Welcome the final Hot Take of 2023! In this final Hot Take of the year, I’ll share a bit about how to find joy in what can feel like a dark, bleak time in the world and what empathy calls us to be for others. And I share an anecdote from my 9-year-old son that prompted me to think about how some leaders are being a bit lazy when it comes to reaping the benefits of empathetic cultures.
Have a wonderful holiday season and here’s to more empathy, joy, and peace in our world in 2024!
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Empathy needs to be woven into the way we interact with each other, it cannot be outsourced to HR as the one person for empathy.
- Seek out ways to find ways to bring empathy, kindness, and joy into your own home, work, and community this holiday season and beyond.
- 2024 promises us another chance to engage, connect, and love. Let’s use it for those purposes and make creating genuine relationships one of our goals for the new year.
“The point of empathetic leadership is that your team members know that YOU, their leader, have their backs, and see, hear, and value them.” — Maria Ross
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
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. Quick offer for you. Listen up, all you marketers, business owners, entrepreneurs, all of you trying to connect and engage with an audience to grow your impact and revenue. I’m all about strengthening empathy to achieve radical success. And this all started for me in my wheelhouse of marketing. See, I realized the key to attracting and engaging the right customers is all about understanding them seeing things from their point of view. Empathy is a marketers superpower if it’s wielded responsibly. So after running two successful real time cohorts, I now opening up my brand story breakthrough course as an on demand offering. Take it when you want how you want for as long as you want five modules of videos and playbooks designed to help you articulate your goals. Understand your customers, define your different and land on your perfect brand story and marketing message. So you stand out and attract that perfect fit audience. Marketing is not about lying to people. It’s about empathy, elevating the truth of your story. And in this on demand course, you’ll learn the exact steps that my past brand clients have gone through to craft a clear and compelling and consistent brand message that guides everything you do. You’ll walk away with a brand story strategy, ideal customer profiles, and even website and social media profile copy. Plus, with this on demand course you get access to weekly Friday office hours with me. Yep, ask questions, get feedback, share new memes, discover new insights to help your business shine. It’s insanely cost effective and extremely valuable to your business and goals. So check out the details@bit.ly slash BSB course, that’s bi T dot L y slash V sb course, or click the link in the show notes. See you on the other side. Hello, and welcome to the December issue of my empathy Edge Hot take for you. This is Maria here, my final solo episode of the year for all of you as we move into 2024 I have some musings for you about the new year and I want to share a thought with you about outsourcing empathy. So first of all, don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram read slice Maria on LinkedIn, Maria J. Ross. And let me know what you think of the show. Let me know what you would like to hear more of next year. Let me know if there’s guests that you would like to recommend. I have episodes booked and banked for you all the way through April. And I’m really excited to share some of these voices and amplify this important work from so many wonderful people that are tackling the issue of making our world and our workplaces more empathetic from so many different angles. It’s just an honor to be able to have a platform to share that with you and to amplify their work. So it’s the end of 2023. Right? How did it go? We’re all into assessments. We’re all into goals. We’re all into picking our themes for the year another year has gone On by another resolution list, another manic holiday season for many, if we’re lucky. Now sadly, for many in our world right now, these seem to be luxuries as they continue dealing with tragedy, hatred, poverty and war. And it can be hard to find the joy in our own lives when there is so much suffering. When in some cases, we are the ones suffering. Empathy reminds us that the holidays are not joyful for everyone. For many, it can be a rough time. So I’d like to invite you to do something I’m trying to do, which is seeking out ways to find the light in the dark and bring empathy, kindness and joy into our own homes, our own workplaces, our own communities. This is the way as the Mandalorian says, when we make our own lights glow brighter, we share that with the world, we infuse it with love, positivity and warmth. You can only have the impact you can have, no matter how big your sphere of influence, make it count, when and how you can, a smile, a good deed, a thoughtful note, a donation, an hour of your time, heck a minute of your time, a reassuring ear, these are the ways you can help find the light in the dark. 2024 promises us another chance, another opportunity to connect, engage and love, use it. Now I want to go into a little topic that has been top of mind lately. Obviously 2023 I feel like was the year of AI and all the hand wringing and opportunity and fear mongering and excitement that it brought to us. But what seems to be happening not just because of AI, but because of some leadership laziness is folks are thinking about how to outsource empathy. So let me explain with a little story. My nine year old son recently left a note on his dirty breakfast dishes that he put on the counter by the same the note said, Can you please pls take care of this with a sad face. And thanks. So a little post it note and this little gem awaiting me when I went over to the kitchen sink. Now the fact you must know is that he placed the dishes on the counter right above the dishwasher. Like the ultimate in lazy maneuvers. I mean writing the note took him longer than putting the dishes away, he had to go find a pen he had to go find the post it note he had to write it out. Now while this provided a great laugh with my friends and family over on social media, it got me thinking about the primal nature of laziness and how it shows up in our organizations and in our leadership. We see laziness as the customer service rep who can’t be bothered to listen to your real issue and look into possible options. It’s just easier to tell you nothing can be done. We see it in the leader who claims that adopting a more empathetic approach is too hard and takes too much time. And then falls back on the old ways of doing things which are dying, by the way. We see it in the colleague who decides getting to know other team members is a quote waste of time and forgets the importance of building relationships and connections in order to get things done. So what is the answer? Here are some options leaders like to think they have one, we will outsource empathy to HR, or to we will outsource empathy, hopefully to AI or three, we buckled down and strengthen the muscles ourselves. So let’s parse these options out. Trying to outsource empathy to HR is like a parent trying to outsource love to their child’s teacher. It doesn’t make any sense. Do they outsource kindness, courage and effective communication? The point of empathetic leadership is that your team members know you, their leader, have their backs and see here and value them. That’s the only way for you to reap all the benefits of empathy, including increased engagement, performance, loyalty, and creativity. It needs to be woven into the way that we interact with each other. It’s not a need I go to someone else to fulfill. Now trying to outsource empathy to AI is trickier. There are empathic AI technologies available. You’ve heard about some of them on our show that are helping organizations strapped for resources or staffing to provide individualized guidance and interactions in industries such as healthcare, higher ed and finance. But the organization’s leaders have to strengthen their own empathy in order to build it into the AI models and ensure the holistic customer experience is consistent and engaging. Strengthening your own empathy muscle is the smart choice. Just like going to the gym, you can build that innate human muscle if it has atrophied. You just need to put in the reps. This is why I wrote the empathy edge why I speak at leadership trainings, keynotes and customer events. To clarify what empathy looks like at work, and what is most certainly not, and give you actionable steps to strengthen your empathy. The results may not be immediate, who gets six pack abs on the first day at the gym. But over time, this is the more sustainable option that you will carry with you to great success. No matter what team you’re leading, or what role you’re in. If you’re tempted to outsource empathy, please think about the reason why are you too scared or feel too vulnerable to connect with your people or customers with empathy? If so, you may need to do some work on your own strengths and blind spots. And what causes that fear? Is it insecurity defensiveness, low self esteem, there’s some inner work to be done there. Are you strapped for time and overwhelmed? If so, perhaps prioritization is the issue and an understanding that the work of leading is connecting and engaging with your people. If you don’t have time for that, you may need to reassess how you spend your time? Or do you think machines can do it better? If so, who is teaching these machines? Where are the inputs coming from? And what happens when people interacting with AI dip in and out of workflow between humans and machines? We abour consistency. That seems like a big risk you don’t need to have to take that could have catastrophic implications on your customer or employee experience. And also No, empathy is an essential human trait about human connection. The machines will never be able to fully replicate it, even if they’re able to imitate it in some scenarios. Empathy is the most important leadership skill going into the 21st century. You can definitely augment empathy by shoring up your HR team and investing in empathic AI solutions. But you don’t want to outsource it without building it yourself. Because if you really believe that is possible, then you are making yourself obsolete. Embrace empathy, embrace connection, embrace vulnerably. admitting you don’t know all the answers, or admitting that other points of view might be more valid than yours. Or admitting that someone else might be better at something than you. It’s okay, as a leader. Leaders need to drop this facade that we can do it all be at all, that we’re perfect. Everyone around you knows that’s not true. So why are we pretending as you go into 2024 I’d love for one of your goals one of your resolutions one of your themes, to be to nourish genuine relationships. And the key to doing that is to learn how to build up your empathy capacity, to get curious, to actively listen, to understand context, and to ground yourself so that you can be a solid foundation and able to take in other points of view. I wish you the best this holiday season no matter what you celebrate. I of course wish for more peace, more empathy and more compassion in our what seems like a very broken world. And I can’t wait to share more good work with you in 2024. Until next time, remember as always, that cash flow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Catch you next time and next year on the empathy edge. 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.
