no, that’s actually not what I say. So we do it like with a safe topic, right? But you can imagine if you extrapolate that out to a conversation about, you know, someone reporting a sexual assault, or someone you know, who comes to you and says they deserve a raise, and they were being looked past for that raise any of those difficult conflict laden conversations, we often have that lens of we think we heard what they said, but we didn’t, because we don’t take that time to stop and reflect back what they said. So I’ll put a link again to Edwin’s episode in the show notes as well as to the empathy circle.
Renee Freeman 27:12
But, but it also reminds me of the work that I do at the Museum of Tolerance, right? So when you’re having these large learning, listening circles, and you’ve just finished listening to all costs survivor, or sometimes we have groups that have just finished listening to a former White supremacist, I will, how did you process that information? How did you hear them, and really being able to co create within the group an understanding of how individuals are processing the information differently? Based on what historically, their families traumas have been? Like?
Maria Ross 27:44
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Renee, it was just wonderful to get your insights. And thank you for doing that the work the work that you’re doing, and supporting so many executives on their journey to create a more inclusive workplace culture. And you know, not just for the benefit of the organization, but also the benefit of themselves as human beings, right. So we take these things that we learned for the workplace and for our success in the workplace, and we apply them in our quote, unquote, real lives. So our personal lives, I guess, I should say, but thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Just as a final wrap, we’ll have all the links to connect with you in our show notes. But for folks on the go right now, where’s a good place they can go to learn more about you and your work.
Renee Freeman 28:27
The best place to reach me is on LinkedIn. But you can also reach me at Freeman consulting and Associates. And that’s Freeman see a.com
Maria Ross 28:38
Wonderful, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Bye, Maria. And thanks everyone for listening to another great episode of the empathy edge podcast. As always, if you like what you heard, please share it with a friend or a colleague, or a co worker. And don’t forget to rate and review if you have an opportunity. 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™
Leaders are being asked to be more emotionally aware and embrace emotions at work. But how to do that in ways that are appropriate and comfortable for everyone? Gone are the days when we separated work and life and we now realize that we can’t bring our whole selves to work without acknowledging our humanity. That can mean messy, uncomfortable emotions – and if you as a leader have not shored up your own emotional awareness, you may struggle. Nowhere is this more deeply felt than when having to conduct layoffs.
Today, my guest, Daina Middleton, discusses how you can get comfortable embracing emotions at work and building rapport – yes, even if you’re an introvert. Daina shares her own C-suite story about her journey of learning to be aware of and embrace her own emotions to create more success at work and better relationships at home. Daina offers powerful and timely tips on approaching layoffs with empathy and intention, and ensuring you don’t ignore those left behind. We talk about why last-hired/first-fired thinking can destroy your DEI progress and designing severance packages that are more inclusive and compassionate.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
We are all human. We all have emotions and feelings. At the end of the day, if you want to enhance productivity, you need to make sure people can bring their whole selves to work.
Listening is the most important thing you can do. Let the blank space be blank space, you do not need to fill it with your own story.
Know when empathy and information should come from the leadership team, not just HR, legal, or middle management.
“If you truly want to propel and move the organization forward, you need to allow people to go through the grieving steps.” — Daina Middleton
References Mentioned:
The Empathy Edge Podcast: Lisen Stromberg: What Modern Leaders and Cultures Need to Succeed in the 21st CenturyHarvard Business Review, “Don’t Let Layoffs Undermine Your DEI Efforts”Daina’s book: Grace Meets Grit: How to Bring Out the Remarkable, Courageous Leader WithinA great article on Prismwork’s site on human-centered layoffs.About Daina Middleton, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Prismwork
Daina Middleton is a former CEO and CMO, and current board member and advisor, strategy consultant, and growth architect with expertise in growing technology and services organizations. She has successfully grown and exited several marketing services businesses. Her success is fueled by focusing on creating market categories, driving thought leadership through partnerships and experiences, cultivating company culture, and executing operational excellence. Believing culture is the competitive advantage, Daina is currently creating culture transformations, inclusive leadership, and company purpose-driven strategies for businesses that wish to create better outcomes for all stakeholders.
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.
Leaders are being asked to be more emotionally aware and embrace emotions at work, but how to do that in ways that are appropriate and comfortable for everyone. Gone are the days when we separated work and life and we are now realizing that we can’t bring our whole selves to work without acknowledging our humanity. That can mean messy, uncomfortable emotions. And if you as a leader have not shored up your own emotional awareness, you may struggle. Nowhere is this more deeply felt than when you’re having to conduct layoffs. Yet many leaders are trying to act like they have it all together or be robotic and delivering the news for worse center themselves in the narrative. Today, my guest is Dana Middleton, co founder and chief strategy officer of prism work, a consulting firm dedicated to culture transformations, inclusive leadership, and company purpose driven strategies for businesses who wish to create better outcomes for all stakeholders. We discuss how you as a leader can get comfortable embracing emotions at work, and building rapport. Yes, even if you’re an introvert. Dana shares her own C suite story and learning how to be aware of and embrace her own emotions to create more success at work and better relationships at home. Dana offers powerful and Timely Tips on how to approach layoffs with empathy and intention, and how to ensure you don’t ignore those left behind. We talked about why last hired first fired thinking can destroy your dei progress, and how to design severance packages that are more inclusive and compassionate. This topic could not be more timely, unfortunately. I hope you love it. Hello, Dana, welcome to the empathy edge podcast. We’re so excited to have you.
Daina Middleton 03:01
Thank you so much for having me. Maria, I’m delighted to be here. Well, I am
Maria Ross 03:05
excited to get into this conversation about how to embrace emotions at work, and specifically how to conduct layoffs in a inclusive and respectful and compassionate way. There’s so many great ideas you have for leaders, and I can’t wait for you to share some of that, especially given the current market. We’re in the current climate we’re in I know, this is an issue that many leaders are losing sleep over. So this is going to be a really valuable discussion today. But before we kick that off, tell us a little bit about your work with prism work, and how you got to this work around culture and purpose and bringing more emotions into the workplace.
03:47
Sure, I’d be happy to it is interesting. We all have winding paths in our past background. And I certainly started out in the marketing and advertising space spent over 30 years there have worn the CEO hats. I even worked at Twitter for a stint. And certainly don’t have the HR background as you would expect for someone to really dive into this space. But I think when I wrote my first book, which is called Grace meets grit, which is really about or actually aggressed me to quit as my second book. What am I saying is about leadership differences and in behavior, specific things like how different men make decisions versus women. And we don’t talk about these subtleties in the workplace, yet they have ripple impacts. So I think my interest about that had been boiling for some time. And then probably the real reckoning came, which is really where Leeson and I started working together before prism work was even prism work was when I was laid off. I was actually fired from a CEO role in the advertising space. And I did a bunch of self reflection to really think about what worked well. In my engagement there, what didn’t. And at the same time, I nearly lost my, what my marriage. So my relationship really took a hit. And so what I understood was that I had begin suppressing my emotions, not just at work, but even in the home. And that had caused a lot of trauma in so many places. And in doing so I had actually lost the things that make me good at work. And so as a CEO, I got to thinking about how often do we talk to employees about emotions in the workplace, and what’s allowed, what isn’t, what’s good, what’s not how to be accountable, because this is an emotional free for all that we’re talking about. So, you know, that I think, led me to where I am today, which is how do we create workplaces where everyone feels a sense of belonging, and you cannot create a sense of belonging unless you truly understand your own emotions, and are able to connect with the emotions of others. And so that’s really our mission at a prism work is to really power leaders with the right skills, the right thinking, the right frameworks in order to do that, and make them more successful because modern leaders have the skills they’re highly desired. And so that’s a little bit about my background, and why I do what I do.
Maria Ross 06:24
Well, I love this. And, you know, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Leeson Stromberg interview about the skills needed to be a 21st century leader to be a successful 21st century leader. And a lot of it is around empathy and inclusion and just general respect for people as people. And what you mentioned there that was so engaging to me, was this idea of like creating these cultures where people can be themselves at work. And I know, you know, in my 20s, as a Gen Xer, I subscribe to the whole, you know, you leave your emotions at the door, and you’re this different person at work. And you’re this different persona. And that’s what many leaders today grew up with, as well. And now the rules have changed. And not that we’re all crying on the floor with our employees every day, we’re actually getting work done and having expectations and setting boundaries, like you said, what within reason, what people are comfortable with. But we have this acknowledgment now that you do not park your humanity at the door, when you come to work every day. And whatever is happening to you in your personal life in your world, in society at large that impacts your particular group. You’re bringing that to work. And we need to have just a recognition of that and just, you know, we can still expect excellence, we can still set boundaries, we can still avoid burnout. We don’t have to take on everybody’s problems and everyone’s challenges. But do we need to work together in a different way now. And that’s what’s so exciting about the work you’re doing at prison work? What’s drawn me to this work from marketing and advertising as well, I might add. And so you know, it’s really just about I think marketers are drawn to understanding people. And I think that’s why there’s a lot of marketers that criss cross in these spaces. So that is just wonderful. So so when we talk a little bit about how to embrace emotions at work, I think that’s the million dollar question for maybe leaders where it doesn’t come naturally to be able to navigate what’s appropriate, what’s not, am I being too intrusive? And you know, am I not being? Am I going to be seen as weak? Do you have any general guidelines for what leaders can do to start embracing more emotion at work and start getting comfortable with it?
08:40
I can, and actually, I have a webinar about this called awakened at work. And it actually is teaching the science of rapport. It’s how do you connect with someone? The reason I went and did this is I learned I’m not very good at it, I think, partly because I’m an introvert. And so I’m not that naturally gregarious person who connects instantly with others. And obviously, even if you are there are people that you connect more rapidly with, and people you don’t so awakened, really talks about how much eye contact should you have? How much should you talk to someone versus Listen, use someone’s name, connect on a personal level, don’t talk about yourself. I mean, there are a whole bunch of guidelines that actually forged that first connection, that are really important. And then once you have that initial report, then you can dive into things like mirroring. So you’ve probably seen mirroring, I didn’t know much about it until I dove into this space. But if you watch a couple sitting in a coffee shop, and they’re engaging, that kind of looks like a dance to me, so one person is doing one thing with their hands and their expressions when the other person is naturally doing that. We do that naturally as humans and so there are ways to deepen that connection over time. Then obviously The key also here is not to be artificial. So we’ve all had the experience of the used car salesman spend who comes out and tries to connect with you and use all of the skills that I’ve talked about in a very unnatural way without getting agreement and alignment from the other person. And that’s not the goal, either. So I think that at the bottom line is, we’re all human. And at the end of the day, like you, I grew up in an environment where I was really taught that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, and it’s all about productivity. But it is all about productivity. And if you truly want to enhance productivity, then you want to make sure that people can bring their whole selves to work. And that includes how they’re feeling because you want that passion in the workplace, because that’s how you’re going to get the best performance. And so, you know, how do we teach and reach and connect with others at a human level. And I think that’s the most important guideline. But it also means that you have to know where how you feel. And I think also, we’ve taught people not to really understand their own emotions.
Maria Ross 11:11
Well, I think that’s a big piece of it. And you know, in my book, the first step of being an empathetic leader, or habit of being an empathetic leader, was to practice mindfulness, because it’s really about your own self awareness and getting your own house in order first and understanding your own emotions and triggers. Because otherwise, you can’t do that. with other people, you can’t do that in your interactions with other people, there’s too much stuff in the way in your own head. And so that this idea of helping leaders, or you know, if I can be so bold, requiring leaders to be more emotionally aware, that is part of the assignment. Now, that is part of the job. And it’s not because we’re just want everyone to be woowoo and hold hands. But it actually leads to better results, it leads to better performance, it leads to more innovation, it leads to groups of people who feel free enough to create an innovate and deliver. And so there are, you know, that’s the beautiful part of all this, there’s tons of research out there that show that when you’re more emotionally aware, when you’re empathetic, when you’re a good listener, when you’re curious, those lead to good business outcomes. It’s not just fluffy, nice to have stuff
12:24
100% And your mindfulness, I think, is a great insight into as a leader thinking about, again, we’ll go back to decision making, being mindful about communicating to people how you’re going to make a decision and why. So as I reef self reflected back on my own career, I thought, I don’t know that I’d ever really told people, here’s how I’m making the decision. And here’s why and making a decision that’s just applying mindfulness to everyday interactions that ultimately create better outcomes because you have people not just guessing what the outcome will be or what the process will be. And so mindfulness, I think goes a long way in the workplace today.
Maria Ross 13:06
Absolutely. And you know, it’s funny, because there’s two things that strike me about leadership paradigms that we already subscribe to as being successful leadership models. One is, you know, athletic coaches. You know, people often will cite sports analogies and all of this other stuff in terms of like coaches they admire about how they lead a team, they’ll take a ragtag team and turn them into a championship team. But a lot of that is them getting personally and emotionally invested with their players. So we see it playing out in front of us. And yet, in the workplace, in corporate, America, the corporate world, we shy away from that, which I find really an interesting dichotomy that we’re so wanting to follow those inspirational quotes of coaches in the workplace, and yet, we still shy away from that personal connection.
13:58
I do think there’s a tie back to the industrial age here. And, you know, I think we have learned there’s definitely value in applying machine type learning and machine processes to the workplace. But if you see the movement today, to your point, I think going back to much more biological analogies rather than industrial machine type of analogies, it’s really how do we take advantage of both of those things in order to get the best outcomes because a lot of our processes still have those industrial qualities and we’re reluctant I think, in the workplace to let them go, which is to your point, in the athletic world, the first thing an athlete gets is a psychological coach to help them get mentally where they need to go. But yet in the workplace, that’s considered woowoo fluffy stuff that is probably a waste of money, and it’s really interesting.
Maria Ross 14:55
Yeah, yeah. So I want to apply this to a very timely topic. work that we’re all dealing with right now, which is, unfortunately, due to the market. And due to the economy, there have been, there have been massive layoffs and leaders are being faced with, you know, especially on the heels of the pandemic, where workers put up with so much leaders put up with so much they adapted, they pivoted, they worked as teams. And now we’re in the stage where leaders are dealing with a lot of layoffs. And they’re struggling, because they were like, I’ve been trying to be this empathetic, supportive leader. And yet now I’m in a situation where I have to lay people off. And I know I’m impacting their lives. I know it’s for the right business decisions, in many cases, not all cases. But in some cases, it is for the right business decisions. And so they’re left, they’re left bereft, because they’re not sure how to approach this when they want to identify as and what they want their legacy to be, is as an empathetic and supportive leader. So when it comes to layoffs, you wrote, you co wrote a great article for Harvard Business Review that we’re going to link to in the show notes about how to conduct layoffs. And it was more the angle of without blowing up your d i efforts in the process, the efforts that many companies have worked very hard to build up in terms of a function in terms of a mindset, and then all of a sudden, you do layoffs, and there’s there’s ways to do that, that are more human and that are more thoughtful, so that you don’t, you know, burn the ground and burn the place down as you are, you’re having to do this very difficult thing. So can you share some of the tips because, of course, what caught my eye is the first one that said, you know, be empathetic. And so what you found so easy, it sounds so easy. Yeah. But can you tell us a little bit about, you know, approaching a layoff with empathy? And what are some of the things that leaders can think about? What are some of the tips that can make for a more thoughtful, human compassionate, layoff process?
17:04
Sure. And I think I’m one of the struggles that leaders have is that legal is highly involved in telling you what you can and can’t do. And then I also think we have all these productivity tools like the one that we’re using today, zoom, which allows you to efficiently lay a whole bunch of people off, but is that the most human and empathetic approach? And so, you know, I do think the first thing back to what you talked about is really reconciling your own emotions around this and acknowledging them. I think, sometimes as leaders, we expect ourselves kind of like what we do as parents to be superhuman, and not have to be affected by this, and really unpacking that, and being able to be a bit vulnerable about it, and to talk about it not to make it your story that goes back to that connection, but at least be able to relate in a manner that makes it feel real makes it feel human and makes the communication much more effective than just, you know, I’ve heard so many horror stories, as I’m sure a few were outlined in the article. And then so many have happened since that article was written, which is quite a few months ago now. Yeah. About You know, someone just logging on and not being able to get in and thinking it was a technical glitch and still trying to work and, and that person’s manager, not even knowing that that person was impacted, because the less was not published, you know, the legal has run amok, I think in these companies. So the first thing is having at the top, someone who was willing to put empathy and connection for people and to understand this is something that impacts people. And certainly, we can do the things that protect the controls of the company from a legal perspective, without losing our humanity is the very first step in this process. And unfortunately, even for companies like Google, who’s been well known forever to be much more human focused company has really struggled I think, in this with legals I don’t know for sure if legals involvement, but that’s my suspicion anyway, is him What do we do to protect the company instead of really thinking about right human impact? So I think starting with that human connection is the right place to start.
Maria Ross 19:16
Yeah, and I love what you said about not making this your story because I think some of the horror stories we’ve heard in recent in the last year, have been about CEOs making all about their trauma and their pain that they have to do this layoff versus really focusing on the people who are actually impacted. And just, you know, going off the rails with trying, you know, I think there was one CEO who was quoting Martin Luther King during her layoff announcement and equating it to the struggle for civil rights. It just really, really bad decisions that are all about making the leader feel better. And sort of like Please don’t hate me, because I’m doing this this is so hard for me. If that’s not the time for it to be your story and to center yourself in that narrative,
20:05
it’s not about you. And I think also, I was coaching a leader on this, how whitespace is positive space, there’s a need or a feel a need to fill the space. And that’s where I think leaders sometimes get into trouble. You know, okay, so no one’s saying anything that feels highly uncomfortable. So two things, you know, really understanding that listening is the most important thing that you can do. How do you just let whitespace be whitespace? And not fill it with your own story?
Maria Ross 20:33
Right. And by whitespace, we should clarify we mean blank space now. Yeah. Race with racial white?
20:39
Oh, yes. Yeah. Very good point. Just, you know, this, you know, like a white sheet of paper with nothing on it was where I was coming from, right. And then, and then absolutely, getting comfortable feeling uncomfortable. I honestly think that’s also a key skill for leaders these days is that we’re all really in unchartered territory. And we need to really get comfortable thinking that we’re not always going to feel comfortable. And that’s okay. And that’s a hard one, I think, for many leaders to really even contemplate.
Maria Ross 21:14
Well, I think, again, it’s that old school thinking that if I’m the leader, I have to have all the answers. And I can’t admit, I don’t know, or I, I don’t know where we’ll go from here. I don’t know if there’s going to be more layoffs after this one. We there’s a tendency to want to come up with all the right answers. And you can, you can admit you don’t know in a confident way, you shouldn’t be vulnerable in a confident way where people don’t think, you know, the world is falling apart, because you’re falling apart as a leader. But it’s perfectly okay to admit that you don’t have all the answers. But you will work towards getting solutions and getting answers for people because you understand they need answers to move forward. I want to talk about also, you know, the crux of the article was all around, you know, making sure you don’t making sure you factor in inclusion and diversity, even in your layoff decisions and processes. But also make sure you don’t blow up any progress you’ve made with D IB, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And there was a quote in the article that I really loved, which was, which said, savvy companies need to embed dei into every stage of the employee lifecycle, including separations. So when we talk about tips for, you know, doing these layoffs are five ways. And you know, any number of ways for leaders and companies to establish layoff practices that are rooted in inclusion and belonging. The first one, the big one is approaching with empathy. But I also want to talk about one that was very intriguing to me, which was making sure we’re designing severance packages. With inclusion in mind. Can you talk a little bit about that?
22:50
Sure. I think we tend to do a one size fits all approach to severance packages. And that might not be what is really needed. So really understanding where your employees are and meeting them where they are. They, you know, actually providing a certain level of severance for so many months served is a great example of that, where as or, you know, firing, the people that were last in are the first out, you know, we tend to think about these decisions and not think about Gee, someone may need to provide childcare or can’t respond that quickly. And they’ve only been here a month. So what do I do? And so, again, we’re applying these almost like peanut butter, rather than really unpacking it and thinking about, you know, what are these employees? Who are they what do they actually need? And how are we going to actually help them through this process in a way that’s meaningful and provide them with the tools and our resources to actually make that bridge occur?
Maria Ross 23:54
Well, and I also love that you made the point of offering severance packages to employees whom you’ve extended offers to, and now those offers have been rescinded because they are impacted because they’ve already left jobs. Right. So
24:06
often, that’s not even considered, right. Again, it’s back to legalise saying, We have no obligation, right to do something like this. So I think again, asking yourself, Is this about legal obligations? Or is this about doing the right thing? Because this is the real hardship that these employees or potential employees are actually facing.
Maria Ross 24:29
Right. And you mentioned in the article, an example of Airbnb, which offered a base package of 14 weeks to all terminated employees and then added one additional week for every year of service when they started downsizing, so that’s very, very generous, and that that could be someone who’s been there a week than their month. Right. So I also think, you know, as a, you know, leaving my brand strategy work behind but as a brand strategist that says something about your company and your culture and your brand. that’s going to be useful to you in the future when you need to hire back up again.
25:05
Absolutely 100%. And I think that’s one of the things that these companies aren’t necessarily thinking about. Like said, you know, lack of transparency, that some companies not publishing who the individuals that are affected, but then individuals actually creating transparency by creating open Google Sheets where everyone can see them. Right. And so yes, these will have long lasting impacts around their ability to recruit and retain employees. Absolutely.
Maria Ross 25:35
And, you know, speaking of the, you know, not having to hire, you know, do the blanket, elimination of jobs, but being more thoughtful about it. Another thing mentioned in the article that, especially if a company has ramped up DEI efforts in recent years, that unfortunately, if you follow a last hired first fired policy, you’re likely to disproportionately impact women and people of color. So can you talk about that a little bit
26:02
100%. So a lot of those individuals that were recently since George Floyd brought on, if that that was philosophy, those were the first to go as we’re contractors. So we have a disproportionate amount of contractors who actually are diverse candidates, who also were impacted by these layoffs. And again, not having that lens, and oftentimes, it isn’t an ill intended lens, right, the actual strategy may be Gee, I’m gonna say, go to each individual and say, you have to come up with two employees in your group. But if you look at those numbers in aggregate, and you start to unpack it, then you start to see some of those discrepancies. And so being able to have the time in your approach and process to be able to look at it with different lenses, I think, is also really important, because I’m not going to say that, you know, the, it was the intent of every company to actually eliminate their de IB efforts. But certainly a consequence of not putting those lenses into place this occurred.
Maria Ross 27:03
Absolutely. And I think it’s like you said, not always a bad intention, because people think they’re being fair.
27:08
Right? Right. Or they want to push down the decision making to the individual groups and empower their leaders, or that there’s any number of reasons to where you can get too into one of those situations, but certainly being able to back up and look at it and say, Gee, gosh, this was our intent. But this is actually what happened.
Maria Ross 27:27
And I want to talk about another thing you brought up in the article, which is not, don’t forget your survivors, I think this is one that is very much something that’s an afterthought. Because you have to realize how traumatized those people are when they’re left, and they don’t know when the other shoe will drop. And they’re living in fear. And they may have just lost really close colleagues, or their friends at work, or people that they relied on to complete their own projects are now gone, and it’s made their lives harder. So how can we make sure we’re taking care of the survivors? What are some, some tips or things to think about for leaders in terms of that?
28:08
It’s so true. And How often have I heard why should you be worried you you’re still here? Right? Right. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. And I think, first, again, being human acknowledging that there is trauma and loss with losing teammates, even if they weren’t involved in your own projects, and then taking accountability and understanding for even workload situation. So yes, in many cases, they’re tightening the belt. And all of those survivors are now wearing two or three or four different hats. So what are you doing to actually prioritize the work and taking accountability and acknowledgement for the fact that we can’t produce as much as we did in the past, or we’re going to do this differently, or I’m going to help come alongside you to make some of these decisions. Because there is, I think, a tendency, especially for leaders who have felt so much trauma in the process, they want to move on, they’re ready to move on, because they don’t want to feel that anymore. So again, in their self interest thinking about this, they’re not thinking about necessarily the people who haven’t been through this need some time. The grief a circle applies here, right? It’s going to take time for your people to get past the trauma that they’ve actually experienced. And how do you help them work toward that positive outcome? And the more you force it to the end, and skip all of those steps they need to in the grieving process, the more backward, you’re going to go. And I believe that’s the key to remember if you truly want to propel and move the organization forward, you need to acknowledge and allow people to go through those grieving steps.
Maria Ross 29:43
Right, right. And you know, it could be just a lot of listening. It could be you know, someone’s one to one turns into them talking about how angry they are about everything going on or how scared they are. And that’s okay, that’s still the work of being a leader. That’s not detracting from the work. That is the work.
30:03
It is 100%, like I mentioned, it may be the process may be, you are required to go through the steps as painful and as uncomfortable as many of those steps may need to be, you’re not going to get to the other side without that. And so again, I think the other thing that he senior leaders can do is equip their middle managers for this, and so often that the middle managers are the ones that get pinched repeatedly, right, they’re pinched from the top, and they’re pinched from the bottom. And how do we provide them with the skills, the support the guidance that they need in order to help people through that process? Usually, we provide them with nothing? Rachel, also, it’s not a good answer. What
Maria Ross 30:45
are some ways that you’ve heard of companies providing that support, so we can give folks just some things to get their their ideas flowing of the types of things they can do to provide that support?
30:55
at a bare minimum? It’s a q&a. That’s, you know, some information, if you get asked this question, here’s the answer that you can provide. But a company who’s really thinking about it much more holistically, may actually guide people to here’s how often we think you should meet with your team. Here are the topics that we think you should actually talk about with your team. Here’s some support in that here are individual support, if you’re struggling yourself, that almost never happens. It’s a falls on the weight of HR, often to do add an HR isn’t necessarily equipped to do that either. It’s better I think, if it comes from a senior leader in the organization who’s willing to help these leaders, take the next step and move forward and allow them to even event and go through their own level of grieving process. So again, it’s back to that intentionality that you talked about that mindfulness, how do we provide mindfulness for those middle level managers where we actually have a complete package and process that we can evolve and adapt, depending on actually what happens in that circumstance?
Maria Ross 32:07
Well, that’s why I love doing, you know, what I’m brought in even just as part of leadership and development or executive leadership training, to come in and do workshops on strengthening empathy, because I love being able to proactively be helping them build that muscle before they need it. And so are so you know, those are the current rate estimates. Yeah, those are the kinds of investments and it could be about bringing in mindfulness training, it could be about bringing in empathy training, it could be about bringing in folks to talk about the grief cycle event, and just really educating and arming those leaders with the tools and the skill sets they need. Maybe before it even happens, but especially after it does
32:51
100%, and even hiring the right individuals who have those skills to begin with. Exactly right,
Maria Ross 32:56
exactly. Yeah, looking for that and hiring for that emotional regulation, that emotional awareness and that ability to listen and that ability to be curious and dissenter yourself from the narrative when things get tough.
33:11
So those being comfortable with that. Yeah, cuz that isn’t necessarily a skill. I think that we think about when we’re hiring.
Maria Ross 33:19
We don’t and it’s, it’s what’s needed in today’s leadership. It’s what’s being demanded. And just like, just like work has evolved, just like industry has evolved, leadership has evolved. And I often talk about the fact that the old models of leadership were not laws of physics. We invented them, we can change them. Yes. 100%. Yeah. So Dana, thank you so much for this conversation, I think it’s going to be super useful to a lot of leaders going through this right now. I’ll have all your links in the show notes. I’d also love to put a link to your book, and of the webinar, you mentioned in the show notes for folks that are interested. But for folks who are listening to us while they’re jogging, weirs, just a quick place that they can find out more about you and your work.
34:03
Sure, LinkedIn is probably the best link I used to be much more of a Twitter person. But in recent times, that’s no longer the case. I am still on Twitter, but not nearly as active and I certainly have ramped up my LinkedIn presence. I’m also on post news. So you can find me there as well.
Maria Ross 34:20
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your insights today and for spending time with us. Thank you so much, Grant. This was delightful. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard and you’re enjoying the episodes you know what to do, please rate and review on your podcast player of choice, and share the episode with a colleague or a friend. 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 shownotes 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™
Leaders today need to understand the assignment. And it’s no longer about telling people what to do like a ruler from on high, filling out paperwork, or even getting a cushy office. Unless your WFH space is decked out and super-glam.
So I ask you: Do you fully understand the assignment….or are you working off an outdated model of the skills you need to be a successful leader?
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Foster collaboration – diversity enables your organization to look at challenges from every angle without missing anything. And it enables the best ideas to rise to the top.
Take the time to get to know your team as individuals.
Care about people as human beings. Understand their context. Empathetically listen before you start preaching.
“You are absolutely required to inspire, listen, empathize, develop, collaborate, and foster trust. And yes, deliver results.” — Maria Ross
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.
Hi, and welcome to your march hot take. Before we get to the topic at hand, I have a little shameless plug for you all, if you are a marketer, if you’re a business owner, if you’re an entrepreneur, or if you’re a PR or design professional or agency owner working with clients, I have a fabulous workshop that I created just for you on demand, how to grow your business with a magnetic brand statement. It’s an on demand brand messaging workshop, to leverage empathy to attract ideal clients with the exact right fit messaging, I actually share the templates and the tools and the strategies that I have used with my own brand strategy clients over the years to help them accelerate sales to help them stand out. And mostly to help them communicate in an authentic values driven way, so that they can attract the people who are the exact right fit for them. And empathy is a huge underpinning of that work. And that philosophy, it’s empathy as a tool for sharing and communicating your brand story that led me to this work around empathy as a competitive advantage. So if you are like I mentioned a marketer, a business owner, a coach, a consultant, a freelance agency person, a PR person, a design agency, and you want to help your business or help your clients communicate to and attract the right fit ideal clients, please check out the workshop, it’s only $39 You can check it out at red dash slice.com/brand-messaging-workshop. And I will put the link in the show notes. So on to this month’s hot take. We are going to talk about what leadership success requires in today’s world. leaders today need to understand the assignment. And it’s no longer about telling people what to do like a ruler from on high, filling out paperwork, or even getting that cushy office. Unless your work from home space is indeed decked out and super glam then more power to you. So I asked you, do you fully understand the assignment? Or are you working off an outdated model of what skills you need to be a successful leader? See leadership in the past was all about command and control. You did the job so well. You were promoted to lead others doing the same job, and so on and so on. But many people who are excellent at the work are never taught how to actually do the job of leading. Leading requires a different mindset, skill set and frankly, temperament. It’s not the same as doing the actual work. In a world where talented workers have options where people are demanding respect in the workplace, and where the data now tells us that innovation, creativity and engagement increase when the right leadership is in place. Here’s the assignment as it stands today. One you’re in, you’re responsible for fostering collaboration. Diversity enables your organization to look at challenges from every angle without missing anything. And it enables the best ideas to rise to the top. So it’s no longer acceptable to simply hire people who look and think like you, or silence dissenting voices, or create fear and competition among your own people foster collaboration, to take the time to get to know your team as individuals, what motivates them? What are their what are their lives like? Who do they want to be? And you must tailor communications incentives and career development accordingly. Invest in your people. Yes, it takes more time. Yes, it’s your job. Now if you want high performance and to ensure you get your own bonus, no, it’s not distracting you from the work. It is the work of leading. Number three, care about people as human beings understand their context. empathetically listen before you start preaching, accommodate for their challenges and differences. Get as personal as people are comfortable getting. Create a culture where people have each other’s backs. Be willing to be vulnerable and encourage connection and love for each other. You can encourage high standards expect excellence and be compassionate. We are not machines. We cannot turn our struggles challenges or mental health issues off to put on some quote unquote professional facade for embrace failure and admit mistakes. Spoiler alert, no one ever believed you knew it all anyway, that’s not the job of leading the job requires risk taking and encouraging new ideas, celebrate and learn from things not going right. It means you’re innovating or getting better. If you’re still parroting, this is the way it’s always been done, then you’re done. Five, be humble. If you can’t admit you’re wrong. What are you doing? Everyone around you knows you were wrong. And when you don’t admit it, you just look foolish and lose people’s trust. If you are still puffing out your chest, acting like you’re better than and not sharing credit or space because you think that makes you the big dog. It’s time to step aside and let a leader with humility take over to get better engagement and results. Let me be clear, these are not niceties. They are not a waste of time. They’re not distracting you from the work. This is the work of leading in today’s world. These are the skills required of successful leaders right now. You are absolutely required to inspire, listen, empathize, develop, collaborate, and foster trust. And yes, deliver results. If you’re lucky enough to lead people, then please understand the assignment. I’d love to know your thoughts on this month’s hot take. Please contact me through Instagram red slice Maria. Or you can always reach me through red dash slice.com. I am here for it all. And please if you enjoy this podcast, which is a labor of love on my part, please share it with a colleague or friend. And you know what to do rate and review it and let me know what you think. Until next time, take care. Remember that cashflow? Creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. 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.
