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Athletes and legendary coaches from sport are often cited by leaders to motivate, inspire, and pull together as a team. But how many leaders actually practice and employ the skills these high-achievers leverage to be successful? In today’s sports landscape, coaches who have embraced emotional intelligent approaches are scoring points and building dynasties. And corporate leaders have a lot to learn from them.

Today, Dr. Peter Sear and I talk about how sport leadership has changed and become more empathic over the last two decades – thus attracting a different kind of leader. We discuss how coaches manage empathic relationships and get the balance of “close but not too close” right. Peter also shares the concept of Empathic Accuracy and tips for how to help your team build empathy among each other.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• It is important to find and keep the balance between coach and athlete. The same thing goes for employers and employees.
• Nothing beats getting to know someone on a human level.
• In modern workplaces, it is important that leaders model and show empathy to their teams.

“The ‘my way or the highway’ approach that coaches often used to apply just doesn’t work with athletes of this generation. They’ve got different expectations and different powers.”

—  Dr. Peter Sear, Founder, Empathic Minds

About Dr. Peter Sear, Founder Empathic Minds

I started off as a Futures Floor Trader, trading sugar futures in London, for five years. I traveled before going to University aged 23, to study psychology. That led to my first Masters degree, during which I opened a property company with my parents. I continued to study, getting another Masters, in Jung, and learning some neuroscience. I’ve worked in many roles, including as a commissioned artist. My PhD was at Loughborough (the best University in the world for sport related research!). Since then, I’ve written for Psychology Today, The World Financial Review among others. I now help coaches, leaders, organizations, consultancies, and individuals learn about the powers of empathy and how to develop them.

Connect with Dr. Peter Sear:  

The Empathic Minds Organisation: https://empathicminds.org/

Book: Empathic Leadership: Lessons from Elite Sport

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003324676/empathic-leadership-peter-sear

X: https://twitter.com/DrPeterSear

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-peter-sear-em-3b226096/

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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. Athletes and legendary coaches from sport are often cited by leaders to motivate, inspire and pull together as a team. But how many leaders actually practice and employ the skills that these high achievers leverage to be so successful? In my personal experience, I’ve seen leaders who idolize the sports and coaching legends, only to never heed any of their advice on team building, empathy and motivation. But I digress. In today’s sports landscape coaches who have embraced emotional intelligent approaches are scoring points and building dynasties, and corporate leaders have a lot to learn from them. Today, my guest is Dr. Peter Cyr, founder of empathic minds, and a consultant to head coaches and leaders. And we talk about what elite sport can teach you about empathic leadership. Peter started off as a futures floor trader, trading sugar futures in London, but then left to study psychology and earned a few master’s degrees, including one in neuroscience. He earned his PhD from an I know I’m gonna pronounce this wrong, Loughborough the best university in the world for sport related research, and did much of his work around the psychology of elite sport champions. He now helps coaches leaders, organizations, consultancies and individuals learn about the power of empathy and how to develop it. Today, we talk about how sport leadership has changed and become more empathic over the last two decades, thus attracting a different kind of leader. We discuss how coaches manage empathic relationships, and getting the balance of close but not too close, right. Peter also shares the concept of empathic accuracy, and tips for how to help build your team’s empathy with each other. This was such an enlightening episode, take a listen. Big welcome Peter Singer to the empathy edge podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

03:13

Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

Maria Ross  03:15

So I’m so intrigued and curious about your work with looking at empathetic leadership lessons from elite sport. And your book title, as we mentioned, is called the empathic leadership lessons from elite sport. And you’ve been doing this work for a while, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into this work of consulting around empathy, but consulting with head coaches, as well as corporate executives and other professionals. Okay,

Dr. Peter Sear  03:45

so it was off the back of my PhD into empathic leadership. I’d studied psychology and from various angles, step psychology and a little bit of neuroscience as well. And I’d always been really interested in emotions as drivers of behavior. And empathy seemed to bring all of that together. So when it came to looking at a choice of subjects to PhD in sport was my other interest. And I tried to get as many interests into a PhD as possible, because everybody told me that that’s what you need to do to stay sane. And so I approached Loughborough University, because this considered the best university for sports related subjects. And I had the idea of empathic leadership in sport and they loved it, and they said, you can start when you want. So I did that for four years. The end of it was during the start of the pandemic, which obviously gave a little bit of very interesting yeah. And then, since then, I just started getting approached by different head coaches and people who are doing the coaching badges in various sports, because a lot of them found, though getting taught a lot of the practical skills of coaching and the technical stuff, where there was a gap there with the psychological areas and Did you know empathy been a quiet buzzword of the moment and somebody that had heard about in other industries, they wouldn’t know why we got into this. And I noticed, for example, during my PhD research, the Football Association in England, had nothing on their website on their coaching badges about empathy. And then during that, I approached them a couple of times, and still didn’t really hear much back then. But then all of a sudden, I had a page whole page of empathy and spool, and then the in football, so there was sort of progression guide on the whole time through my PhD. And more and more people are interested in I’ll get approaches from all different sports.

Maria Ross  05:39

Oh, well, I can see that. And I love that you have this perspective that sport leadership has become more empathic over the last two decades, and it’s attracting a different kind of leader, which is interesting, because as someone who is not in the sporting world, my impression has always been that many successful coaches, whether they call it or empathy, or not, have always sort of brought that aspect of motivating, inspiring, you know, tailoring the way they talk to their team to get the best out of them really caring about their players. That’s always been my impression of the way successful coaches have operated. But you’re saying that that’s actually been a shift. Can you talk to us about that shift.

Dr. Peter Sear  06:18

Roughing is interesting, the way you phrase that question, successful coaches, and I think there have been a lot of successful coaches that have had success by coaching in that way. And I think there were other coaches who had success coach in a different way. But that way, is just unacceptable by athletes. Now, the my way, or the highway approach that coaches often use to apply, it just doesn’t work with athletes of this generation. They’ve got different expectations, they’ve got different, that it’s a different world as well, but they’ve got more powers, athletes, athletes have got more ability to move clubs, etc. So it’s a matter of retaining talent. If you don’t want to lose people, you can’t treat them badly anymore.

Maria Ross  07:00

Well, and it’s funny, I’m laughing, as you’re saying that because you literally could replace the word, you know, coaching and sport with the corporate world. And it’s the same trend. It’s the same trend of employees demanding a different type of workplace. Yeah, really craving a different type of leader that sees, hears and values them, so that they can just innovate and perform and bring their best to work every day. And it’s interesting to see that that’s permeated into the world of sport as well.

Dr. Peter Sear  07:30

Yeah, one of the reasons I chose sport was not not just because I was really into it, because I’d seen that other industries look to sport as a model for leadership. It’s a very transparent industries. Now it’s everywhere. So whatever industry you’re working in, if you talk to somebody, so it’s a common ground that you can discuss sport leadership. And the coaches I spoke to, I interviewed for my research, often compared the way they coach and the way their contemporaries coach with how they were coached when they were athletes themselves. So the change that I talked about was typically over a sort of 20 year period, something like that. And they gave examples like, when, for team selection, for example, the old way might have been to post a piece of paper up on the wall with a table on it, and everybody had to go and look at it a second time. And while they look clearly at the coaches in his car and driving off home before he asked to speak to anybody, now, coaches will often tailor this news individually to athletes, they’ll ask each individual How do you want to know about selection? Do you want me to call you into our mid to the email usually to speak directly to me. And sometimes athletes will choose an email, for example, and then once they’ve calmed down after their reaction, perhaps then go to the coach and say, Can we have a conversation? But other times, they’d like just straight face to face conversations.

Maria Ross  08:56

So that’s super interesting. Can you give us some examples of the power of empathy that we may have seen you talk about the World Cup winners, you talk about Lionel Messi? Give us some examples of empathy and action among high performing teams and players.

Dr. Peter Sear  09:13

Okay, so Argentina won the World Cup in 2022. Their best player everyone would agree is Lionel Messi, the best best footballer in the world over the last 2015 20 years probably. He’s also showed that he’s an empathic leader on the pitch. So I can give you an example of that, as Sergeant seed awaits the World Cup though. Many people’s favorites. The first game the World Cup, they lost to Saudi Arabia, which was a big shock to World Football. And there was a die in their squad that didn’t start that game that was brought into the team for the next guy who played very well. And in the gamemaster that he scored a goal is known as Lex Alexis McAllister. And in the World Cup final itself he set up one of the goals and Argentina won the world cup so he was Part of their transformation as a team during the World Cup. And one of the things that he went through is very interesting before he was played in the team. He was training with the team civically, he was very overbroad about trading with Messi and some of these heroes. And he has Scottish and Irish heritage and he has ginger hair. So a lot of the other players nickname do colo which in Argentina is what they call people with ginger hair, apparently. And Lionel Messi is captain of Argentina saw this was going on in trading, and maybe that it wasn’t good for this athlete. And he said, Well, how do you feel when the other athletes who colo and he said I don’t like it, you know, and that was it. Obviously, Lionel Messi is only gonna say, the way he feels about it’s the rest of his team. Right now. We’ll call him out again, it gets an insane and the rest is history, as they say. So it’s just one example of how the fortunes of a player have changed, and probably his whole confidence and well being has changed and it’s made his World Cup.

Maria Ross  11:04

Wow. Well, in here in the States, we have a great example of an empathetic and Empathic Coach, and that Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors. He is known for being incredibly empathetic. And he has created dynasties of championship teams with the Golden State Warriors, and he was part of a championship dynasty with the Chicago Bulls and learned much of his coaching style from Phil Jackson. So followed a similar philosophy I believe he was I might be misspeaking, but I think he was a Zen Buddhist, as

Dr. Peter Sear  11:40

well. I played links for that. Yes. And so positive interview. Yes. And just to say, Dr. Dorsa, who you interviewed, had endorsed fantrip Yes, yeah, he’s podcast. Yeah,

Maria Ross  11:51

definitely. And there’s just this whole philosophy around how he coaches and how he brings out the best in his team. It’s very collaborative. It’s very personal. It’s very emotional, and he genuinely cares about as players and you were saying how, you know, sports analogies are so pervasive in leadership and coming from the corporate world, we were just discussing this, how so many sales leaders and C suite leaders love to quote, coaches loved quote, athletes and talk about building the team. But many of them don’t embody those empathic leadership skills that those coaches practice in order to create such high performing teams. So I’ve always found that very interesting. The irony of the fact that these are people that they’re quoting in terms of their leadership, but they’re not modeling their leadership style. In every case,

Dr. Peter Sear  12:44

I think the one thing sports coaches have been doing in this move towards more empathic solid leadership is they’re becoming very close with their athletes, you can see that physically their relationships, were at the end of a game, the coach will go up and hug all their players, you know, that didn’t happen sort of as much, 20 years ago, there might have been a handshake back then perhaps, my five might be but that was it about its own problems, though. Because if you’re getting really close, and you’re trying to know the athletes as best you can or to understand, and then your empathy can work better, the more knowledge you have than then these close relationships often mean that the balance can go too far that way, and you could become too close. And the dangers of that are obviously that you might become biased in your decision making. Other athletes might think that or get jealous about your relationships together. I’ve got an example of that there was a coach in Australia who had a very successful team. And they won everything they could have won that season. And all of his team, the male athletes that he’s coaching have asked him to go out drinking with him to celebrate, they went out for a few nights in first week after the end of the season. And then they start training the rest of the following season. And the athletes are ringing him up and say no, you’re coming out for a beer tonight. And he says no, that was because we were celebrating so we’re not best friends, you know, you’ve got to draw the line and keep that, that balance that distance that’s necessary between a coach and athlete.

Maria Ross  14:18

And how can leaders do that? How can you see them getting the balance right?

Dr. Peter Sear  14:23

I think it’s really difficult I think, I think people are always going to have preferences for who they will spend time with as well and who they want to talk to so just traveling to away games for example. A lot of coaches I spoke to said that they try to move around the coach or the aeroplane when they’re traveling so that they get to know each individual and find out things they didn’t know about them, you know, what they do in their spare time etc. And that can often create a closer bonds with them. But if they say that they’re doing that with everybody, it stops that blast we’ve been in let jealousy in relationships.

Maria Ross  14:58

And what do you think about You know, you’ve mentioned close but not too close, right? What are some tips or boundaries for leaders to create that boundary? So it doesn’t seem like they’re being inauthentic when they are practicing empathy, but they’re making it very clear that this is a working relationship.

Dr. Peter Sear  15:17

Yeah, I think it is a really difficult challenge people now, I think that the physical relationship is the problems which are magnified. Of course, when you’ve got a male coach from a female team, or, or the opposite. There was a female coach of a national sports team was coaching men. And she found there was already that gender difference created enough of a barrier. And she felt that it was an advantage. She was a woman because the team had been renowned before she started coaching for being a bit too aggressive and feminine qualities brought him down to earth a little bit, and they wouldn’t do certain things in front of her because she was a woman. That was her idea, really, anyway, but I think I did netball coach the other day said to me that it’s not easy to get the judgment, right, she saw one of her athletes in tears, signaled some steps. And she had coached this girl who was near a woman for all through her teenage years. And so she sat down and put her arm around her. But she jumped up as if to say, Why are you touching me? So even when you think you get it, right, it is difficult with the hugging and all sports, all the coaches were saying to me that you’ve got to understand whether that player is happy being how to, you know, you’ve got to know and be able to judge him for that. And you need to really know them well. And it might be somebody who you know, or want to be hugged in a certain situation, but not another situation. So it’s a very difficult thing to get right. Yeah. How

Maria Ross  16:35

can you develop empathy in teams? So you have a coach that’s bringing a very empathic leadership style to a team? How can they shore up empathy among the teammates?

Dr. Peter Sear  16:46

Yeah, that’s a good question. So that that’s one of the goals of the coaches that I spoke, to bring the group closer together, like cohesion in teams is obviously really important. But also, what empathy does it it brings commitment, if you feel that somebody’s empathizing with you, and understanding, then you’re automatically going to be more committed to them, you feel closer, and you’re going to, you know, push a little bit harder for them. So you’re not the coaches were really focused on encouraging this between players in teams. So the kinds of things they do is in that group work, they will ask individuals to volunteer to give biographical stories about where they grew up. If you take a sport like football, soccer, you’ve got, especially in the Premiership, in England, you’ve got players from literally every country in the world, all coming together in sports. And these athletes know nothing about each other’s backgrounds. So just sharing a story about where they’ve come from, what they went through to get where they are, what their parents did for them, things like that, the more they don’t accelerate, it’s more like a family, then isn’t it? If you know the story of the other, then you’re more likely to want to play to each other. And so that’s one thing they do is share back biographical stories, they also did little things like that have small groups of athletes with juice with conversation cubes with real questions. So just to inspire a conversation of anything, so people start bringing their ideas and, and then it gives the athletes the opportunity to see how each of them react to different subjects. And so just increasing the knowledge of other athletes. And they also like to encourage families meeting each other as well. So one of the rugby concepts spoke to have a crash training ground, for example. And they have things like yoga classes and different things for the wives of athletes, so that they all end up knowing each other and it becomes a more cohesive group like that.

Maria Ross  18:46

I love that. And those are great ideas you can apply to any working group. That’s wonderful. Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about empathic accuracy. You mentioned this in your work. Talk to us about what that term means? And what are the implications of it?

Dr. Peter Sear  19:02

Yes. So it goes back to what I was saying, I suppose about knowing the individual well enough to empathize accurately with. So if you don’t know somebody, then you’re more likely probably to put your own world unto this is that thing about? We say that empathy is walking in somebody else’s shoes, but it’s nice about being that person in their shins for a moment. And I think the more you know, somebody that the easier you can get that right. And I know a lot of organizations in all industries use things like psychometric testing to get to know to understand how they should communicate with people now, but a lot of the coaches I’m speaking to that said that nothing beats really getting to know people on a human level. You know, that’s the real way you can understand somebody and empathize with them. It’s not by the form they’re filled in. So through that ethic accuracy, then you can start to judge how a player might perform in certain situations whether they’re good under pressure, for example, if there’s penalties at the end of the game, who do you will lift up Ah Do other certain players that just won’t respond well to that situation. You can also it gives you a little bit of help with, how do you think they could have progressed in the guidance? Well, that potential, but also because just by reading their body language as well adds to that information. So during the game, so some players naturally look, they know spools naturally look tired. But if you know them, well, it’s just their running style or something like that. So that boy, you know, somebody that more accurately could empathize with them.

Maria Ross  20:31

I love that. Now, one of the concepts I know I’ve been very interested in researching, and I’m hearing from leaders is making sure that empathy is not just a one way street, many leaders are feeling very pressured these days. And those especially that want to be empathic leaders are doing so much work. And yet, they don’t feel like their teams or their employees feel like it’s a two way street. Like, it’s only the leaders responsibility to be empathetic, and not that the empathy needs to be a two way street. So how can you build empathy to go in both directions? So for example, in sport, you can have a very empathetic style with your coach, you’ve talked about ways to build empathy among the team themselves, how can you, quote unquote, teach empathy, so that even team members, players athletes, can have empathy for their leaders as well.

Dr. Peter Sear  21:26

I think empathy is contagious. So I think just by setting the example, other people don’t be more empathic to them, than when athletes see how head coaches treat their colleagues, then they understand how empathic they are, as well. It’s not just about how they treat them. But I think one of the ways they can do it is I was given a lot of examples of when athletes are going through particularly bad times and their personal life and some of that, and if the coach has been through something similar themselves and shares that experience, advises them based on that, then I think that increases trust and probably empathy starts to go the other way as well. Right?

Maria Ross  22:03

Is that an issue that you find in sport, where it’s, the players are sort of like, I’m the player, you need to be empathetic. But I don’t have to show empathy towards others or towards you as my coach? Yeah,

Dr. Peter Sear  22:15

I think one of the things that’s confused that lady as well is that the bigger athletes become in the media, you start to the area is getting blurred. With Who are they really committed to are they’re committed now to their own brand more than they are to the club and the leader? Are they committed to the sport as a whole, or they’re committed to their international career, but not their club career? So there’s a variety of things. But I had leaders, for example, telling me about when an athlete might have done particularly well in the game, but the team lost the athlete and goes home and posts on social media. Did you see how good I was today? And then the rest of the team besides the coach, have you seen what they’ve just posted on here? You know, what does that say, you know, and so it disrupts the harmony of the group. And so it’s really important for coaches to explain to athletes, the damage that can be done through those things. But as I say, it’s, it’s difficult because a lot of athletes, athletes are more worried about how much money they can earn out their own brand, which is often as much as they will gain PayPal and their clubs.

Maria Ross  23:21

Yeah, it is definitely a challenge. And I think it’s now the role of leaders in the modern era, to model and teach empathy to their teams, that’s actually a requirement of the job now. And that has to start with self awareness of their own empathy, and shoring up their own empathic skills before they can model and teach it to others. But I’ve often heard this from from different leaders of, you know, I’m trying so hard to be empathetic to my team, but I’m getting nothing back. I’m getting just entitlement back.

Dr. Peter Sear  23:55

For the athletes in the lot sports as well to be empathic towards their fans. If the fans say the way they behave, and you know, their whole lives are recorded in the media so heavily, they’ll then they’ll send builds them and that creates disharmony as well.

Maria Ross  24:09

Right. Right. And the correlation of that with the corporate world as customers or clients. Yeah, understanding that you actually don’t have you don’t have sport and you don’t have business without that stakeholder group.

Dr. Peter Sear  24:22

Yeah. And it’s not just about disrespecting the fans. In a sport like soccer or football, each club has, has got certain things that are distinct about it. Like there might be a certain playing style that the fans expect, or a certain way of behaving, they’ve come to expect just through their own club story. And they want their continued and if they see an athlete coming in, who goes against that culture, and then it doesn’t fit their group. So it’s really important for the athlete to understand the fan base, as well as their head coach and their colleagues.

Maria Ross  24:58

As we close out, I just Want to ask with your research? And the work that you do? Is there one common thread of successful empathic coaches or leaders that you see over and over and over again?

25:12

What do you mean by common thread,

Maria Ross  25:15

some common trait among them, that helps them be more empathetic?

Dr. Peter Sear  25:21

Yeah, I think I may have mentioned in the beginning, but it’s not only that sport leadership has changed is that it’s attracting a different kind of leader. So I had an ice hockey coach, for example, say to me, that, if the sport was as it was 20 years ago, he wouldn’t be in the position he’s in now, because the role just wouldn’t have suited the sort of person that he is. And he went on to tell me what is important to him. And, you know, the things that are more important to him than trophies, like he gave me an example of that of a young player that you had with him, who had some ability, but he could see that the biggest problem with him was that he just didn’t have the ability to motivate himself to work hard. And so him and the other coach worked with him on this and got him to work hard. And what he did is spread through the rest of his life. So ended up working really hard, and his schoolwork, he became a doctor, got married, didn’t have a career in sport in the end, but he said, when he sees that person now, now successfully, his life has come. He feels, you know, that gives him more of a buzz that actually winning a trophy. I think that sort of symbolizes the kind of coaches we’re seeing, have success these days, because that way of leading may seem like it’s focused on other things other than trophies, but it actually brings the success.

Maria Ross  26:42

Right, right. It follows. And it sounds like from what you’re saying, you see a thread of people willing to mentor other people are willing to look for opportunities to mentor versus just coach and win games.

26:55

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Maria Ross  26:57

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that’s fascinating. Well, thank you so much, Peter, for sharing these insights with us today, we are gonna have all your links in the show notes. But for folks who are on the move listening to this podcast, where’s the best place they can get in touch with you?

Dr. Peter Sear  27:10

Well, the best thing to do is to buy my book, obviously, I think leadership lessons will explore. I’m also all empathic minds to all and I’m under my name on Twitter, etc. So anyone find me there on LinkedIn.

Maria Ross  27:24

Wonderful. And once again, we’ll have all those links in the show notes. But thank you so much for your time today.

27:30

Really enjoyed it. Thank

Maria Ross  27:31

you. 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 this episode with a friend or a colleague. 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.

When I say “team-building” or corporate training, do you say….ugh! Maybe you imagine sitting in a windowless conference room, or enduring an interminable video call that takes you away from the pile of work you need to get done – without offering anything of lasting value?

There’s a better way. And yes, it involves empathy as the key ingredient for turning a team-building event from a one-off transactional experience into a transformative one.

Today, Terri Schmidt and I discuss where most well-intentioned team building goes wrong, how serving others primes your brain to learn new skills, how you can intentionally combine connection, professional development and meaning to get more ROI for your team building efforts – as well as engage and retain Gen Z talent. We have a great discussion on how to build trust and connection in a remote or hybrid workplace – including how she blew my mind with her observation of how we have always interacted with screens in the past and why our struggle to connect over screens now just requires some upskilling and re-learning!

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Take the time to gather feedback on what your team is doing well, and also what skills your team needs to strengthen. 
• Serving and doing good for others primes your brain to learn and retain skills and information better. 
• Even though remotely is a new environment, you still want to build practical skills and camaraderie with your team.

“We infuse empathy in many different ways. We want to make sure that the team is actually connecting in a way that will impact their performance when they get back to the job.”

—  Teri Schmidt

Episode References:

GET YOUR FREE GUIDE! Team Connection: 10 Activities to Connect in 10 Minutes or Less and learn more about these innovative team building and development experiences at https://becomestrongertoserve.com/empathyedgeThe Empathy Edge podcast, Rae Shanahan:The Empathy Gap: 2023 State of Workplace Empathy ReportMaria’s blog post: Can’t Get Your Employees Back to the Office? Here’s Why.

About Teri Schmidt, Director, Stronger to Serve Coaching & Teambuilding

Teri uses her 20+ years of experience in coaching, leadership, and performance improvement to seamlessly integrate teambuilding, leadership development, and community service.  Her workshops and coaching cultivate empowered individuals, cohesive teams, and impactful contributions to society.

Teri hosts the Strong Leaders Serve podcast inspiring leaders to make their workplaces more compassionate and just through their leadership, without burning out.

She is an Ironman triathlete and loves to be in nature backpacking, camping, and doing some occasional rock climbing.  She currently lives outside of Dallas with her three favorite people, her husband Jeff and her two teenage kids, Tyler and Megan.

Connect with Teri Schmidt:

Stronger to Serve Coaching & Teambuilding https://www.strongertoserve.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-m-schmidt/

Learn by Doing (Good) workshops: https://www.strongertoserve.com/teambuilding

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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. Okay, when I say team building or corporate training, do you say maybe you imagine sitting in a windowless conference room, or enduring an interminable video call that takes you away from the pile of work you need to get done without offering anything of lasting value? There is a better way. And yes, it involves empathy as the key ingredient for turning a team building event from a one off transactional experience into a transformative one. Today, my guest Terry Schmitt shares how intentional team building sessions can help you bond as a team, develop valuable leadership and communication skills, apply those skills immediately to seal in training, and give back to your community all at the same time. Terry is director of stronger to serve coaching and team building and uses her 20 plus years of experience in coaching, leadership and performance improvement, to seamlessly integrate team building leadership, development and community service for workshops and coaching cultivate empowered individuals, and cohesive teams and impactful contributions to society. Terry hosts the strong leaders serve podcast, and is an Ironman triathlete, so she knows about performance. Today, Terry and I discuss where most well intentioned team building goes wrong, how serving others Prime’s your brain to learn new skills, how you can intentionally combine connection, professional development and meaning to get more ROI for your team building efforts. As well as engage and retain Gen Z talent. We have a great discussion on how to build trust and connection in a remote or hybrid workplace, including how she blew my mind with her observation of how we have always interacted with screens in the past. And why our struggle to connect over screens now just requires some upskilling and relearning. This was such a great conversation. Take a listen. Hello, Terry Schmidt Welcome to the empathy edge podcast to talk about empathy and fused team building. I’m very excited to talk to you today.

Teri Schmidt  03:41

Well, thank you for having me, Maria, I’m really looking forward to the conversation as well.

Maria Ross  03:45

So your work is so interesting. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into this work. And what what makes you so passionate about it? Yeah,

Teri Schmidt  03:53

definitely, you know, I can trace the start of what I’m doing right now, way back. But I won’t, won’t go too long. But I want to say, you know, I trace it to two factors. So really early in my life, I developed a deep curiosity, and actually became pretty adept at figuring out why people acted in the way that they acted. There are some reasons for that in my upbringing that we can go into if you want, but for now, I’ll just say that, so I became really good at it. In other words, empathy became my superpower. i Yeah, exactly. It’s definitely served me well. And it’s why I’m so passionate about it. And the other thing that really shaped my career choices, and who I am as a person, both based on my faith, and really watching my mom as an elementary school teacher, I began to see how different people were really good at doing different things, and sometimes without even knowing it. And I became so intrigued and inspired by that. And so those two pieces really led me into the world of human development. And you know, my career has taken kind of a winding path. But whether it was when I was living in a homeless shelter as a volunteer coordinator, or when I was in the corporate world, or what I’m doing what I’m doing today, as a leadership coach and team building facilitator, the focus is always on using my talents to help make a way for other people to courageously use theirs.

Maria Ross  05:23

I love that. And I love that you discovered so early that empathy is your superpower. Because I think many of us who learn to embrace that it comes later, we sort of like have to think back at what was the secret sauce of us being able to succeed in that job or connect with that person or, you know, create a relationship with someone that we were told was really, really not you know, you weren’t, you were never going to be able to create a relationship with that person. And, you know, it was only through for me, it was self awareness around the StrengthsFinder, doing the Clifton Strengths Finder and realizing that empathy was one of my top five strengths, because I never would have said that. But then when you unravel that, and I think this is true for a lot of people, and a lot more people than think it’s true for them, and how they relate. Now, there’s

Teri Schmidt  06:07

definitely those of us that we still need to practice and strengthen that empathy muscle. And that’s what I love about your work is it enables people to continue to strengthen that empathy muscle as they go along. So I would love to ask why empathy is such a key ingredient for returning a team building event, which is your specialty, from a one off transactional experience, the thing that makes us roll our eyes and go, Oh, my gosh, can we stop doing this now and get back to work? And turns it into an actually a transformative one a transformative experience that we we take with us beyond? Even possibly that job? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, you know, when leaders are investing in team building experiences, hopefully they are thinking about, I want to get a return on this investment, right, we’re taking people away from the real work, right, and, you know, spending money spending time or two most precious resources. And I think sometimes they just kind of go with, uh, you know, let’s hope we get something out of this. Or hopefully, we’ll have some fun. I wouldn’t say that’s the right way to approach it. Because especially in these current economic times, time, and money is everything. And we want to make sure that you are getting return on your investment. So I think it comes down to the fact that without empathy, there is no connection. And without connection, there’s no teamwork. Sure, you can have a bunch of individuals working side by side, but they’re not really working as a team. And you’re not realizing the enhanced product, enhance productivity, enhanced performance that comes when you are truly working as a team. So in our experiences, we infuse empathy in many different ways. Because we want to make sure that that team is actually connecting in a way that it’s going to impact their performance when they get back to the job.

Maria Ross  08:02

Okay, so tell us about the mistakes, well intentioned people are making, whether they’re HR leaders or employee experience professionals, when they try to do team building exercises, and it turns into a transaction, what are they doing wrong?

Teri Schmidt  08:21

You know, I think it’s just really a lack of intention. It’s a check in the box, it’s we know, we should be taking care of our team, we know we should be giving them some experiences, to have fun to connect, to learn about each other. But if there’s not a whole lot of intention behind it, that’s not going to happen. Sure, you might have some great conversations, some really friendly banter during the event itself. Maybe you learn a little bit about yourself. But you know, we as humans have a lot going on through our brains. And so unless there is some intention put into, okay, how are we going to design this in a way that they’re learning something new that they actually need, in order to function better as a team? And then how are we also going to look at how we’re transferring what they’ve learned into the workplace itself.

Maria Ross  09:15

I love that because I think that is the missing piece of, you know, people trying to, again, with all good intentions, trying to manufacture fun. And they say that, you know, having the happy hour on Friday is the team building exercise, or let’s go do a ropes course or, and all of those things can be good, but often they’re just sort of the lowest hanging fruit of what people think, okay, as long as we’re doing something outside of work or outside of the office or something, quote, unquote, fun, you know, according to whose opinion by the way I would say it just feels like another forced exercise that people have to go through. And again, some of them might be so preoccupied by work, because they’re like, why am I here? Like I already have a good relationship with people or or, I’m already friends with the people I want to be friends with at work. And I don’t, you know, so talk to us a little bit about that concept of bringing in skills development into deep building activities, because I don’t know that that’s often intentionally thought through and how can someone who’s in charge of these events, or who’s putting together these events, figure out what the most important need is for the team to work on?

Teri Schmidt  10:24

And I’ll start with that question. And I’m a big data person. So, you know, I think it just starts with getting that data in some way. So whether that’s through observing the team, whether that’s talking to the team leader, if you don’t happen to be the team leader yourself, whether that is looking at engagement, survey data, or different however, you are getting that feedback for how people feel about their time that they spend at work, you’re going to want to try to dig into that and see, okay, what are what, what are we doing well, but also, what are some of those muscles that maybe we need to exercise. So maybe it comes up that, you know, we’re not really good at giving each other feedback, or receiving the feedback which connect, you know, via the heart, right? Sometimes, right? Or maybe, you know, we’re just not really good at planning effective meetings. And those are two skills that, although they seem simple, are critically important in terms of how the team is going to perform day to day. So that’s how you can find out kind of what skills are needed. But then beyond putting that into the team building experience, your itself, you can do it in a multiple different ways. I mean, even on a on a ropes course, maybe you have an opportunity to give and receive feedback. The way that we design it is we actually are team building experiences are called Learn by Doing good. And the good is in parentheses. So you can learn, you know, learn by doing but also learn by doing good. And the reason for that is that we take that skill development, and we combine it with a community service project. So some project that benefits those in need in the community. And while they’re doing that community service project, they’re actually practicing the skills that we taught them. So that may sound a little bit different. It’s quite innovative. And so let me give you an example. So for our courage team building event, we talk a lot about giving and receiving feedback. And we, I will, through interactive activities help people to realize how they feel about giving and receiving feedback, you know, where maybe some of the roadblocks are for them. And then also, we go through a model that makes the feedback really specific, so that it’s actionable. Then in the project, we since it’s called courage, where you’re doing a project for first responders and active duty service members, and it’s making paracord lanyards. So that’s something that they can use out in the field for multiple different purposes. But a lot of people don’t know how to make them. So we partner them up, we let one team member learn the skill from a video how to do it, and they have to teach the other partner and the other partner has to use that model of giving feedback that we just learned minutes ago, and give feedback about how well that person taught them to do that skill.

Maria Ross  13:28

Wow. And so. So you’re really it kind of goes beyond it’s almost a mixture of a of a training session on skills development, and a team building activity. And it benefits the community. So you’re actually doing something that matters you’re putting out you’re putting it into practice, and you’re putting it into practice because of that community service aspect. So why is it is that? Like, how did this come about? How just serving prime our brains to learn and retain new skills better than just, you know, sitting in the session, other than that being, you know, sitting in the session being more boring? How does that actually help us learn and retain the skills

Teri Schmidt  14:11

better? Yeah, it’s fascinating. So when you are engaged in community service, when you are doing something good for others, there’s actually a reward center in your brain that activates. And it turns out that that reward center and the neurotransmitters that are released are the same ones that engage your brain in learning and retaining information. So it just happens to be that, you know, beyond all the benefits that you just mentioned, and you know, you’re learning, you’re doing something fun, you’re doing something that makes you feel good because it’s good for the community. It actually has some brain science behind it and that you are then more able to retain that information in those skills. You just learned?

Maria Ross  15:01

So how do your clients determine what activity to do? Do you encourage them to pick a community service project that aligns with their purpose or their mission? Or how do they even decide? Or is it based on the skill that they want to master,

Teri Schmidt  15:17

it’s kind of a mix and match. So we do have nine standard events that we offer. But we allow organizations to customize, and I love what you said, because I definitely recommend that if at all possible, they can align it with the purpose of their organization, because that’s just another way to transfer it back into the workplace. So if they’re doing something that is aligned with what they’re going to be doing every day, that makes it all the more likely that they’re, the brain is going to be triggered. Oh, yeah, I remember when we did that. And I know why we did it. Because that’s the one thing about, you know, the empathy generation, they need to understand the purpose behind what they’re doing. And they need to be able to relate to the person or the animal, we have projects for animals that they’re doing it for. And so without that, the empathy isn’t generated as much. And those reward centers don’t light up as much. Because although empathy comes to us naturally, it only comes to us naturally, for those who are in our in group. So we need to find a way, whether it’s through seen person face to face, or just watching a video about the person, which is usually what we do, because while they usually do it virtually, and they have to be able to relate to that person so that empathy can be triggered by them feeling more like that person is someone who matters and someone who they want to help. And it’s been part of their in group.

Maria Ross  16:48

I love that. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about how you can do this in a remote environment, because I think that’s, you know, as the workplace is changing as we are in this new era of work. The reality whether some leaders want to admit it or not, is that there’s a lot of people who are not going back to an office every day. And we realize the opportunity that potential with that, but the argument you often hear for making everybody mandating everyone to go back into the office is, oh, we can’t collaborate. If we’re remote, we can’t form connections. And for those of us that have been working remotely from home for decades, it’s kind of a weird thing to hear. But you know, it’s fear of the unknown for a lot of these leaders, like I don’t know how, unless everybody’s under the same roof, and we do an event and we’re all in the same room. How am I going to do team building? How am I going to do skills development, if everyone is still isolated in their own homes, but you have effectively done team building and skill building events? Learn by Doing good with remote teams? So how does that work? How are unable to make that happen? And what can someone listening? Learn from that about how to build more collaboration and camaraderie between their team even in a remote or possibly hybrid environment?

Teri Schmidt  18:08

Yeah, definitely a great question and one that I think is at the top of everyone’s mind. And before I jump into the answer, I do want to say I love the blog post that you recently did about that. And I, and the episode that you did a while back about the state of the empathy, you know, report in the workplace.

Maria Ross  18:24

Thanks. I’ll put a link to those in the show notes. Yeah. I recently for folks listening, I recently wrote a blog post about the real reason people may not want to come back to the office and how we can address that. So I’ll put links to that. Thanks for giving me a shout out there.

Teri Schmidt  18:38

Of course, of course, that was very insightful, in terms of how do you build connection, I was interesting, I was just listening to another podcast that you know, kind of beard, how we do this in a virtual environment. And the gentleman on there was talking about, you know, for so long screens, whenever we are in front of a screen, we expect it to be entertained. And the person leading, you know, was the person doing it, and we were just receiving that we were really passive. Now, if you operate your virtual meetings, or you operate your virtual team building events like that, there’s no connection that’s going to happen. And he was talking about and I would agree, because this is what we do you introduce those opportunities to connect as early as possible in the event, so that you can kind of say to your brain know that even though you’ve had decades of the screen being you know, your entertainment and you just passively absorb that we’re going to use it in a different way now. So what we will do is we will break people up into breakout rooms. Now the way we structure those depends on you know, what the leader wants and what activity is going on and what we understand about the relationships between different people, but we’ll give them an opportunity to do a quick connection exercise that is related to the scale, but still kind of light and fun and, you know, doesn’t require everyone to get real deep real fast, right. And we’ll do that as early as possible. And we’ll do those types of activities and breakouts very frequently throughout the event, so that people are getting to engage in a smaller group and able to not only, you know, gain some understanding about themselves, but also gain familiarity and understanding of how and why other people work the way that they

Maria Ross  20:32

do. I love that observation that you’ve just shared, because I never thought of it that way. I never thought about the fact that why was why was remote work easier for me when the lockdown happened since I had been doing it for you know, over a decade. And it’s because I was used to collaborating with people screen to screen, I was used to collaborating with people I’d never met in person before. And it’s such a, it’s such an underappreciated skill. And the fact that you called out why is because usually, when we have a relationship with the screen, it’s us and the screen. And we’re either doing our work by ourselves with that screen, or the screen, TV, tablet, whatever, is entertaining us and we are passive. Now you could argue like with video games, or whatever, that’s a little bit different. But again, we don’t associate work screens with that type of entertainment. And so it’s sort of this expectation of if I go into the Zoom Room, and it’s a class or a course or a team building activity over zoom, I just get to sit here. Yep. And, you know, show me what you got kind of a situation right, exactly. But getting used to this idea that we need to interact through the screen is a learned skill, and one that we don’t have. And just that was a brilliant nugget you just shared with us because I never thought of it that way of people. The challenge that people have with remote the challenge that leaders have, with leading remote or leading hybrid is their inability to interact screen to screen. But if we learn that skill, and you know, do it through team building activity, so we’re not only building camaraderie, but we’re you know, whatever skill, we’re also learning whatever professional skill, also learning the skill of how to interact with each other in a work environment through screen, and not being passive and to be part of it and participate.

Teri Schmidt  22:24

Yes, yeah. And I will say no, the other thing that we do are several of our events, they involve some sort of supply. So I talked about the paracord lanyards, we will ship out individual boxes, to the people who are participating. So what that does is that also gives you something tactile to work with that, again, engages you in the experience a little bit more than if you were just sitting back listening to something

Maria Ross  22:52

right. I remember one of the fun exercises my husband’s company did during the lockdown was they made succulent planters? Uh huh. So everybody on the team got their own little kit. Uh huh. And I think someone was guiding them. I’m not sure but, but it was creative and fun. And it was had nothing to do with work. But it was all about sort of expressing themselves and getting their creativity out and being able to share the experience of like, oh, let me see what you did, John. And let me see what you did Sarah. And I just thought that was such a neat opportunity for them to do something over zoom. And then we’ve all heard the stories of people doing things like wine tasting classes, or, you know, baking bread together or something like that. So, but what I love about this is, I feel like that component of that type of remote team building, in their minds, people have isolated to the lockdown. Like, we don’t need to do that and everything. And what you’re proposing is you still need to work on skills development with your team, you still need to build camaraderie, and teamwork. And you need to you might possibly need to do it in this new environment. So what’s a way you can do that? That’s not a, you know, not saying the succulent session was a waste of time. But you know, one could say, well, where’s the ROI on that? What you’re doing is you’re bringing in actual practical skills that impact productivity in the workplace, to the same kind of event and making it fun and giving back to the community. It’s like, it checks all the boxes, so I just exactly how much yeah, we

Teri Schmidt  24:22

kind of see it as a three for one. It was like what the succulent, you know, yes, that could enhance well being that could enhance relationships. You know, we feel like we are enhancing wellbeing of the team. We’re doing skill development that helps them develop skills they can use back in the workplace, and they’re doing good for the community. Right, right. And so as

Maria Ross  24:45

we wrap up, I want to ask one last question that I know you and I have talked about in our pre conversations to this call. And that’s the component of this that really appeals to younger generations in the workforce. Gen Z, the top talent that you know, to be a sustainable business we need to attract and engage and retain. Why is this type of team building skill building community service, event or experience so tantalizing to younger talent?

Teri Schmidt  25:18

Yeah, it’s really for two factors. So two factors that the younger generations consider when they are selecting a job or deciding if they want to stay with that particular employer have to do around professional and career development. So one reports from McKinsey said that 87%, consider professional development as important or very important to their choice of employment. So that’s 87% of people who are looking at that. So if you’re showing them that you are invested in giving them skills that they can use to progress in their career with you, or with another organization, that’s going to be very attractive. And the second one, I think, there’s been so much said, and there’s been research to back it up about how socially conscious the younger generations are. And, you know, I heard from a Deloitte Report to that 1/3 will actually reject an employer based on personal ethics and beliefs so that if they don’t feel that their employer is concerned about the causes that they are concerned about, well, I shouldn’t even say their employer, if they don’t feel their potential employer is concerned about it, flat out rejection, you know, it’s not necessarily about the money. It’s more about that purpose, and that professional career development.

Maria Ross  26:41

I love that because again, you look at these types of events and experiences, whether people do them with you, or they start being more intentional about how they’re doing and for their own organization, you’re able to accomplish a lot by combining these experiences into one experience without feeling like you’re trying to cram everything in, right, it all is interrelated. And add on top of that, the fact like you mentioned earlier, when it’s done in this type of an environment, when it’s done in this type of format, people will actually retain the skills that they’re learning and talk about wasted ROI. When you spend all this money sending people to fancy trainings or workshops, and they’re sitting in a room for five hours. And you know, they’re away from their job, and then you fly them back home. And then how much of that have they actually retained? And how much of that have they actually learned to use in practice?

Teri Schmidt  27:34

Exactly, we do one more thing to support that as well, we will offer resources or beyond the event. So whether that is strategies that you may want to incorporate in your weekly team meeting that relate to what was done in the event, whether that is leadership coaching for those, you know, organizations that do the team building with us, we do offer discount of leadership coaching so we can continue to work on, you know, what happened in the event? What was some of the progress that was made? And what is some progress that still needs to be made? And how can we support you and helping to make that happen?

Maria Ross  28:08

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much, Terry, for coming on today to talk about empathy infused team building to create lasting impact. And I am going to have in the show notes the link. But we’ve got a little gift for listeners, you have a free guide 10 activities to connect in 10 minutes, and it can be found at become stronger to serve.com forward slash empathy edge again, we’re going to put that link in the show notes for people and they’ll also be able to link to more information about your Learn by Doing good experiences, and hopefully spark some ideas for them. So for folks on the go, though, that are not in the access the show notes right now, where’s one of the best places they can connect with you and learn more about your work?

Teri Schmidt  28:50

Yeah, the best place is to find me on LinkedIn. So I’m under Terry te ri Schmitt, and I think it has an M in the middle. But if you search Terry Schmitt, and stronger to serve, you’ll find me and I know you’ll have it in the show notes as well. And I do want to give a little secret hint, there is a discount for our team building events in that activity guide that you were just mentioning that free gift. So love it. Make sure you get your hands on that and exactly it does support you and your teams. Yep, become

Maria Ross  29:20

stronger to serve.com forward slash empathy edge. Terry, thank you so much for your time and your efforts to help build teams build skills, but also benefit the community.

Teri Schmidt  29:32

Well, thank you for having me on Maria. This was great. And thank

Maria Ross  29:35

you everyone for listening to another great episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you liked what you heard you know what to do, please rate and review and share it with a colleague or a friend. And until next time, 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 end At the 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.

We are not tied to harmful business and workplace practices. In fact, history shows us that we, as humans, work to improve things over time – look at laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, and safety and truth in advertising regulations.

Yes, capitalism and business have been rooted in toxic and inequitable practices for a long time because people can make a lot of money. But we are in a new era of converging trends: more transparency, higher ethical customer demands, and much more marketing-savvy consumers.

Today, Brigette Iarrusso shares her unique journey and how she bucked a major higher ed institution by pushing to teach a new model of business success. We talk about raising awareness of coercive business and sales practices, especially in the wild west of the coaching and online business space.  We discuss leading in ways not rooted in dominant cultures, how to shift your sales and marketing to be more consent-based, when cancel culture is and is not effective, and how to unlearn toxic and patriarchal leadership and sales approaches to create more sustainable models.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership is not a binary. You do not have to lead compassionately or lead with financial success – you can have both. It is just a challenge to unlearn the things that we have been taught by society.
• You can’t create a new business model using old business paradigms. You have to rethink organizational structure, strategy, skills, finances, and everything else that goes into your company.
• All steps in the sales process should be taken with consent and curiosity, not with coersion and aggression.

“You really can’t extract big, fast profits without causing harm. And so I think there are some constructs that are a hard pill for certain types of businesses to swallow.” —  Brigette Iarrusso

Episode References: 

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers and boosting revenue and growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

About Brigette Iarrusso, CEO and Founder, Disruptive Business Coaching 

Brigette Iarrusso is CEO and Founder of Disruptive Business Coaching. She’s an international speaker and social impact business coach. She is on a mission to help coaches, healers, and experts, who care about racial and social justice to scale their sales and impact with integrity, equity and inclusion.  She is committed to raising awareness around coercive marketing and sales practices in the coaching and online business space.  And, disrupting harmful practices that disproportionately affect People of Color and other people with marginalized identities.  She creates inclusive and engaging events that inspire and connect business leaders with widely diverse backgrounds from around the globe.

Connect with Brigette Iarrusso:  

Disruptive Business Coaching (formerly Embrace Change): 

Website: https://www.disruptivebusinesscoaching.com

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brigette.iarrussosoto/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/embracechangeus/

Take her high impact challenge: https://go.embracechange.us/highimpactchallengeevergreen

Join the tribe, download your free guide! Discover what empathy can do for you: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

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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. We are not tied to harmful business and workplace practices. In fact, history shows us that when we as humans work to improve things over time, it gets better look at laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, and safety and truth in advertising regulations. And yes, capitalism and business have been rooted in toxic and inequitable practices for a long time, because people can make a lot of money. But we’re in a new era of converging trends, more transparency, higher ethical customer demands, and much more marketing savvy consumers. My guest today is Bridgette ire Russo international speaker social impact business coach and CEO of disruptive business coaching. And she’s on a mission to help coaches, healers, experts and even companies who care about racial and social justice to scale their sales and impact with integrity, equity and inclusion. We both believe organizations can be successful and profitable, while still disrupting harmful practices that disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. Today, Bridgette shares her unique journey and how she booked a major higher ed institution by pushing to teach a new model of business success. We talk about raising awareness of coercive business and sales practices, especially in the wild west of the coaching and online business space. We discuss leading in ways not rooted in dominant cultures, how to shift your sales and marketing to be more consent based, when canceled culture is and is not effective, and how to unlearn toxic and patriarchal leadership and sales approaches to create more sustainable models. This was an eye opener. Take a listen. Hello, Bridgette I are so welcome to the empathy edge podcast, my friend, it’s so good to see you.

Brigette Iarrusso  03:44

You too. Thank you so much for inviting me, buddy. I’m really excited.

Maria Ross  03:47

So you are so much you have done so much. And I would love to give listeners a taste of your story and how you came to this work of being a disruptive business coach and helping to disrupt the coaching industry. So tell us how you got here. And why is this your passion?

Brigette Iarrusso  04:08

Okay, well, I’ll try to do it in a way that doesn’t take too long. I have a mixed identity, and I’m half Puerto Rican and half Italian American. And I was always drawn to explore other cultures. And so during grad school, I took a good chunk of time off for my degree program. And I went to Guatemala, and I worked with indigenous communities around microcredit lending initiatives, and I just saw so much disruption, innovation and resilience among people who had very scarce resources. And I really began to see that my worldview was flawed that I wasn’t going to be going to Guatemala to save these kinds of poor, marginalized impoverished people. If anything, they were there to teach me a lot. And they were just simply lacking in resources. That’s where things kind of started. And it started to disrupt my worldview and my perspective of the US and how we frame ourselves as kind of being this global Savior that’s going on doing all this good in the world, I started to really see that there were a lot of holes in these narratives that were taught about the United States and financial aid to developing countries. And then I wound up working in bedroo, doing work with extractive corporations, mining companies, and looking at the impact of multinational businesses, on the environment, on the society on the culture in Begu, very much an ongoing reflection of colonization, and a continuation of colonization in a new global economic format. And so again, I wound up learning a lot more than I actually think I contributed, being on the ground with these kinds of local groups, and really learning to listen and tune into what people were already working on, and unlearning the desire to come in and fix and save, which is very much a symptom of people like myself and many other people in my community who are wanting to do good in the world. So full circle, I wound up coming back to the US after those experiences working in a couple of nonprofits in a way that was really misaligned for my new worldview. And then I wound up teaching business, UC Berkeley change management, and cross cultural communication, and then entrepreneurial leadership. And then I kept disrupting and inserting ideas around sustainable green marketing, triple bottom line, ethics, sustainability, and they were okay. They kept saying, okay, Bersia, and I would bend the rules, and I’d get instructors in that we’re not quite fitting the standards. And then I started to talk about systemic oppression and racism, in business, and institutionally. And that’s where I crossed the line as a disrupter, right? That’s where I threatened that institutional status quo and triggered something that there was a lot of shame and suppressed history around. And so that’s when I became just way too much for that institution. And realized after I was released from my role, which a lot of people say, Oh, things happen for you, not to you. That’s not true when it comes to like genocide and rape, like, we should never say that. But when it comes to this situation of me as like a white presenting woman of privilege being released from this role, it really was one of those, like hidden gifts. The universe was really like, here, I’m gonna do you a solid, you don’t see it quite that way. But the thing was, at this time in my life, I was available for that. I saw this as like, this is your out, like, you don’t belong here anymore. You’ve reached the maximum level of disruption, you can, you’ve done some great things. In fact, I think I tried to hire you, you were one of my most amazing people that I met through those years of like seeking out and stalking, you know, marketing experts online. That’s how I found Maria. I was looking for awesome women leaders in marketing, that were doing cool shit. And that’s how I found her. And I like invited her to coffee. So I did this great work at the University. And I disrupted where I could, and I shifted the curriculum to the extent that I could, and then I like, let it go. And I said to the universe, on the day, I was released from that role, the day I was laid off, I said, I’m ready for something better. And that’s when someone came into my life that was in the entrepreneurial coaching industry, and invited me to work on a collaboration and it just took off from there, I just got really excited about the possibility of doing things my own way and creating my own business, even though I had originally been scared about entrepreneurship and business leadership, because there’s so many narratives in the work I was doing in Silicon Valley about failure rates, and everyone’s destined to fail, and that everyone’s cut out. And there’s so many failure narratives that are deeply rooted. And so I had to like, do the work to unlearn those narratives and trust that I was going to succeed on my terms, and that I was ultimately, always an entrepreneur and an innovator. It’s just I didn’t know that that’s what you called it, I always thought I was just breaking rules, getting in trouble for trying to do things more efficiently, trying to take risks, trying to make things more efficient, trying to deconstruct things from traditional power sources, right. All those things I was doing was social innovation, social entrepreneurship, but I had no idea until after I taught it and learned about it and Silicon Valley and then started my own company. It all started to connect. I was like, Oh, I’m an entrepreneur, but I’m not a regular entrepreneur, and I’m never going to be right, right. Right.

Maria Ross  09:44

What I love about that is you’ve taken all the concepts that you were trying to help entrepreneurs building these quote unquote, big ideas and big systems and big companies and, you know, tech darlings and all that kind of thing, and you’ve brought it to an industry that is way overdue for disruption, and for sort of cleaning house, which is the coaching industry. So tell us about how you decided to focus there. And what are the toxic business models you see in the coaching industry today?

Brigette Iarrusso  10:17

Yeah, so I found out that I was a coach, through a mentor that I invited to speak in my classroom, Hans Kurdi. I remember talking with him after I got laid off, and he was the person that came to me with a project. And he’s an amazing business mentor, and coach and mindset coach. And I was like, I don’t even know what this coaching stuff is. And he’s like, Yeah, Bridgette, you’re just a coach. You’re like a natural coach. And he’s like, I’ve witnessed you in your classroom, you ask more questions than you do tell, and you facilitate the students taking risks and making mistakes. And that’s what coaches do it. And I thought to myself, Wow, is that true. And then my mother had this massive stroke while I was three months pregnant. And I got laid off, pretty much right after I came back from maternity leave, while I was in this medical crisis, trauma crisis, caring for my mother, who lost 40% of her right brain and became severely disabled overnight. And this is an indigenous Puerto Rican woman who’s obese, the system does not, is not set up to care for her. But I’m set up to disrupt that system and make sure she gets cared for. So I was in the midst of all of that. And my traditional therapist, I was just sitting and complaining to her for years, throughout my mom’s condition and care. And I got in touch with all my feelings toward my mom, over and over processing feelings. And finally, one day, I just asked her, when are you going to tell me to just shut the fuck up? When are you going to ask me? What do I want to do about any of this? How much longer are you going to let me sit here repeating the same bullshit stories over and over and over? This is like, not at all helpful anymore. And so that’s when my mentor Hans began coaching me around the situation with my mother. And in a very short period of time, I realized that I had the power to shift my stories and beliefs around the situation of my mother’s condition and what it meant for my life. And it wasn’t like overnight, it wasn’t like a magic wand, which is one of the problems in the coaching industry, right? This narrative that you just need this one mindset shift, and it’s so easy. And then overnight, your whole life, no, deep mindset coaching, is rooted in first unlearning to rewrite and relearn your stories and and there’s a pretty significant, deeply rooted process. And that that work also has to be trauma informed, and trauma aware for it to actually be safe and sustainable. And not just be a short term mindset tweak. So I had this beautiful experience of unfuck Ng, my own mindset about this truly fucked up situation truly bad. Like, I’m an only child. financially. My mother’s care was like extraordinarily overwhelming. And I went from like, there’s no out it’s hopeless. There’s no solutions to like, Fuck this. I’m building her cottage, I’m taking over. I’m bringing in caregivers, I’m taking her out of the care system. I’m doing this I’m advocating I’m making it work and all kinds of shit went wrong all the time. And my mindset throughout all this was like, Okay, now what? So that’s not working. Now, what do we do? And I just shifted my entire, my entire way of being in the world from like, focusing on the problems to looking at okay, what’s the next possibility? How do I move from this stuck place? And so that is where the intersection with the coaching?

Maria Ross  13:47

Yeah. And so what do you see as some of the issues though, with the coaching industry, as it is

Brigette Iarrusso  13:53

one of the biggest Well, I mentioned that there’s this lack of awareness around trauma and its impact on the body and the brain. And this is particularly relevant for people who hold a marginalized identity, whose bodies and brains have been ultimately assaulted systemically with higher levels of trauma than many of us have ever experienced. And the two largest traumas that have impacted people are colonization, the the destruction and decimation of indigenous culture and the westernization and colonization of those cultures, and slavery, and ongoing systemic racism that came out of the creation of the narrative that people who are melanated are lesser humans. And so these two constructs produce a great deal of trauma, global collective trauma, individual trauma, cerebral trauma, epigenetic trauma that gets passed on generationally. And so a lot of what coaching attempts to do is to skirt over deeper issues with mindset tweaks, and shifts in beliefs. Yeah, and you can shift your belief which I hate that word. Yeah, you can shift your beliefs. But, and I did that initially and shifting my beliefs got me far, it got me pretty far in terms of taking action. But what shifting my beliefs did not get me is nervous system regulation, healing internalized trauma in my family system. Like, that’s work I’m still doing now, I’m playing catch up and doing that work in myself and in my family system and learning about how to integrate it into my coaching. Because mindset shifts alone are really helpful for people with very limited trauma and very limited challenges that the challenges that they’re facing are relatively minor, like leaving a job that you don’t like, if you’re a person of privilege, and you have other opportunities, but you’re kind of making out to be really scary. That might be something where mindset work can help a lot shifting the narrative around, there’s many opportunities available for me, lots of people out there want to hire someone like me, I don’t need to stay at this company, I don’t need them. They’re not a fit, like mindset work is really useful in that construct. But again, let’s put that in the perspective of like, maybe this is a woman of color working in a company where she’s experiencing microaggressions on the daily, and she’s ignoring these behaviors, and this treatment in order to continue to function in her role. And all of that harm and toxicity of that organizational culture has been built up in her nervous system. Now, mindset work alone is not going to help that woman if she’s afraid of going out looking for another job, because her fear of looking for another job has multiple levels. And it’s including fear of being harmed again, in another toxic supremacist organizational culture where she as a woman of color, is not fully embraced or accepted for who she is. Right? So there’s all these complexities that there are coaches in the industry that are acknowledging these nuances. And there is a certain percentage, I would say, 15%, maybe it’s moving from 10%, maybe 15%, maybe we’re stretching to 20%, of the coaching industry is starting to understand that we need to look at coaching through a lens of trauma, awareness of equity, true equity, diversity and inclusion. And not just equity, diversity, inclusion, for virtue signaling or for looking good. But for actual restorative racial justice to actually correct the imbalance in power and opportunity that has been impacting people marginalized identities, and these constructs of the inequity are really magnified in the coaching industry. And they’re really prevalent. And because everybody is online, and everyone’s sharing their perspectives openly, you can see these power dynamics around race and privilege and equity playing out. And I’m very blessed to be in a community of other disruptors, people of color, white people who are taking a stand around racial and social justice and conscious business and wanting to do things differently. And part of what we’re all learning, and unlearning is to be more empathetic, and to have more self love and self compassion in this work, because it’s really uncomfortable. It’s complicated. And it’s really messy to do this work well. And if the goal is to not make mistakes, because you’re afraid of being canceled, or called out, then people don’t do anything, right. And this is where a lot of conscious kind, white people consider themselves spiritual, who have positive intentions who want to do good in the world. They get stuck in well, I don’t want to say the wrong thing or make a mistake. So I don’t do anything. That’s a problem. Right? You have to be willing. So deconstructing, or dismantling white supremacy requires white people should embrace discomfort, imperfection and making mistakes, because white supremacist culture is punitive. It’s not forgiving. It’s about incarcerating people. Three strikes, you’re out. People are reprehensible people are, you cannot rehabilitate people that makes mistakes in society, they need to be shunned, locked away and punished. That is what white supremacist culture is. And that extends to everything, including business, and online social media, this idea that, like, if you say the wrong thing, or you make mistakes, or you cause harm, you’re gonna get canceled, and you’re gonna get ruined. Well, I

Maria Ross  19:34

want to talk about that, because you talked about that. There are certain situations where canceled culture is okay. But it’s not as often as we think. So talk to us a little bit about that, because and I want to build I want to connect the dot here to leadership models that are rooted in dominant culture. But before I get there, since you brought it up, I do want to talk about the impact of Kancil culture on business. Yeah, and you What’s your viewpoint on that?

Brigette Iarrusso  20:02

Yeah, so canceled culture is complicated because when you cancel a company, for example, it might be warranted if that company has been called in. And the harm that they have caused, or continue to cause has been pointed out. And if they dig in their heels and deny any wrongdoing, deny, causing harm, and continue to perpetuate harm, and multiple attempts to call in to correct to give a restorative justice approach to fix the problem. That’s where you get canceled. So like a coach, that has been harming people for a long time, and has been called out multiple times. And then people call this person in and have a dialogue and all kinds of people have expended excruciating amounts of emotional labor, to talk with this person about the harm and give them constructive feedback and how to do better. And they’re just like, No, I didn’t do anything wrong, too fucking bad. That’s where things are kind of complicated, right. But what Colin culture and constructive restorative justice culture looks like is, we all make mistakes. We’re all capable of learning from our mistakes, we’re capable of doing better. But when we shame other and cancel people, block them, take away their voice. It drives the behavior underground, they get put into a place of shame, and self criticism and self judgment, there’s a lack of empathy for the mistake. The idea is that other people are better than them and don’t make mistakes, which is absolute bullshit, because we all make mistakes, right? But that is what white supremacists culture is. And that’s why women and people who hold marginalized identities, even men struggle and suffer so much in white supremacist culture, because there’s no space to be imperfect humans that are in a duality of goodness and causing harm. Yeah.

Maria Ross  22:03

Well, and I think that impacts our leadership models, because it is a very, you know, even you know, I know you were talking about the criminal justice system, but there is that viewpoint of three strikes, you’re out on the job. And, you know, and it’s balancing, that I feel strongly that you can lead compassionately and in a humane way, and still expect excellence, and still make a profit, and still achieve your goals. Like, I think we’ve signed on for this binary thinking of you’re either a compassionate leader, or you’re a financially successful leader. Why can’t we be both. And that’s what I love about the slant on your coaching, where you’re talking about helping people build profitable businesses, and make money so that money can then flow into their communities and into their causes, and to create a sustainable business that not only supports their lifestyle, but then also can give back to their communities. We don’t talk enough about that, you know, there’s either people who are scared of money, or think it’s shameful to make a lot of money. And oh, I just want my business to do well, and just support my family. But I love that you are very bold about working with entrepreneurs and working with businesses that still care about the bottom line. But there’s a way that they can do it that is compassionate, that is not oppressive. That is good to the environment, that we can have both of these things. And so I know you in the past, you’ve talked about leading in a way that’s not rooted in the dominant culture. Is that what you’re talking about? Is it that viewpoint that it has to be an either or?

Brigette Iarrusso  23:40

I mean, it’s one thing and it’s a very important thing, and it’s probably one of the hardest things to unlearn. You know, I personally have a very dominant personality style, I’ve always had a lot of masculine energy. I’ve always been a leader. And I’ve always had strong ideas. And people have looked up to me and looked up to my ideas. And it’s a challenge to unlearn, always needing to be the smartest person in the room, always needing to have all the answers. This is where burnout occurs among leaders and CEOs and companies, because they put this super pressure on themselves, to have it all figured out, to lead strongly to model everything perfectly to drive company excellence. And I do think there’s something to be said for there is an inherent challenge in fast growth and fast scale. without replicating toxic and oppressive systems. It’s actually almost impossible to do. And so this is where there is a little bit of a crux here because I did a lot of research in the conscious business space when I was on the board of conscious capitalism, which has now since disbanded and we had a very honest, open internal conversation about the lack of depth of our own commitment to doing the deeper anti racism work within the organization was really missing because that’s really what it’s about. And so when you’re looking at the capitalist business model, the profit based business model, ultimately, it’s still rooted in extraction, and extracting the most from people. And so to build a company culture in an organization that’s counter to that requires greater output of expense, infrastructure time. And it’s a low food business, it’s not a fast food business. And so you’re going to have higher upfront costs, you’re going to need to build more foundation, more solid foundation invest more initially. And then you’re going to be a long haul flow growth company, that sustainable over time, that doesn’t get canceled, and you’re gonna hit your lips, and you’re gonna make your mistakes. But when you’re available for learning and doing better, and you’re available to be called in, and you’re available to receive feedback from your employees, from your customers, from your followers, and you’re listening, and you’re doing better as a result of that feedback, then you’re going to stay for the long haul. And there’s only a slim margin of companies with this particular approach. And I know many of them. And it’s a beautiful thing to witness because fast extractive growth is what toxic capitalism is. It’s the epitome of toxic capitalism, right? It’s about shareholder dividends, it’s about profit only. And you really can’t extract big, fast profits without causing harm. And so I think there are some constructs that are a hard pill for certain types of businesses to swallow, because they’re not inherently designed will be that slow type of thing. And they

Maria Ross  26:44

have to do the work. That’s the thing is you can’t create that new model using old paradigms. Right, you know, you can part yeah. And it requires rethinking your organizational structure. It requires rethinking your investment strategy, your budgeting strategy within the organization, it requires you rethinking the skill sets you require to actually get the job done and where you’re going to find them. And so

Brigette Iarrusso  27:13

because of fear and scarcity, that Yeah, I mean, don’t do those things. Right. So because capitalism is rooted in competition and scarcity, we’ve coded from birth, to think that there’s only a certain amount of resources and that we have to fight and compete and do certain things to access those resources. And there’s some truth to that in some ways, but I think what companies fail to see is that a lot of the things that they consider extra nice to haves, nice to have, like antiracism, or,

Maria Ross  27:46

like de IB, leaders are getting exactly left and right, because I don’t understand recession. Yeah. If

Brigette Iarrusso  27:52

your organization is truly deeply committed to unlearning toxic supremacist leadership approaches, whether through in sales, product development, creative design, customer service, user experience, whatever the area is, those tools to be trauma aware, equity informed, and to learn consent based collaborative coaching models of leadership, it’s going to help every single type of department in your organization do better. But there’s a lack of belief or buy in, because the leaders of those departments are under pressure and operating under scarcity that they have to get their teams to produce and perform. And so they put more pressure on and they will and then they don’t necessarily realize how counter that is to people’s wellness and productivity.

Maria Ross  28:44

So can you give us an example or two of companies that you see doing things in a new way? And trying to adopt some of these models?

Brigette Iarrusso  28:54

Yeah, I mean, well, it’s hard. I mean, they try to, I would say that in the B Corp. in the B Corp movement, Donna, Karen is an interesting example. I met Donna Karen 25 years ago, and she was in a board room at the law firm where I was working as a paralegal crying, because her lawyers informed her that her products were still being made with sweat, children’s sweatshop labor, and she authentically literally didn’t know. And she did the white woman crocodile tears and it’s like, okay, you’re crying about this, but you’re not the child working in the sweatshop and you’re privileged person. But she worked through this over the years and became a B Corp and has done a lot in the garment industry and has made big changes, right. And so she’s an example of someone that came out of the possibility of being utterly canceled. Like many companies that are exposed for harmful business practices, which many especially garment production, fashion industry companies, most Most are participating in child trafficking, child slave labor, unhealthy and unfair wages and factory conditions, right? And often it takes companies being put out on Front Street for leaders to realize, so there’s this kind of push pull of like, do leaders fix these things? before they happen? That’s the ideal, or do they address the wound once it’s been exposed to the public, and they’re bleeding out and they’re losing their money, and they’re at risk for losing their shareholders? Both are happening, right. But I’m really interested in the companies that are trying to get out ahead of it. And I don’t know that many, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I actually did a, I did outreach. And I asked for examples. And it was really hard. People would come back to me and say, I did a lot of research. And this company is doing some cool stuff, but not quite right. But I would say looking at the B Corp roster, looking at companies that maybe call themselves conscious capitalist, but I would look into what their definition is of being a conscious capitalist, if that includes being anti oppressive, anti racist. Yeah, I

Maria Ross  31:07

think that’s the thing, too. I mean, I think there’s a few examples of companies like SAP or Patagonia or Unilever, who are actually proactively taking a look at their supply chain, for example, and making sure there’s not harm being done to communities or to people along the way. Now, right? Have they solved all the problems? Probably not. But the point is, they’re actually investing time and resources into investigating the problem and into looking into it. Rather than saying, like, I’m sure there’s nothing to see here. And waiting, you know, as long as we don’t have a PR nightmare, everything’s fine. Yeah, they’re actually proactively doing some work in that area. As we wrap up, I do want to talk about this concept that you talk about a lot, which is how to lead with consent in sales, and unlearn supremacist and patriarchal sales models that have been passed down. I’m constantly impressed with your platform of saying there is a different way to sell and be successful. And it doesn’t have to harm people, it doesn’t have to fool them, especially given my long background in saying that marketing can be used for good not for evil. So tell us a little bit about what does that mean to lead with consent in sales? Can you give us some examples?

Brigette Iarrusso  32:27

Yeah, I think I mean, on a daily basis on LinkedIn, I’m bombarded with inbox messages. Oh, seriously. It’s telling me to want to connect or, you know, but then they ultimately lead with an immediate pitch and there are asked, yeah, they aren’t asking, or they’re offering a solution to a problem that they don’t actually know that I have, that they don’t have my consent to help them solve. And they are making assumptions and kind of projecting onto you, the potential client that you need them. And that is really a hierarchical approach to sales, that is all about cold outreach and pushing onto people and getting them, wrangling them into fear around a problem and getting them to take the next step out of fear. And that’s a very kind of old world white male dominant culture approach to selling. It’s very interlaced with subtle or explicit coercion, a lot of manipulation, leading people into what the problem is and what they need, right. And it’s, and then there’s a completely inverse way of approaching sales, which is to look at people who are following you that might be potential clients as intelligent sovereign beings, who actually know what they need and what they’re looking for. And you’re there to facilitate them having a lightbulb moment that you’re what they need. And the best way to lead to that is through curiosity and seeking consent at every step. So an example of how I do this online, is I’ll share a post with a great deal of value and giving advice and explaining and breaking down consent, pay sales in the exact way that I would do in my paid course or program for free in a social post, lots of details, lots of explanations. And then let me know if this is helpful, like an actual request in the message, or if this is helpful. Do you want to attend my workshop next week where I’m going to go in greater detail into this. And then if someone comments, this is really helpful, then I would get their consent, the next step and say, may I send you a message about my upcoming workshop? Would you like me to send you information? I get their consent. They say yes. Now it’s okay for me to send them a private message and say, Hey, thank you for engaging with my post. I’m glad you found it useful. My five steps for consent based selling, and here’s the link for my workshop. I’d love to see you there in May I follow up with you after the workshop to see if it was helpful. third level of consent. So literally, the way that you approach sales when you are consensual and curious, and always giving the person the opportunity to decide if they want more, or if they’re ready for the next step, you really can’t go wrong. So it’s leading with extreme value first, with no pressure to buy anything, consistently sharing value in ways that are scalable. And making sure that anytime anyone finds you on any platform, or whichever are your chosen platforms, when they land on your profile, they can absorb wisdom and understand exactly how you help them. And if it resonates with them, then you can have a next step in the customer journey, but that those steps all have to be taken with consent and with curiosity. Yeah, and if someone is interested in working with you, and says, Not right now, or I don’t know if I have the money for that investment. But I’d really love to work with you. This is the next step, right? So traditional consultative selling gets really coercive and aggressive around this, and what are you afraid of? And this is where you can, you have to lean into nervous system regulation, releasing the need to force a sale or make a sale. And also, again, get curious. And that’s where you can get consent to ask further questions in the sale? Like, are you comfortable talking through that with me? Would it be helpful if we explored the financial investment? And what the fear is around the investment? Or is this something you feel like you’re absolutely not at all available to make? If the person says, Well, yeah, let’s talk about it. Because I really do want to work with you. Now you can begin to go back into curious coaching. And this is where true coaching that is consensual, and doesn’t have a hierarchical power dynamic is how you can coach people through a sale, where you help them figure out what they need to know about the decision and make it for themselves. I’ve had people have conversations with me, where we coach through their money fears, and they say, You know what, I still, I’m still not able to make this financial investment with you right now. But I know I want to, and I want you to check back in with me in three months. And then I will write and then there’s the follow up piece consent to follow up. I’ve had people also change their mind and say, you know, it’s a really stretchy investment to work with you. But now that we’ve talked through it, I do understand the value, I understand how I’m going to get a result, I understand the risks, and I’m willing to do it now. Right? I like I feel much better. And but it takes deadlines selling

Maria Ross  37:29

with empathy, though, that’s the whole thing is that it’s you looking at it from their point of view and allowing, like you said, allowing them to be in control of the process, and respect them as a sovereign human being. And it’s so much better than, you know, I’m going to admit, I mean, these folks on LinkedIn that you get these InMail messages from, it must work, because they’re playing a numbers game. I don’t know how I think it ruins your brand reputation. But you know, when you get those messages of like, I can help you do this set up some time on my calendar. I’m like, I’m not going to set up some time on your calendar, I listen to you. And yeah, don’t even talk to me, I didn’t reach out to you. So you know, just even that, you know, that’s where I go in my mind is like it must be working, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But it’s a win by attrition. It’s a win by just beating people down enough that they’re like, Fine, I’ll respond or take your call. Now I have responded to cold sales emails, because literally right at that moment in time, I was facing that problem. And it was like serendipitous that this person reached out to me. But that’s a fluke, that that happened because they didn’t know me. They didn’t know what I was working on or what I was doing. I did get one of the best podcast placement pitches I’ve ever gotten in recent weeks, where the placement agent, listened to an episode of my podcast, quoted it back to me said why it resonated with her. And then gave me the information about her guest and an outline of what her guests could talk about on my show that was relevant to my audience. And I thought, oh my gosh, that’s I said, I’m gonna heard about this on LinkedIn, and I promoted it on LinkedIn, but she wouldn’t let me use her name. She said, You know, I just, I’d rather not, you can post it anonymously. And I thought interesting, that was so telling about who this person was. And her approach to marketing and selling. It was very bespoke, it was very customized. It was very conceptual. And I never felt pushed or pressured. And when you compare that to the 90%, of pitches that people get, I just don’t know how it works for them. And I don’t know what types of customers they’re attracting. If it does work.

Brigette Iarrusso  39:48

They’re attracting customers who are in a place of victimhood, who want to be saved, who are not strong in their own beliefs that are easily bullied, right? So these are going to be folks that probably are going to need deeper work. So whatever they’re doing with that person that’s reaching out to them to help them with their business, you know that because again, they might not be the best clients either. They are not customers, clients. I mean, yeah, it’s a done for you service and they’re offering to do it for you. The reality is that 90% of us marketers out there doing lead generation are selling you exactly what they’re doing to you. So they’re selling you that they’re going to go cold message other people on your behalf. And they’re going to do it in the same icky way. And they’re going to bring you clients that you’re going to then try to coerce into working with you. And it’s unfortunately, quite a strong trend and it’s staying but I don’t know if it I questioned if it’s working as well as it used to I think it’s gotten to a frenzy of desperation. It is a numbers game, I think people are really fried from it. I mean, I worked in cold calling when I was a teenager, I remember working at a call center. And that was my first experience with sales and my nervous system had to like unlearn that gross feeling of like interrupting people at dinnertime and being hung up on and then having like my gross old boss, like breathing over my shoulder and asking me if I’d made any sales right and never making any sales. And like I literally went in the bathroom one day and had like a rum and coke in my purse. I guess I was like, How can I get through another day of doing? Yeah, I did. I did a vlog like maybe a month or two?

Maria Ross  41:19

Well, I nobody wants that to be their career, like this is the thing. And so

Brigette Iarrusso  41:23

you know, what it becomes in the industry when you don’t have the other approach, which is you have something that is truly worthwhile of bringing intentionality to the free value, you create the days of like my three quick tricks to make $100,000 a month PDF thing. You know, buyers in the online coaching industry and expert consulting industry are more savvy than ever. Lots of people have been burned and harmed and spent a lot of money on what I call magical marketing solutions that are not rooted in actual strategic frameworks and support that are going to produce results that don’t take into account the behavior and actions of the actual client. That is significant. And people are have learned a lot. And so there’s still kind of a smaller group of people who you can still get away with this. But I think it’s changing. There’s been a lot of awakening and awareness building

Maria Ross  42:21

it consumers are more savvy than they have been in the past. And especially when you look at the younger generations and their buying habits and their buying preferences. They’re not having it.

Brigette Iarrusso  42:30

Now, you know, they’re just not. So knowing this. Let us talk to people like they’re smart. Let’s talk to people like they know what the problem is. They know what they need. We don’t have to beat them over the head with it. Let’s keep showing them relevant options and solutions, viable ways of doing things. Let’s keep modeling good stuff. And then if they bite, and they like it, let’s ask for their permission to continue the conversation and do sales in a way that feels good for everybody. I love that results in making money.

Maria Ross  43:01

Yeah, exactly. I love it so much. Great insight Rajat, thank you so much for sharing your disruption with us. We need more disruptors like you and the world. Because I really believe that these business models are created by us and they can be changed by us. So we need to meet after we have, we have to and

Brigette Iarrusso  43:21

more good people making more money, they spend their money differently. Yeah. And so the kinds of people that I’m talking to, and the kinds of people that you’re talking to that are out there trying to build more conscious businesses, when you make more money, you’re going to redistribute that money, that wealth and that opportunity in ways that are radically different than our predecessors in business, who are a bunch of old men that didn’t really care about anybody else except themselves and their shareholders. And so if we also have to get over our bullshit, and our fears of selling, and embrace selling as relationship building, and in many ways, get back to something more authentic and more intimate. And yeah, and there’s vulnerability in selling authentically an athlete or the work and we can get to that place and feel comfortable with selling, you will make more money, and you’ll have more opportunities. And you’ll have more flexibility to do the kinds of great things that you want to do inside your own family, inside your own leadership, investing in yourself and your own personal development. And then if you’re in an organization, investing in initiatives that you care about, love it, love it. So

Maria Ross  44:24

we will have all the links to get in touch with you in the show notes. But for folks on the go, where’s one of the best places they can connect with you or find out more about your work?

Brigette Iarrusso  44:34

I would say I’m most active on Facebook at Virginia Russo’s Soto and on Instagram at embrace change us now disruptive business coaching, but you can still find me. All right,

Maria Ross  44:46

awesome. Thank you so much for your time today and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you liked what you heard, you know what to do, please rate or review and share with a colleague or friend and in the meantime until our next wonderful guest. Always 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.

What do collaboration and empathy look like when lives and liberty are on the line, not just workplace culture? Today, you’re going to hear what happens when people come together across cultures to support each other – amidst a backdrop of World War, racism, fear, and segregation in 1940s America.

Janice Munemitsu shares her family’s inspiring story of kindness, collaboration, and empathy. Her book, The Kindness of Color, is the true story of multicultural collaboration between the Mendez and Munemitsu families, two immigrant families who came to Southern California for better lives, only to face their own separate battles against racism in the midst of World War II. 

Today, Janice shares this story with you – why she wrote the book, how children and young people have responded, and most importantly how kindness leads to a brighter future that lifts everyone up.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• All children are born with empathy. It is an exercise to continue to keep it strong. 
• Kindness isn’t done for fame or accolades. Kindness is done because of character, honesty, integrity, and desire to help a friend.
• DEIB is about more than just strategy and benefits. There is an ethos that comes when groups come together in collaboration with each other – and it is kindness.

“It’s not a Mexican and Japanese story. It’s a multicultural story, of people doing what they could, given the circumstances, and not just thinking of themselves, but of thinking more of the whole.”

—  Janice Munemitsu

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers and boosting revenue and growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

About Janice Munemitsu, Author, The Kindness of Color

Janice Munemitsu is the author of The Kindness of Color.  This is the true story of two immigrant families who came to Southern California for better lives, only to face their own separate battles against racism in the midst of World War II. One family came by land from Mexico and the other by sea from Japan. Little did they expect their paths would meet and lead to justice and desegregation for all the school children of California in Mendez, et. al v. Westminster (1947) – seven years before Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Janice is a third-generation Japanese American Sansei. A native of Orange County, California, she worked on the family farm from age five through high school. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Biola University. Janice’s book may be purchased on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Connect with Janice Munemitsu:

Book: The Kindness of Color: https://www.thekindnessofcolor.com 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaniceMunemitsu 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janice-munemitsu/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekindnessofcolor 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekindnessofcolor/ 

References Mentioned:

• Silvia and Aki
• Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation
• Separados No Somos Iguales (Spanish Language version)

Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

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. What does collaboration and empathy look like when lives and liberty are on the line, not just workplace culture? Today, you’re going to hear what happens when people come together across cultures and backgrounds to support each other. Amidst a backdrop of World War, racism, fear and segregation in 1940s. America, Janice Munna Mitsu shares her family’s inspiring story of kindness, collaboration and empathy. Her book the kindness of color, is the true story of multicultural collaboration between the Mendez and Muna Mitsu families, to immigrant families who came to Southern California for better lives, only to face their own separate battles against racism. In the midst of World War Two. One family came by land from Mexico, and the other by sea from Japan. Little did they expect their paths would meet and lead to justice and desegregation for all the schoolchildren of California, in Mendez at all versus Westminster 1947. Seven years before Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. Janice is a third generation Japanese American Sansei, a native of Orange County, California, she worked on the family farm from age five through high school. Today, Janice shares this story with you why she wrote the book, how children and young people have responded, and most importantly, how kindness leads to a brighter future that lifts everyone up. You will leave inspired. Take a listen. Hello, Janice. Welcome to the empathy edge podcast to share your incredible story and book with us about the importance of kindness.

03:11

Thank you so much, Maria. Thanks for having me on your podcast.

Maria Ross  03:16

So let’s talk a little bit about your story. Tell us your story. And when it intersected with the Mendez family and what that how that looked like and how that relationship developed.

Janice Munemitsu  03:28

Our story is one that started with my grandfather coming to America in 1916. And just to fast forward, he ends up farming in Westminster, California, in the 1930s. Right before World War Two he was farming had a family of four children. And when Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, that changed everything. My grandfather was first generation immigrant, as was my grandmother, but their four children were US citizens. My father at that time was about 20 years old, he was enrolled in the local community college part time and working full time on the farm. But when Pearl Harbor happened, and there had been racism before, but not to the degree after Jin Han obviously bombed Pearl Harbor, and now our family looks like the enemy were Japanese heritage, even though only my grandfather and grandmother had been to Japan ever. My dad and his siblings had not. And so their allegiance was really to America. It was not to Japan at all. But because of that and executive order 9066 That was signed by President Roosevelt. The Japanese Americans along the west coast of the US, Washington, Oregon and California, were forcibly removed from their homes and communities into incarceration camps. That’s the point where the Mendez family is injured. reduced because my father, he did not know them before World War Two, but through the kindness of the local banker here, he is introduced to Gonzalo Mendez, Gonzalo Mendez always wanted to farm. And so he leases our farm on a yearly lease, because you didn’t know how long the World War Two would last. And what would happen to the Japanese, but this seemed like the best outcome to secure the farm. And when the Dalai Lama and his wife felicitous moved from Santa Ana, California to Westminster, which I don’t know if that’s even 10 miles, it’s a pretty short distance. They come to work, the farm, they’re excited about it. But their children, they find out when the school year starts, cannot attend the Westminster 17 Street School, which is where my father and his siblings went. Instead, because of the color of their skin and their last name, they have to go to the Mexican school in that school district. And it wasn’t just segregated. The Hoover school, the Mexican school did not have a normal curriculum. They assumed that the children didn’t know English and could not be challenged by regular academic courses. And so the biggest difference was there was no academics, which Sylvia and her two brothers had already been acquainted with in their former school district. So that sets off what becomes a class action lawsuit that led to the desegregation of California public schools in 1947, seven years before Brown versus education across the US.

Maria Ross  06:38

Well, and I was so excited to meet you when I got introduced to you. Because a couple of years ago, I think I told you in our pre call, I read a children’s book to my son about I believe it was called separate but equal, I will look up the actual name and put a link to the book in the show notes. But it was about Sylvia Mendez and her family’s courageous fight to desegregate the schools and the conditions of the school they were forced to go to sounded horrendous. It sounded like they didn’t have a place to sit down and eat. It sounded like the facilities were a little subpar. And in this children’s book, you can even sense Sylvia’s confusion of like, but there’s a really nice school closer to us, I don’t understand, you know, as a little kid not understanding why they couldn’t go to this other school. So their case was groundbreaking. And and I have to admit, I didn’t know a lot about it either. Until I read that book to my son. And I remember reading it to my son and having him you know, at five, six years old, saying, but I don’t understand and having to explain to him, why adults can be so hurtful to each other. It was really hard. And so when I met you, and I found out your connection and how the Mendes family helped your family by basically keeping the farm while your family was in the internment camp, and while they were there fighting this courageous court battle, you know, enrolling and empowering other families who were not as brave as they were, who didn’t want to speak up, but they were able to rally them. It was just so amazing to see two groups of people both suffering from injustices and from racism come together in kindness to help each other.

Janice Munemitsu  08:23

Yes. And actually, at that time, in California, there was a state law that actually allowed segregated schools for Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese, and the school districts could decide. So the school districts also made a decision on Mexican and it just depended on where you live, and what school district you’re in. Right. And so that’s what makes this case really groundbreaking because it led to California Assembly and Senate saying, No, we’re going to have one law for the whole state. Every district is going to desegregate their schools, whether it be Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, or Mexican. At that time.

Maria Ross  09:10

Now your book is called the kindness of color. And tell us a little bit about that book. And what prompted you to write it based on your history?

Janice Munemitsu  09:21

Well, Sylvia has been speaking on this probably about 30 to 35 years since she retired from her nursing career. And I’ve known Silvia now for just over 20 years. And in that time, every once in a while she would get invited to speak and he also asked me to come and speak as well. And so it became more of a multicultural convent and multicultural story. Because there is a background to the story. A lot of people know the Mendes versus Westminster story, but they don’t know what led up to it. And I think that’s what gives this story in the 1940s so much What makes it so significant? Because it was many different people who encountered racism. I mean, the attorney who fought this case in federal court is of Jewish descent. But he was known as the Mexican attorney because he was bilingual. He was married to the daughter of a prominent Mexico City physician. And he worked for the Mexican counselors. So even though he was Jewish at Heritage and had encountered racism against his Jewish race, he was fighting for the, in this case for Mexican children, but really, for all children, just saying that all schools should be desegregated in California. And then subsequently, it had a ripple effect that leads to later on to Brown versus education in 1954. And so

Maria Ross  10:52

with your book, what do you hope to achieve with the book? What do you hope readers will take away from it? And more importantly, what do you hope they will do? After they read your book? And after they learn this story?

Janice Munemitsu  11:04

That’s kind of an evolving question. I didn’t really have a vision for this, Silvio, and I would talk about it verbally, but there wasn’t anything written from start to finish about the story. And several people, including our local superintendent of schools, and Department of Education here, were really, really prompting me and pushing me to do this. And I’m like, I’ve never written a book. So this has all been one grand adventure of figuring this whole thing out. But I think when I really felt like this story needed to be written was when Sylvia and I had a corporate event that we spoke at. And we found out everybody wants to know more about our family’s story. We could talk about the case, but they kept going back to well tell us more about how did your parents meet? And how did this all happen? And that’s when I saw the beauty of telling a story, a family story that was more than just a legal case. And I think when she and I talked about it after that, she says, Wow, they really want to know, what about our families? I said, I know Sophie, I said, I didn’t expect that. And they’re like, Well, you know, what did they were and where did they live? And how did they do this? And we’re like, wow, so but I think that makes this a human story. This is not just about a law case. This is a human story of all the different people in my book that did something, it was not always tangible. Either. It could have just been to listen, or to encourage or to say, let me know what I can help you do. But all those things, all those kindnesses lead up to something that really changed our state and education, no classes, I often speak at classes now that are so multicultural. And the kids can’t even imagine that had early. Yeah, most of that classroom would not be there. Whether it be Mendes versus Westminster, or some case that came after that, if it hadn’t been for that most of the classes would be a third maybe array of white children. And in subclasses, that depending on where it is, most of the children are of Asian or Latino heritage, here in our local area. So it really makes an impact. They all look at each other like wow, we wouldn’t be friends. And I think that’s one of the that’s what I want to get across this book is very inclusive, because the story is inclusive. I mentioned attorney Marcus, who is of Jewish descent, obviously Sylvia’s family, our family. And but one of the key figures in this story is a man named Frank Monroe. And he was the banker of the local small town bank manager, who actually was very, very kind to my father, even as a little boy, he was basically my dad’s mentor for the rest of my dad’s life. And he also was a very, very good friendship. Mr. Mendez to Gonzalo man was also his banker. And he played a major role, I think, in both encouraging both families, serving both families without any kind of prejudice or bias, and was a great counselor and friend, my dad said about Mr. Monroe, he was about the best friend you could ever had. He didn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body. So that kind of gives you just a glimpse of one man, Mr. Monroe, in this case, did and he passed before I was born, so I’d never met him. I did meet his wife, and as a little girl, I didn’t really understand the whole gist of what he had done. But that family and my dad and our family were lifelong friends.

Maria Ross  14:58

Did he help facilitate Are the two of them. Mendes taking over the farm while you were away? Was he instrumental in funding tell us about his role

Janice Munemitsu  15:06

a little bit. Yeah, his role was really one of I would say true friendship of knowing what was really going on with his customers, as well as he was. My father had never met Gonzalo before Mr. Monroe said, Gonzalo would like to lease the farm. And so he would made the introduction he went to Gonzalo, Sylvia said that Mr. Monroe went to Gonzalo her dad and said, Gonzalo, you’ve always wanted to be the boss of a farm. Maybe this is your chance, why don’t you lease the swamp, and that had been one of Gonzalo streams. So it’s kind of like a dream fulfilled. But yet, it was a wonderful opportunity for our family to know that somebody who Mr. Monroe trusted who was trustworthy, who was not out to take the farm away. Who was going to work hard, would want to caretake the farm. And basically, that’s what happened.

Maria Ross  16:06

Well, and didn’t they give it back? When your family? Yeah, it was totally again. Yeah, yeah, it was totally

Janice Munemitsu  16:12

a one year lease, there was multiple one year leases. But there were also families who leased Japanese American families who leased homes and businesses, farms during World War Two. And when they came back, the law was not on their side to get their property back. And so I’ve heard of numerous stories, especially after I’ve written this book, where people said, Wow, your family got your farm back, having leased it. There are many stories and people are not, they’re hesitant to share those because they still live in those communities. But they did not get their property back in a rightful lease. So that was another injustice upon injustice in our family was very unfortunate that Mr. Mendez and Mr. Monroe it truly was a lease that there was truly a start date and an end date. And it was legally documented. And most of all, that Mr. Mendez was very faithful to the lease. But the other part of the story, and that’s really interesting is when Silvia talks about this, she said, her mother was so grateful, because at the end of the lease, my dad could have said, Okay, you have to leave, but they were still the case had not been decided. And they needed to stay in Westminster, because it’s Mendez at all. Palomino, Ramirez Estrada and Guzman families. It’s a class action lawsuit versus Westminster at all. And the other thing is, Gonzalo had use the profits from our asparagus farm to pay for this court case, the legal fees and such. And so he didn’t have the savings he would have had. And so he didn’t really have the equity to go out and start his nukes business or his next venture. And so my dad, they made a very interesting last lease for a year where Gonzalo took the steal lease the farm paid lease money to my dad, but in that document, it says that Gonzalo will hire my grandfather and my dad to work for him. Oh, wow. For hourly wages. Yeah. And so this is where this collaboration of winwin a truly comes in. It’s, it went over best parts of our story. And they lived on that property together for a year. So the case would conclude, and then my father and grandfather would take goat move back into the main house and take rightful ownership of all of it. But it also sent Gonzalo off with the profits for that year’s farm.

Maria Ross  18:54

Do you think your dad understood the importance of what Gonzalo was fighting for that it somehow would also impact your family too, and other families who were seen as outsiders? Is that part of why he wanted to make it work and allow Gonzalo to stay and finish out the case?

Janice Munemitsu  19:10

I don’t think they had that much vision for it. Okay. I just remember my dad saying, oh, yeah, that’s the family who lists the farm. I think he was more. Here’s an honest man who cared well for our farm or as well as he could given the circumstance. And he just wanted to be very collaborative. I think that’s more the spirit of my dad. I don’t think in fact, I don’t even think Gonzalo and his family really realized the significance of this case. Because their youngest daughter, who wasn’t born at the time she was born much later. She didn’t even know about it. It wasn’t in their family story at all. Wow. And she Sylvia sister’s name is Sandra Sandra always tells the story as she didn’t know about until she was in college. Working on her teaching credential, and it shows up in a book on educational history. Wow sees her parents names in that book. And she goes down. And this was when there was payphones. There’s no cell phone, she runs down to the payphone in the school, the college building and calls her mom and says your name is in this history book. Is this you? So I think that sort of gives you a flavor for it. This wasn’t something like the families did. And then they kept talking about it. Their youngest daughter didn’t even know this happened. Wow. Until she studied it on as a, an actually, as a graduate student right after her four years of college to get a teaching credential. And so I think, I don’t think my dad had the foresight to say, well, this is an important case, you should fight for it. I’m sure he thought that, but it was more like, No, I think the focus of that part of the story is more, you know, than sallow. Use the money for this for that’s important. We need to let him take the profit for this next year. But it’s more important that we continue to work and get everything’s, you know, kind of set up. And yeah, and going again, the other interesting thing too, is that, the more and more I tell the story, I find out, there are people whose relatives know that their relatives stayed at our farm, because you have to remember, most of the Japanese probably had no place to go. And so our farm be kind of, uh, oh, you could stop here and work here. And until you can get settled and find something else. So it became kind of a little clearing house for people who were coming back this direction, or had lived in Orange County before, but did not have property to come home to. So that is more the spirit, I think and collaboration and helping the community to get back on their feet. Well, and

Maria Ross  21:57

you know, obviously, we’re talking about the role of empathy and all of this. And it is amazing, just the sheer amount of empathy going on in all these relationships and all the aspects of the story. And it’s interesting, because some research shows that groups if they’re very much alike, they actually don’t find empathy for each other, because they feel like if I had to suffer through it, you have to suffer through it. And what’s so moving to me is this is a story of, you know, like you said, multiple marginalized groups coming together. Despite that, and not, you know, well, you need to worry about your fight, and I’ll worry about my fight, but coming together and helping each other. What do you think? I’m going to ask you to wax poetic here a little bit, but what do you think is the lesson there for our larger society, about being able to overcome difference to move forward together?

Janice Munemitsu  22:53

I’m going to answer that with an example. I spoke to a group of educators recently, and one of the gentleman came up to me and said, you know, you use this word collaboration. I hear that all the time. He’s actually for that school. District T is their diversity, equity and inclusion officer has been in the business of education for years. And he said, I hear that all the time. What is your definition of it? Then I thought, Wow, I’ve never been asked that question before. And I so I said, this is off the top of my head, but I would say, collaboration requires a sacrifice, some sort of sacrifice. And he said, I’m going to have to think about this more. Because given the story that I wrote, The true story that I wrote, I think most of the collaboration in there was for more of a win win solution. But that meant that somebody didn’t win and someone lost, right? It was as best as they could to make this workout for all parties for mutual benefit. Mutual mutuality, right. And so I think, and we don’t have time to go into the whole story, but if your listeners are interested, we have a Japanese family, a Mexican family, but Jewish attorney, a Catholic federal judge, we have Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter, who actually wrote a legal brief to support Mendes versus Westminster as black Americans, and they were working for the NAACP at the time. And we also have the Native American tribe of the Colorado River Indians, because our family was incarcerated in a in the desert in a very makeshift camp, right on the Colorado River Indian tribe reservation. The reason I mentioned that is that tribe and the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated there as well as their descendants have a collaboration. And I was the keynote speaker last October at the pilgrimage that they have every few years. And it’s very interesting to see what, two very diverse cultures, in some ways and in other ways they felt like our brothers and sisters. So I think in our story we don’t just have it’s not a Mexican and Japanese story. It’s a multicultural story in many ways of people doing what they could. Mm, given the circumstance, and of them not just thinking of themselves, but if thinking of it more as a whole. Yeah, more holistically. Yeah, because I don’t think I mean, I’ve not an author, I’ve written one book. But I don’t know that I could have crafted a story that would have naturally included so many different cultures and people, groups, and races. But that’s what happened here.

Maria Ross  25:56

That was reality. And I think the important thing here is to look at how people, so many people acted, they didn’t just stay silent. And they, when you talk about that collaboration, it’s them coming together to actually make this happen. And maybe they didn’t have the vision of how important or groundbreaking it was going to be. But it was about helping people through what they were going through right now.

26:23

And not just, you know, like, Oh, I

Maria Ross  26:26

feel really sorry for you, which is sympathy, right? But really taking action and going that extra step and being there to listen being there to support being there to act, being there to make the right connections, it all it is such a universal story. And just a great example of what happens when we harness our our differences and our individual strengths for the greater good. So I just love it. You mentioned earlier that you do talk to children and to schools. What is it meant to children to hear this story? Like you did mention a little bit before about them having that realization that half their classmates might not be there or wouldn’t be their friends. But do you see it having a profound impact on their views on diversity and inclusion?

Janice Munemitsu  27:13

Yes, I think so. I’ve not asked them that question. But a lot of the children have read the book you mentioned separate is not equal, but also a book called Silvia and Aki. And it’s a fictional story. But it’s Sylvia Mendez and my aunt Aki. They’re about about the same age. And the fictional part is that they were friends before World War Two. But it is based on fact, in that my aunt, as a seven year old went to the internment camps and Sylvia, you know, couldn’t go to school. So most of the young children I speak to or via zoo or email or in person have read that book. And what’s so interesting is, I noticed the other day I spoke to 106 kids from kindergarten to third grade. Wow. And they had the best questions, because they were actually picturing what that would have been like for them. And that area down right from the adult. The adult questions I get. They asked, what did they eat? Where were the bathrooms? What was the room? Like? Did they have a house? Did they have any kind of books? Which not necessarily, it was only what you could carry in a very small suitcase? Right. But the best question I think, I got asked maybe ever is did Aki have a happy life? After the camp? Oh my gosh. Now my aunt Aki was about 10 years old when she came back to the farm. And if you were to ask her, she felt very protected because of her father and mother, my dad. And so someone who is that young takes it a very different way. But I called my aunt Aki and I said, this, she goes, Wow, they asked that question. I said, Yeah, she goes, what’d she say? And I said, Well, I told them, you know, you have, there will be times you go through very, very hard things in life. But my aunt and my dad, they all had to make a choice of are we going to let this horrible thing that happened? define who we are? Or are we going to work hard and move forward for something better? And that’s not to say there wasn’t resentment or, you know, lots of emotional feelings, but it saying that’s not going to be what defines us. It’s not going to be our identity. And so, we were able to talk with the children about making those choices when bad things happen. To understand them, to put them in a proper place but do not let that you are A friend, define who you were created to be. And so it was a really, really good discussion. But if it kind of that was the first time anyone had ever asked, Did Omni have a happy life and after the camp? Were right, because you know, that child who asked it really wanted her to have a happy life. Yes, she wanted after the end. Yeah, she wanted a happy ending. And not just because it was happy, but it was, can you overcome something that’s difficult, and still have a productive and happy life? But it is a choice. They think, because my aunt and my dad, they could have chosen also to say, No, this happened. And I’m going to stay in the past in that regret, and resentment, and they could have based their life on that, right. So they had to choose. But I thought how sweet it was that those children, I think more than adults maybe would put themselves in that place and say, what would that be like? As opposed to say, well, we rationalize it because we’re in the midst of a world war, or we rationalize it, because it was for national security. They don’t know that stuff. They’re just saying, this other little girl who’s just like, my age, had to do this. I hope she’s okay. Right? It’s basically kind of the well, and that’s hard.

Maria Ross  31:19

That’s what’s so important about teaching young people helping them keep that skill, that innate skill of empathy that we’re all born with, strong and keep that muscle strong. And a big exercise to be able to do is to read books, watch documentaries, listen to music and learn about people whose lives are very different from your own, so that you can practice that cognitive empathy of what would it have been? Like? How would I have felt? that’s those are the seeds of creating an individual who has a very strong empathy muscle and can bring that muscle to bear in lots of different interactions as they grow up. And as they develop? I want to ask you really quickly, the title, the kindness of color, how did you land on that?

Janice Munemitsu  32:05

I knew that what makes this book different is all the different people who offered kindness to our family or Sylvia’s family, because that was another thing verbally telling the story. It’s just kind of striking of all the different names that you come up with. And frankly, because of the age of the story, in the 1940s, these people have all passed. And I always say, Henri Rivera, the truck driver has no idea his name is in a book. Yeah, but he didn’t do it for fame or for Look at me, he did it because of his character of honesty, integrity to help a friend. And so I really thought kindness had to be in, in the title of a book on racism and complete gold desegregation. And I was playing with some words, and I had been praying about it, like, what could this be called? What is going to encapsulate it and during the pandemic, I went out to, for a walk, and I just was like, Oh, the kindness of color. Net, a lot of people at first when I told him, they said, don’t you want it to be the color of kindness? I said, No. It’s the kindness of color. It’s that really, I hope it represents the diversity and the kindness that a diverse community brings in right in their own way. But each understanding what others may have suffered or been through with compassion, as opposed to comparison. I love that

Maria Ross  33:39

I kind of see you as a kindness advocate, activist,

33:42

if you will, I vote so I

Maria Ross  33:44

know. So I love it. I love it. And, you know, I love the way that you come out this, from that view of what’s possible. When people who are different come together we talk, you know, especially on the show, we talk a lot about diversity, equity and inclusion, as the strategy as you know, here’s all the benefits we get from that. But just this idea that there’s an ethos that comes from those groups coming together in collaboration with each other, and it is kindness. And just it seems, I don’t know, when you describe it that way, I can only imagine that to certain people. It makes diversity less threatening. It makes it more desirable. People want to be part of that. They want to be part of a kind community. And so I just really think it’s actually a brilliant title for a book. So as we wrap up, I did want to share I saw this poem on your website. And I wanted to share this because I thought it was beautiful. You wrote an English language Haiku, to bring a deeper meaning to the cover art that you had for the book. So I would just like to share it with the audience if that’s okay. Unless you would like to do you have the words in front of you. Okay, I would like you to share it. Okay. Thank you for Harry scoring that on you and then I was like, Oh, she’s got it right in front of her.

Janice Munemitsu  35:02

Thank you for noticing my Haiku. Yes. Anyway, here goes barbed wire imprisoned, war of bombs and racism. Hands off her kindness. Fences keep you out. Fight for school for all children. Hands off or kindness, no bar high fences, no barbed wire to imprison. Cultivate kindness. That’s beautiful.

Maria Ross  35:32

Thank you. What a grueling way to end this conversation, Janice, we are going to have all the links to the book and to you so folks can get in touch with you in the show notes. But just really quickly, where would be the best place that they can go to connect or find out more about the

Janice Munemitsu  35:47

book, I think would be the website, the kindness of color.com. And there’s a contact me, link, if they have questions if they need clarity, I am trying to also pull other resources to help, whether it be book clubs or teachers, I do have a resource, but on the website of all the different resources I pulled together, and they’re all free. So you could download them. I’ve recently put together a map of Westminster that shows some of the sites of where this is, it’s all within like a two mile area, right where the farm was where the schools were. And so there’s lots of resources. So please, if you are more interested in more detail, check out the kindness of color.com.

Maria Ross  36:32

Yeah, I did want to mention that you’ve got a blog there the resources for teachers, students and readers. So that’s really a great, great place to go. And I also should mention that in 2022, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of this landmark case, and just in so many ways we’ve come so far in so many ways, we’re still stuck in some outdated thinking. So it’s just really interesting to reflect on all that has happened since then, and and the work we still have left

Janice Munemitsu  36:59

to do. Yes, I often say when I speak, if all this could happen in the midst of a World War, we certainly can do better. Yes, that same night. So I hope people are inspired to really see what everyday kindness, especially to those who are different than we are. You might be how much that really does matter. Love it.

Maria Ross  37:23

Thank you so much Janice, for your insights and for sharing your story with us. Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening to another wonderful episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard you know what to do, please rate and review and share it with a friend or a colleague. Until next time and our next 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.

Captains of industry and political pundits who believe the free market economy will save us all love to cite 18th-century social thinker Adam Smith and his book The Wealth of Nations. In it, he championed self-interest and a free market as a catalyst for societal improvement. But he also assumed those with the power and privilege would consider the needs of others within that free market system. Somewhere along the way, his ideas around empathy and moral obligation got stripped away from his economic philosophy. See, back then, the lines were blurred between economists, social thinkers, and philosophers.

Today, I talk with Sam Fleischacker, an expert on Adam Smith, to clarify what Smith really thought about a free market and our responsibilities to society within it. We also talk about what is distinctive about Smith’s conception of empathy in his own time and how it squares with today. Sam shares how empathy affects Smith’s proposals for economic policy, what he had to say about our tendency to empathize more with people we already know and care for than for people very distant from us, and the big question: Should we try to empathize with people we think are evil?

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Judgment isn’t always negative and, in some cases, it can be used to form connections – such as admiring strength of character or showing sensitivity.
• Consuming art, literature, documentary and other stories of people that have different lives from you is a way to stretch your brain and think more empathetically.
• You must empathize with people you don’t agree with, even those who you consider evil. If you want to have any hope of changing them, you need to do that. You don’t have to approve of it, but you have to at least try to understand them. Empathy and criticism are not incompatible.

“Smith is very much about thinking about what everybody wants, from their own perspective, that is to say, empathizing with them. And I think that’s gotten badly lost on both the left and the right in public policy.” —  Sam Fleischacker

About Sam Fleischacker, LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

Sam Fleischacker is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.  He works on moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of nine books, including Adam Smith, Being Me Being You:  Adam Smith and Empathy, A Third Concept of Liberty:  Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith, and On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations:  A Philosophical Companion.  He was President of the International Adam Smith Society from 2006 to 2010.

References Mentioned:

Edwin Rutsch, The Empathy Edge podcast: How Empathy Circles Can Change the World

David Weissman, The Empathy Edge podcast: From MAGA to Jewish Liberal Progressive

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers and boosting revenue and growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

Connect with Sam Fleischacker

University of Illinois at Chicago: https://phil.uic.edu/philosophy/people/faculty/fleischacker

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sam.fleischacker.7

Books:

Adam Smith (Routledge, 2021)

Being Me Being You:  Adam Smith and Empathy (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria:

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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. captains of industry and political pundits who believe the free market economy will save us all love to cite 18th century social thinker Adam Smith, and his book The Wealth of Nations. In it he did championed self interest and a free market as a catalyst for societal improvement. But he also assumed those with the power and privilege would consider the needs of others within that free market system. Somewhere along the way, his idea around empathy and moral obligation got stripped away from his economic philosophy. See, back then, the lines were blurred between economists, social thinkers and philosophers. Adam Smith also authored The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he wrote about and defined empathy, then known as sympathy as, quote, changing places and fancy with the sufferer and quote, I’ve mentioned Adam Smith in the empathy edge. And today, my guest sandfly Shachar, and Las distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and expert on Adam Smith, will clarify what Smith really thought about a free market and our responsibilities to society within it, and how he saw even policies such as taxation, through a lens of fairness and empathy for those impacted. Sam works on moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of nine books, including Adam Smith, being me being you, Adam Smith, and empathy. And on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations a full philosophical companion. He was president of the International Adam Smith society from 2006 to 2010. Today, we talk about what is distinctive about Smith’s conception of empathy in his own time, and how it squares with today, Sam shares how empathy effects Smith’s proposals for economic policy, what he had to say about our tendency to empathize more with people we already know and care for, then for people very distant from us. And the big question, Should we try to empathize with people we think are evil. This was such a provocative conversation. Take a listen. Welcome to the show, Sam flashpacker. I’m so excited to have this conversation about Adam Smith. Thank you for joining us.

03:42

Thank you so much for inviting me, Maria, this is great.

Maria Ross  03:45

Well tell us a little bit about your work. We know that you are a professor of philosophy, and you are a big fan of Adam Smith, and speak about him at lots of different events in lots of different venues. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this work, what drew you into philosophy, and specifically your interest in Adam Smith and his impact on our world today? And tell us a little bit also about who he is for those who don’t know?

Sam Fleishacker  04:11

Sure. So I got interested in philosophy. Even when I was in high school, I was worried about questions about whether there’s a God, what’s the point of living all the biggest,

Maria Ross  04:23

common 10 questions? Yeah.

Sam Fleishacker  04:26

I haven’t yet to find a satisfactory answer to most of that. But then I went to college and studied philosophy and and on to graduate school, and I wrote a dissertation about the role of cultural norms and ethics. And when I came out, in my first year of teaching, I was teaching a class on British moral sentiment theory. That school of moral philosophy in the 18th century 1700s The most famous member of it is David Hume. But there are other people like Francis Hutcheson. Lord Shaftesbury not so well known today. What was distinctive about them is that they thought that morality is rooted in how we feel, rather than in our reason. And one of the main ones is Adam Smith, who was also a very good friend, arguably the best friend of David Hume. They’re both from Scotland. And they both were writing about the human mind. And they’re both founders, really, the social sciences, as well as the philosophy of social science, do more of history. But he also has important things to say about economics and political science. And Adam Smith is best known as the author of The Wealth of Nations, or as it’s technically called, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is regarded by many people as the founding textbook of economics. It isn’t actually the first thing that was ever written about economics, but it’s probably the first systematic, extensive treatise on the subject. And it was thought for a long time in many schools and was very, very influential on the rest of the discipline. And for because he’s so famous for that, but people think he wasn’t economists. Now, first of all, in the 18th century, people weren’t divided that neatly between economist and philosopher are economists, political scientists, philosopher, psychologist, sociologists, both human Smith could be called all of those things. But this typically was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow where he also got his own degree. And he was a student of Francis Hutchison. And he took over Hutchison’s courses in one was this huge year long course, which started with moral philosophy. And then went to philosophy of law, and then did policy at the end. And the policy included heavily economic policy. And Smith taught that and he was actually going to publish books on each part of it. But he never got around to doing the law part. I think if he had ever published that he might be known as a legal thinker instead of an economist. So this is all part of one project.

Maria Ross  07:02

I love that he, you know, back then it was sort of a blurred line around economics, social thinking philosophy, because we just spoke about the fact that in my first book, I had a reference to Adam Smith that I got from Roman Chris menarik, from his book. And I talked about the fact that he is cited as championing self interest as the catalyst for societal improvement in the Wealth of Nations. And he’s seen as the forefather, and he’s often bastardized to justify greed in economics, when actually he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and talked about concepts like empathy and collaboration. And so I love that there was this duality about him where they they very clearly saw a link between economic structures, and moral imperatives. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did that start that way? And where did we lose our way?

Sam Fleishacker  08:01

Yeah, that’s a big question. I should say that, as regard men, this has been a question people have been worrying about for about 150 years that the in fact, at the end of the 19th century, in Germany, you have people who talk about what they call in German, of course, that’s Adam Smith, probleem, which means the problem of how you put together the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith is talking all about sympathy, X, his word, they didn’t have the word empathy, then, and benevolence and virtue and in the Wealth of Nations, they said, He only talks about self interest. Now, I should say, I don’t think this is really a fair reading of either book, Smith thinks that there is some kind of virtuous acting on your own self interest, even in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that is caring about yourself, caring for your own health and your life is a moral duty. He thinks you’re you should do that, as do most people, actually. And most thinkers at the time would have said, and since that said, it’s a virtue to take care of yourself and to let yourself go, suicide to become drug addicted or something. This is actually a moral failing. But he also believed very strongly in benevolence. And in fact, he said that a lot goes wrong if we care too much about ourselves. He says it was a great rule of Christianity is to love your neighbor as yourself. And he says, the great rule of nature is to love yourself, only as much as you love your neighbor. Not more than that. But he did think self interest was a driver of economic activity, as again most people did. And he draws out how we can actually help each other satisfy our own interests in a free market without any government control or with very minimal government control simply acting on our self interest in the Wealth of Nations. He certainly does say that he’s not present greed, but he is saying that acting on your own self interest on acting by yourself without being told what to do by the government is a good thing, I think because the Theory of Moral Sentiments was kind of overshadowed by the Wealth of Nations. And what Smith said in his moral philosophy. It’s kind of interesting that it wasn’t that exciting to people. And wasn’t that different from other things at the time. By the 19th century, and certainly later, nowadays, most people usually read just a few sentences cut out from Smith in the economics textbook, people have forgotten that he had a wider moral theory in which he wanted to place his economic theory. And so

Maria Ross  10:33

that leads me to the question, again, because you mentioned that he did, he used the term sympathy back then, which was akin to what we call empathy today. And he actually defined it as, quote, changing places and fancy with the suffer. But where how does empathy effect his proposals for economic policy? Can you explain the link he talked about in terms of that, if it’s a free market, and there’s no regulation? What was the role of empathy in that economic prosperity and in that economic model?

Sam Fleishacker  11:07

So I’d love to talk about that as one of my favorite things about the Wealth of Nations. But could we backtrack a little bit, we didn’t talk about what Smith in detail thinks empathy is because he really has a different view of it from other people, including his friend, David Hume. And I think that’s how both of you put Yeah, nicely changing places with a sufferer, but quite how unusual that is, is worth Brown. Yes, so far, cume, sympathy is catching somebody else’s feeling. Man, he has a complicated explanation of how you do that. But you know, if somebody else is sad, you feel sad, if they’re happy, you feel happy. If they’re angry, you feel angry. And basically, that’s the mechanism for him even calls it contagion at one point,

Maria Ross  11:50

which is what we know to be emotional empathy at this, in our current world, yeah, after effective empathy.

Sam Fleishacker  11:57

For Smith, it’s feeling what you think you would feel if you were in another person’s situation, right? So sometimes that means feeling what they’re feeling. Sometimes it means feeling it less strongly or more strongly, sometimes it means feeling something quite different. So on the one hand, if you stub your toe, and you start screaming and yelling all over the place, I might think, man, it’s not that bad. That’s not how I would feel and I disapprove of you a bit, or rebuked you for making too much fast. If on the other hand, you’re going through something very painful and you are feeling it or expressing less pain than I think I would feel, then I might admire you and think, oh, wow, she’s, she’s really stoic. She can handle pain. She really, I’ve been very impressed by you. Right? So I measure what you feel by what I think I would feel in your circumstances. And it could be different.

Maria Ross  12:50

Right? And it’s because it’s your own lens. Yeah, your own

Sam Fleishacker  12:53

lens. And sometimes the lens is completely different. Smith gives the example of seeing somebody who, either because they’re drunk, or or they they might, and they’re not in a good mental state, or dancing and singing and clowning around inappropriately, you don’t think if I were in that situation, I would behave in the same way you think if I were in this situation, I’d be ashamed of myself. Just completely different. Right. So the point about what I call on behalf projective, empathy, as opposed to contagious empathy, is that it gives you a standpoint by which you can feel what other people feel but also measure their feelings to some extent, and either approve or disapprove, depending upon how much what they seem to be feeling Mac does what you think one should feel, and you would feel in their circumstance.

Maria Ross  13:44

So this is interesting, because we talk about this today as like I said, affective empathy. But also cognitive empathy is the mental exercise of imagining what it must be like for you or trying to, to see the situation through your perspective. Effective empathy is when the emotions get involved. But

Sam Fleishacker  14:03

that can say, I think that Smith wouldn’t accept, right, that dichotomy, because they’re both effective. When you project yourself, you’re still feeling something is just a different feeling different kinds of feelings. So I don’t think he would exactly line up with the wave data,

Maria Ross  14:19

he probably wouldn’t. But that’s the way they define it today. Right? So the point being that we often talk about it that in terms of the good it can do, but in my talks, especially talk about what are the pitfalls of that? Where can that go wrong? And that’s actually what you just got to whereas now you get into judgment, you get into I wouldn’t do it that way, or I wouldn’t feel that way or again, you can be biased of even the way you see it might not be the way the other person sees it, because you’re looking at it through your own frame of reference. And so it’s very interesting that there’s a that can be good or bad. And I hate using those terms, but but you can use it where it’s it’s productive. It creates connection. But it can also be something where it creates distance as well and creates some judgment,

Sam Fleishacker  15:07

the I would add further complexity, and partly on Smith’s behalf because Smith also thinks each of us is constantly seeking other people’s sympathy or empathy. And because of that we change how we feel or how we express how we feel. So a young child, for instance, may indeed jump all around the room screaming every time it stops, it’s no. But as the child gets older, they learn to restrain the feeling and often have a different version of the feeling that’s called maturity, right? Called growing up. And this is how we adjust ourselves to one another. So I actually think even the judgment sometimes is a good thing. And it’s a way of forming connection. After all, remember, the judgment can also be positive, if I admire you for your strength of character, or even for for showing a sensitivity that I don’t show to right? Well, I may emulate you, I may want to be like you. So that’s also a form of connection. Yeah, all these hasn’t gone many different directions. I love

Maria Ross  16:04

this. I love this. So let’s get back to that question of how, in Adam Smith’s view, how did empathy affect? How does empathy effect economic policy?

Sam Fleishacker  16:15

Okay, so I should say that this is me reading Smith. And I know a lot of people have really stressed this about the Wealth of Nations, I would strongly say it’s there. So I’ll give you my favorite example. There’s a point where Smith is suggesting tax policy, the tax policy part, the boring today’s reading with three, this was actually the favorite part for ministers in the British government at the time they get looking through it to find new taxes they could impose on people, or how to impose taxes. But that’s not exactly what Smith has in mind. He’s looking for taxes that will be efficient, but also fair. And one of his suggestions in terms of fairness, I should say some of those famous proposals and clewd, redistributive taxes, at least to a certain degree from redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, is very much not the greed and all capitalism is a good view that’s attributed to him. But one of the things he says is that the tax gather of who is taxing a house should tax according to the number of windows in the house and not the number of cars. Why? Because if you’re going to tax people’s hearts, the fireplace this you have to go inside. And nobody really wants to tax gather in their house, they you know, it’s kind of offensive and an invasion of privacy and you don’t like taxes anyway. So that meeting them and having them traipse around your house is going to be very upsetting, while window tax you can do just by looking around the outside. And I think that policy depends upon really in quite detail, thinking yourself into the situation of a person who is having their house invaded or debate for the back. I mean, it’s a fairly trivial example. But it’s also one that shows a great deal of sensitivity to how policies in practice affect people. A more famous example, which actually also clearly shows a great deal of empathy is that myth that we should not tax on necessities, only luxuries. And he says that a linen shirt might be considered a luxury for a poor worker. But it’s really these days deep says a necessity because and people would feel ashamed of themselves if they went out in public without having a linen shirt. He also says about shoes. So he’s thought in considerable detail about what the lives especially interestingly, of poor people are like, and what it is to what what will humiliate them, what kinds of policies will affect them in a way that they’ll feel bad about themselves, that they’ll lose their sense of self respect. And I don’t think he could have come up with that, those kinds of insights without a great deal of empathy.

Maria Ross  19:07

So before we get to our next amazing questions that I’ve got for you, I’ve got so many, but I want to know, where do you think that’s gone? astray? So like we mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of free market. Economists and business leaders who cite Smith all the time in terms of, you know, self interest is what drives the economy and drives prosperity, and they’re not encapsulating the whole picture that he seems to have flushed out. Is there a trendline of when that started to separate? Or anything you can point to of where that thinking started to get pulled away where only the greed part of it got pulled through. And then, you know, looking at economic policies today in Western nations, where did it start to uncouple

19:58

so if you think it

Maria Ross  19:59

uncoupled you might not believe that it uncoupled. But if that is something that you subscribed to where do you think that started happening?

Sam Fleishacker  20:07

So I think uncoupling Smith from his moral foundations, this happened in many ways. I do agree with that I’m one one respect is that the attention is paid to the poor, which was so important to him. And to many of his immediate followers. His followers tended to be the more radical people at the end of the 18th century, not what we would think of as the right way, April as it were. And he always shows tremendous respect for the poor, not a condescension towards them. So that’s gotten lost. Another is the way in which pessimist, whole moral philosophy and simply a stalker has been has faded away. And we talk simply about the role of self interest in the Wealth of Nations. But a third thing, and this is something I’ve stressed to a lot of my students is a way in which policy has been driven by basically utilitarian concerns, rather than empathy, basically. And then what I mean by that is, policymakers very, very often think about the people that they’re making policy for in terms of debt, objects, perhaps, who want pleasure and want to avoid pain, and maybe they care about them. And that tends to want to make them want to increase their pleasure. But they’re not thinking from the people’s perspective, to think about what, how do we get them what they want? But not, how do we make sure that we are thinking about what they want from their own perspective. And one effect of that is, in terms of economics, what you usually hear is simply about how efficient the free market is, or how the free market can increase goods and distributed them? Well, you don’t hear kind of thing that I was talking about right now. Well, do the people, especially at the lower end of the economic ladder, for workers, for instance, people who don’t have much say in public policy, do they want what we think they want, public policy, mountain makers are often very top down, even manipulative, and they’ve been trained in the best schools to think they know what’s best for everyone. And that begins to get going really, I would say, at the middle in the middle of the 19th century, and continues to some extent to this day among Democrats and Republicans alike. You tried to figure out what you think will be good for those people. And you figure that they don’t know what they want for themselves. And Smith is very much about thinking about what everybody wants, from their own perspective. And that is to say, empathizing with them. And I think that’s gotten badly lost on both the left and the right and public policy.

Maria Ross  22:43

That is fascinating, because I think that that’s something we have, we’ve lost that I love how he brought in morality and the heart and and the humanitarian concern of how economic policy can impact people’s lives. Yeah, and people that were not necessarily like him. Right. So I would love to hear what you have to say about what Smith has to say about our tendency to empathize more with people we already know and care for, than for people that are very distant from us, because I think what happens in our very polarized society right now, is that we can imagine what, what those lives are like, because in our bubble, everyone looks and acts and functions the same. And so what did he have to say about that?

Sam Fleishacker  23:34

So Smith, there’s a section of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, that is known by scholars as the circles of sympathy. And he’s drawing there on an ancient idea goes back to the Roman stoic, that our care goes out in circles that we care most about ourselves and our families. A little bit more about the people we see every day. Smith mentions neighborhoods, and he mentioned office workers, he says, people in the same office call each other brothers that sometimes really feel that way, which is nice. And I think sometimes true, not always. And then still, we still care. But again, and again, and then we could weigh about every member of our country. And then just some small extent, Smith thinks we can care about the well being of any preacher that fields including animals in the entire universe. So that’s very weak. Our broad care for human beings is very weak. So the circles get weaker as you go further out. And I think he’s right. And he’s aware that that can mean for instance, that you don’t care very much about me in the hate the people, the next country. And he talks about national prejudice as one of the most terrible sources of conflict and completely unnecessary. It’s actually one reason why he wrote The Wealth of Nations actually, he really thought the idea that Britain has to do down French industry that, you know, the British have to destroy the French economy or the French have to destroy the British economy in order to be successful themselves. I thought that was ridiculous. That’s a win win game. International trade is helpful to everyone. And that’s the main sense in which he’s a free trader, actually, he’s it’s not so much about no government interference in in your local economy, as free trade across nations across the world. But he recognized that it’s just a natural fact about us that we don’t care that much about people we don’t know. And in fact, it’s very interesting, he doesn’t tie even family love to any biological kinship. It’s not that we have the same blood, it’s that we know each other well, Mac, the phrase he uses for the basis of caring about people, which I think is lovely, is habits of sympathy, or habitual sympathy. The people you have are in the habit of sympathizing with are people that you come to care about. And that does point to at least a partial solution, which is you have to get into the habit of sympathizing with empathizing with very different people. And of course, you can’t meet everybody. So the face to face contact, which is very important to this for him. And for others at the time, you know, you can’t hope to care about all this distant people. But he also thought because empathy works through the imagination, projecting yourself in imagination into other people’s place, places that literature can help. He’s a big promoter of imagine more than any other philosopher of

Maria Ross  26:42

the time. Right. And actually, I talked about that in the book in terms of consuming art, literature, film documentary from people that have very different lives from you, and being able to stretch that muscle of what might their life be like and start getting your brain to think that way. But I want to ask a question about this an offshoot question, do you think that’s why that purest form? I’ve had this discussion with lots of people over the course of my life. Do you think that’s why economic regulation legal, you know, policy regulation is required, because people ultimately fall back on their own self interests. And so the true free market economy can’t flourish without regulation, because of our very human traits of only being empathetic to people that are just like us.

Sam Fleishacker  27:34

Wow, that’s so interesting. I actually hadn’t thought about it in these terms. Exactly. So I’ll try that I have to put Smith rather than for me. Okay. I think Smith thinks that trading and knowing who to trade with and knowing what’s going to be a useful economic relationship is something you don’t need regulation for. Because you don’t really care what the other person is like if they have something to offer that you like to buy from them. Right. And if they seem to be a good worker, you’ll hire them. And that will overcome prejudice. And you don’t need to worry about

Maria Ross  28:06

that’s a perfect world. Yeah, exactly. But he wasn’t

Sam Fleishacker  28:10

living in a world in which there was an issue state of racial prejudice getting in the way of hiring that wasn’t an issue around him. He, he didn’t know about that. He was very opposed to slavery, by the way. And he did think if we could we need a regulation to get rid of slavery. But he also thought that only a monarch is likely to get rid of slavery. And in a democracy, that people who own slaves are going to have a lot of money and they’re going to make sure that you don’t have lost labor. It is on the pessimistic about that. But in terms of other regulations, he did think you need basic regulation regulations to make sure that that your property is protected, you’re protected against fraud and contracts are protected. Most people even extreme free marketeers agree with that the stay in a certain rules of justice. But beyond that, he thought that the exchange world could work on its own pretty well. I think that if you really want to overcome you want to new Smith to overcome deep seated prejudice. The main place, the main Smithian tool would be to introduce literature about very unfamiliar people into into your schooling. It’s not that he actually suggests that but that fits with what his proposals on other things best, right other people’s religions, other people’s cultures,

Maria Ross  29:36

just because it is a very utopian view that that’s the way the free market should work. And then you introduce, you know, excess greed, you introduce selfishness, you introduce prejudice, you introduce just all those human emotions and tendencies that make it not work as balanced as it should on paper.

Sam Fleishacker  29:59

Yeah, I needed a look, I should add, didn’t think that we should have some regulations to redistribute wealth. As I indicated, he had very modest suggestions. The main point was that when the government is building things, it needs to especially build things that private people won’t build on their own. So rich people often take care of themselves very nicely. But a lot of taking care of the roads, for instance, take making sure that freight can pass easily, it’s very important to the poor people, and that government has to make sure that it directs its monies that way. to a limited extent, he also thought that regulations could counteract prejudices here, the prejudice he has in mind isn’t maybe one way of thinking about so much these days, it was prejudice against merchants actually, corn merchants, popular prejudice, thinking that the reason why the price of bread is high is because merchants are just keeping it for themselves. And, and just making profit, he actually stopped us free trade and corn would lower the price of bread, and that if you had regulations that would get rid of restrictions on the price of wheat, actually, that’s what he calls corn, then the prejudice against merchants might disappear. So law can do something to mitigate prejudice. But I don’t think he thinks that government can do that much to change who we are, right? moral education is something that happens in families and right once one contact, and if governments try to take it on as a project, it’s not going to work.

Maria Ross  31:32

And that’s I think that’s the reality is, if everyone had, if any, everyone was in agreement on the moral imperative, and on taking care of each other, and on that ethos, then a free market, without any regulations would work, because everyone would be doing the right get the quote, unquote, right thing for each other. But in reality, that’s not what happens. It’s even even in the best of companies that start with good intentions of, you know, doing no harm or doing no evil. Like some companies, we know, eventually, they get so big and so powerful that that takes over. And then the human drive, for selfishness and FOR MORE And for a higher stock price and for how can I get my labor as cheap as possible and earn, you know, the best profit margins I can start to take over. And so I’m just curious if he had any cautionary tales for us about what happens when it does get out of control.

Sam Fleishacker  32:31

So one thing to bear in mind is that there were no large operations of the kinds that we’re thinking of in his day. What you had was some government encouraged industries like the East India Company, government encouraged businesses government run, really, and he was very against the East India Company, he thought it was terrible. But since you didn’t have limited liability, limited liability only comes in at the end of the 19th century, you really don’t have corporations now sense. It’s all fairly small shop. Got it. And they can’t get too much out of control. They’re just not big enough to get out of control. They can have only most they’re going to have a very limited control of of the market. One person who had started Frodo large company at the time is Josiah Wedgwood, from when we get all the Wedgwood, pottery and Smith probably disliked him. There’s some reasons to think that he gets a letter A year before the Wealth of Nations comes out from Burke, who’s in parliament is and it was a friend was Smith. And at that point was a liberal, I should say, not a conservative, and Burke says that Wedgwood has been pretending, claiming that helping his business would help the whole of Britain. And Burke says I don’t like it when businessmen claim that helping their business does good for the rest of the country. I will say we honestly say they’re doing it out of their self interest. And Smith includes a version of that line in the Wealth of Nations without mentioning weds word, saying that basically, that merchants who claim that what they’re doing is good for the whole country, and usually not speaking good faith, and you should just get them to shut up.

Maria Ross  34:14

He would not like some of the modern business leaders that I don’t know. Well, let’s this leads me into my last question, which is a big question. And it’s kind of all rooted in this because when we talk about differences in philosophy around the moral imperative of rich versus poor or business versus consumer, or you know, all of these things that their economic policies, but they also reflect our, our moral sentiments, many of these economic policies that we subscribe to, I get this question a lot. And I told you, I never know how to answer it in a great way. But should we try to empathize with people we think are evil. Where does our tolerance for empathy. When does our responsibility for empathy run out? If it does?

Sam Fleishacker  35:07

That’s a great question. And it is actually the question of the last chapter of my book. It’s called, that chapter is called empathy and demonization. And I do argue, without apology, that yes, we should try to empathize with people who are evil. In fact, I don’t hold no holds barred bear. I’m a son of a refugee from Nazi Germany, both both my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. But I think we should empathize with Nazis. And were the white nationalists. Why? And their Capistan going beyond Smith, they’re talking about exercising the vote that Brett Smith, so rather lovely, perhaps naive, non demonic view of human beings in general, or yes, people he criticizes, he says, oh, you should do the best that you’re doing the best they can. He’s very rarely rarely he really

Maria Ross  36:00

understood their context. It sounds like Right.

Sam Fleishacker  36:03

However bad they were he’d ever demonize them because right, it was the people. But look, you can demonize him, I think correctly. You can see a lot of a lot of people as grossly, grossly evil. Why empathize with them anyway? Well, first, let’s remember what you were calling in accordance with a lot of current usage, cognitive empathy, and I’m calling projective empathy. Smithian empathy, which the but remember that I said that that does involve Smith, dealing what somebody else feels when you project yourself into their circumstances? Why should you do that with evil people? Well, I’ll give you three reasons. First of all, if you want to have any hope, of changing them, you need to do that. You don’t have to approve of that. But you have to at least try to understand them. And think of how you might do what they’re doing. Understanding I think means figuring out, maybe you wouldn’t do some of the horrible things that the people you’re talking about are doing. But how could you get the situation in which you might be tempted to do that? I can’t imagine myself doing what the Nazis did. But I can imagine myself, going through a process in which I became an exam is a horrible thought. But I can’t imagine that happening. And if I want to have any stance of changing a Nazi, I need to do that. Now, I don’t know how good our chances are of changing Nazis period, there are these stories, especially in fact, in a lot of empathy broadcasts and podcasts, about some former white nationalists, white Nazis in America have been turned around often by way of empathetic exercises. So I think that’s encouraging, but I doubt it happens a lot. But the second thing is, do you want to prevent other people from becoming not this from becoming white nationalists from becoming terribly evil in some other respect, empathizing with what gets people into the sponsor vivo is necessary if you want to prevent it, right. And then the third thing, and maybe the most difficult thing is if we don’t try to empathize with the evil, we block ourselves from recognizing the potential for evil in ourselves. And I think eBay, basically, it’s a matter of either own up to the fact that you yourself could become exactly what you most hate, you know, horrible, fanatic, killing people, cruelly greedy person, etc. Or you have at least the possibility that you will act like that, or will eventually become like that, without knowing it. you block yourself from seeing the wrong you’re doing and that you’re capable of, if you can’t empathize with other people like that. So the Renaissance slogan, nothing human is alien to me. I think we have to recognize that good and bad we can, everything anyone else does for the good. Because it’s what a human being has done, we can share. But everything every other human being does that evil, because it’s what another human being does, we also can share that. So I think a true humanism involves an effort in empathizing with others, you can still condemn them when you do. Right. Right. But I think empathy and and, and criticism are not incompatible and May, but the criticism that comes up empathy is a deeper and more thoughtful criticism.

Maria Ross  39:35

I think completely and you know, when I have talked to folks about empathy, it’s it doesn’t mean that you agree with someone. Right. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Edwin Racz, who I’ve quoted many times on this podcast. He has the Center for building a culture of empathy based out of Berkeley, California, and he has done global trainings for years around a process called empathy circles. which is a facilitation technique that he has actually taken to the country’s most divisive political rallies, and gotten people from both sides of the spectrum into a tent, an empathy tent, to have a conversate, an active listening conversation with each other. And the goal is not to convert to one ideology or another because that won’t happen. The goal is for them to see each other as human. And understand the context. I don’t agree with you. But I could see how you got there type of situation. And so the more conversations we can have like that, the I think the better for everyone, because I think it elevates everybody, it gets both sides thinking. It gets both sides understanding that we’re dealing with human beings that one person really believes their point of view is right, and the other person really believes their point of view is right. And how do we go forward from there? That the answer can’t be that we stopped talking to each other.

Sam Fleishacker  40:56

I even think that adds what a fourth reason for doing this kind of empathizing to the three HSK. A is somebody who even somebody who you may think of as happening, absolutely hateful ideology, if they see you trying to empathize with them, it might not change them, but at least it’s more likely to build some respect for you to open them up a little bit. Because that’s one of the things that they’re probably looking for some kind of respect, right understanding of who they are and where they’re coming from. Well, I

Maria Ross  41:29

had a guest on the show, David Weissman, who has become an influencer in social media. He was a very, very strong Magga proponent, a former veteran, and he changed his mind. And it was through the power of conscious effort, very empathetic conversations, where it turned out he had just grown up in a world where he was fed certain information. And he completely believed it about the quote unquote, other side about liberals about Democrats. He was raised to believe that they were evil, and they were trying to destroy the country. And it was only when he was able to have conversations where people weren’t judging him where people were, were talking with him and trying to understand what he’d been through that he realized the brainwashing he’d been through. And now he is what he calls a progressive, Jewish liberal, right? So he has really made that switch. And I interviewed him for the show. And it’s just so wonderful when you see like, people didn’t give up on him. They they continue to try to engage in conversation. And yeah, maybe it was their ultimate goal, quote, unquote, conversion, maybe. But they also gave him space to listen to reflect, to question his own beliefs, like you said, their empathy, and their respect for him, gave him the space to not dig in his heels so much, and do more learning, and do more reading and do more investigation of the facts on his own. So that he realized, oh, what I’ve been fed, my whole life is actually a false narrative. He never would have done that, if he was put on the defensive.

Sam Fleishacker  43:07

There’s great work like that going on in Israel and Palestine at the moment. And I know people who are involved in that, that’s the cause of close to my heart, is the brief parent circle, which has Israelis and Palestinians who have both lost family members to violence. There are a whole bunch of other groups. And in fact, I know someone quite well went through something very much like what you’re saying he began engaging in these empathetic discussions. He is an Israeli settler, with Palestinians. And at first, all he wanted was to understand them, and to have conversations, but it really led him to become very concerned about denials of Palestinian rights and to become something of an activist for Palestinian rights. That really changed him a lot. And it’s changed people on the other side as well. So I mean, it’s unfortunately, it’s very small, it’s low level, it’s grassroots. But I do see in Israel, Palestine, some of these kinds of empathetic conversations is one of the most, one of the few real points of light in that dark region at the moment.

Maria Ross  44:13

Well, that’s a wonderful place to leave it off. Uh, Sam, thank you so much for this conversation. i As always with my guests, I could probably talk to you for another hour, but I won’t keep you we will have all the links in the show notes, especially to your book being me being you Adam Smith and empathy. But for folks that are on the go right now listening, where’s the best place they can get in touch with you?

Sam Fleishacker  44:34

They can Google me and I have a web page on my unit at the university or they can get in touch with me on my Facebook page. I think that the damn

Maria Ross  44:44

dot flash Hacker dot seven. Yes. Yes, that’s fine. We will have that link in the show notes as well. Sam,

44:50

thank you for the stay off, though. It was a delight to be here.

Maria Ross  44:53

Yes. It was such a great conversation. I’d love to continue the conversation with you offline as well another event us but thank you for your time and your insights today a very unique point of view and, and a well deserved point of view of Adam Smith and his intentions and, and where the role of empathy does have a place in economic policy and in our current climate today. So thank

Sam Fleishacker  45:15

you. You’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me on.

Maria Ross  45:19

Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. As always, if you like what you heard, please rate review and share with a colleague or a friend. And until next time, please remember that cashflow, 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.

We are too often sleepwalking through our lives. Rushing from here to there, where people we come in close contact with become mere extras in the screenplay of our day. But what if you could take some time and find a way to connect with someone over a shared joy, or frustration, or cool coffee drink – or gaudy pink flamingo earrings? What if you could do this with the people you see and interact with every day – your co-workers?

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Story is up to 22x more memorable than just facts alone.The best approach for data retention is to incorporate it into a story.
• Story touches hearts and changes minds in a way that data, facts, and figures cannot do alone.
• Stories unite us and connect us, across any perceived barriers. They can touch, delight, provoke, anger, move, or propel us into action.

“If you want people to remember you – or your business, cause, or movement – and take action, the best way is to tell your story.” —  Maria Ross

Episode References:

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• John Millen blog, 4 Reasons Stories are So Memorable

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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. Hi, Maria here with a quick announcement for all you business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers out there. Does it feel like no one knows who you are or the value of what you do? Or worse, the wrong people are showing up at your door prospects who won’t pay you what you’re worth can’t make the most of your offerings or suck your energy dry. My problem you say is I know I could get the right customers if I could nail how to talk about this thing. You may know what you do well, but figuring out how to talk about it and market it can be overwhelming. If you’re here you know, empathy is the key to a thriving culture and perfect brand story that attracts all the right people. Join me to build the brand story that will attract more of your ideal clients and boost your business success. The authentic genuine story that is unique to you and your business. And that helps you stand out brand story breakthrough. Five weeks, playbooks videos, live weekly coaching, and even my eyes on your work. In the end, you’ll have your elevator pitch, brand story, website, copy, and everything you need to start moving your business forward and getting attention for your amazing work. Next cohort starts September 8. Get more details and sign up at Bitly slash BSB course that’s bi T dot L y slash BSB. course right now, before the spots are all gone. I hope to see you there. You’re in line at a coffee shop. You notice that the woman behind you is wearing a pair of giant pink flamingo earrings. We’re talking almost neon pink that hurts your eyes and hearing so large, they seem to graze her shoulders. You immediately catch yourself staring at the same moment she catches you staring now mind you if you choose to go in public with earrings like this. I’m sorry, you can’t be mad if people stare. You smile awkwardly and she grins. What can happen next? One path suggests you both politely smile at each other maybe even giggle and then go about your day. Another path suggests that you immediately laugh and say Wow, your earrings remind me of a trip I took with my family to Florida as a kid. When I got a stuffed pink flamingo as a souvenir. I slept with that thing every night for most of my childhood. And she may add actually, that’s where I got them. It was hilarious. My late husband and I went on this boat cruise and got stuck out at sea for a few unplanned extra hours. As soon as we got back to shore I found a souvenir shop and grab the most gaudy thing I could find so I could forever remember this crazy adventure. You both laugh, order your coffees and wave goodbye. Which interaction created more of a connection. Just think about everything you both learned about each other in that one to two minute exchange of stories. She was married once but lost her husband. She got stranded at sea on a boat cruise. And she has a sense of humor and that she wanted to remember what she termed a crazy adventure with something fun and audacious. She learned that you took family vacations, loved stuffed animals, and cherish this goofy souvenir as a bedtime comfort throughout your childhood. You both connected through the power of story. I sometimes intentionally spark or Kindle stories to make connections with strangers, complimenting someone on their shirt or bag commiserating over bad customer service or empathizing with a frantic young mom juggling three unruly kids. While those moments may only last seconds, you feel connected in this world, like you see people really see people and they see you. But why do we as humans love stories so much? According to a great blog posts written by storytelling expert John Millan, I’ll link to this in the show notes for you. We as humans are hardwired for storytelling. He writes about the work of Stanford graduate schools, Dr. Jennifer acre, who found that quote, a story is up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone. In her studies, acre had students give one minute pitches, nine of 10 presentations were heavily supported by facts and figures. The 10th presentation told a human story in support of the position. Her research found that only 5% of the audience could recall a statistic, but fully 63% remembered the stories. She concluded that the best approach for data retention is to integrate your data into a story and quote, Aker goes on to say that quote, Our brains are not hardwired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories. A story is a journey that moves the listener. And when the listener goes on that journey, they feel different. And the result is persuasion, and sometimes action. And quote, We are too often sleepwalking through our lives rushing from here to there meeting to meeting, where people we come in close contact with become mere extras in the screenplay of our day. But what if you could take some time and find a way to connect with someone over a shared joy or frustration or cool coffee drink or gaudy pink flamingo earrings? What if you could do this with the people you see and interact with every day, like your coworkers. Storytelling is also a great way to connect your business work or nonprofit with desired clients, customers or donors. It’s a way to quickly communicate who you are, what you’re about and how you work in a short period of time, so other potential clients can see if they are a good fit for them. It’s why brand storytelling is so effective. And one of my favorite topics, something I’ve devoted a large part of my career to unpacking and applying to anyone who wants to engage and connect with people to achieve a desired outcome. One of my favorite books of all time, is made to stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The subtitle is why some ideas survive and others die. The author’s talk about quote, why urban legends, conspiracy theories and bogus public health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas, businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others struggle to make their ideas stick and quote. If you want people to remember you or your business, cause or movement, and take action, the best way is to tell your story. Give us a hero to root for a conflict to overcome a way to save the day. With businesses you want to make the hero your customer. With nonprofits, you may want to make the hero your donor or your inspiring clients. As I have always said, stories unite us connect us. They can touch delight, provoke anger, move or propel us into action. We can open up our hearts and minds more with stories rather than cold facts. The best communication finds a way to weave facts and data into powerful relatable stories that get us to see something in a new way or compel us to act. Children learn through story and adults never stopped doing so as well. The next time you want to connect with someone be it pink flamingo lady in the coffee shop or your potential multimillion dollar customer. Find the story and share it and watch how engagement unfolds. Speaking of story, on September 8, I’ll kick off the next cohort of brand story breakthrough a virtual course sprint to help you craft the right brand story to attract more ideal customers, enhance lives and amplify your impact. Five weeks digestible videos and playbooks 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 most importantly grow their revenue and impact and the root of the entire course. You guessed it, empathy. If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, coach, consultant, freelancer, PR or marketing professional, please check out the details of my new course brandstory breakthrough@bit.li slash BSB course. That’s boy Sam boy course. It’s a Bitly URL, so it’s bi t.li/bsb course. There you’ll find a free 12 minute masterclass video to enjoy about how to craft effective sales and marketing that engages people. And we go deep on how to do this in the course together would love to work together to help your story, touch hearts and change minds. Until next time, remember, cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Thanks for listening. And if you loved what you heard you know what to do. Please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend or colleague. Until next time, 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.

A beloved economy. Doesn’t that just sound like an economic ecosystem you want to be part of? Well, it can be. There are organizations out there who have innovated HOW they do work and broken out of business as usual – to stellar results. And the great news is that everyone can contribute to practicing a beloved economy – reorienting how we work to share power and unlocking well-being, meaning, and connection.

Joanna Cea and Jess Rimington are co-authors of Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work. They spent seven years researching the common traits of successful beloved economies across diverse teams and enterprises. Today Joanna  shares what is a beloved economy and how to transform business as usual in a “loveless” economy. We discuss the role of “bad actors” in breakout innovation, and Joanna digs into two of the seven practices – seeking difference and trusting there is time – and explains why they work and how they can be applied.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• The way we work together matters – and it is a potent force for change, not just making the work environment a warm and fuzzy place.
• We need leaders to step up and take ownership of doing something different than what has been done before. People want to be doing things in a different way but are often too afraid to speak up.
• The rules are created by society. If we don’t like them, we can work together to change them.

“The economy is something we all make and remake every single day. Yes, there are big structural forces at play, but there’s also the accumulation of 1000 little decisions and actions that we each make every day.” —  Joanna L. Cea

About Joanna Levitt Cea, Co-Author, Beloved Economies

Joanna Cea is dedicated to reimagining investment and funding practices to lift up the well-being of all. She has worked in community-driven efforts to stop destructive investments that threaten local livelihoods and ecosystems, and she has also helped launch solutions that enable communities to determine our own economic futures. Joanna led the human rights organization International Accountability Project for eight years, and served as founding director of the Buen Vivir Fund with Thousand Currents.

About Jess Rimington, Co-Author, Beloved Economies

Jess Rimington is a next economy strategist focused on the design and ethics of emerging post-capitalisms. Her practice and research is grounded in historical analysis, accessible truth-telling, and present-day experimentation. Jess’s work is informed by over a decade of experience leading two global organizations–as both an Executive Director and Managing Director–building cross-cultural staff teams with innovative work cultures rooted in power-sharing.

Connect with Joanna L. Cea and Jess Rimington:

Beloved Economies Website: https://www.belovedeconomies.org/

Book: Beloved Economies: https://www.belovedeconomies.org/book

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers and boosting revenue and growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

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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. A beloved economy, doesn’t that just sound like an economic ecosystem you want to be a part of? Fact is it can be. There are organizations out there who have innovated how they do work, and broken out of business as usual, to stellar results. And the great news is that everyone can contribute to practicing a beloved economy. reorienting, how we work to share power, and unlocking well being meaning and connection. Joanna, Cea and Jess Remington are co authors of the book, beloved economies transforming how we work, they spent seven years researching the common traits of successful beloved economies across diverse teams and enterprises. Jess and Joanna both served as a visiting scholar with Stanford University’s Global Project Center, where they co facilitated research with more than 200 collaborators to identify co creative practices that awaken next economies. Their research led to identifying seven common practices as a framework to cultivate economic imagination, contributing to and building on visions of collaborators. These practices can help you reimagine work. Today, Joanna is here to share what is a beloved economy and how to transform business as usual in a loveless economy. Joanna is dedicated to reimagining investment and funding practices to lift up the well being of all, she’s worked in community driven efforts to stop destructive investments that threaten local livelihoods and ecosystems. And she’s also helped launch solutions that enable communities to determine their own economic futures. Joana led the human rights organization international Accountability Project for eight years and served as founding director of theBuen Vivir fund with Thousand Currents. Her co author Jess Remington, is a next economy strategist focused on the design and ethics of emerging post capitalism’s her practice and research is grounded in historical analysis, accessible truth telling, and present day experimentation. Today, Joanna and I discussed the role of bad actors in breakout innovation. And she digs into two of the seven practices highlighted in their book, seeking difference and trusting there is time and explains why they work and how they can be applied. Mostly, this discussion will inspire you to stop waiting and start transforming the way your organization gets work done. Take a listen. Welcome Joanna Cea, co author of the book Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work, which you co authored with Jess Remington, welcome to the empathy edge today to talk about beloved economies.

04:26

Thank you so much, Maria, for having me here.

Maria Ross  04:29

And I love this topic, obviously, which is why it’s such a great fit for the podcast because I truly believe we need to change the way that we work, especially given that we spend the bulk of our time at work. So let’s get right to it. And let’s talk about what you mean by the term beloved economies.

Joanna L. Cea  04:46

Hmm. It’s a very good question. And it’s one that doesn’t have a quick one liner answer. And I think it’s hard to explain what we mean without also contrasting it. With the dominant economy that we’re in today, which we ended up describing in the book as the loveless economy. And because this is the water we’re all swimming in and have been swimming in for so long, it’s hard to realize that anything else could be possible. But the way we kind of break things down in the book is looking at business as usual, which we operate in right now. And the way that it, the whole structure of our current manifestation of capitalism in the US is rooted in maximizing the accumulation of profit for a few in a way that actually ends up feeling pretty loveless for everyone involved. And the what we explore with beloved economies, and I’ll say in a moment who shared that framing with us, is the possibilities to still be successful and thriving. In metrics measured by business as usual, you know, when it comes to financial success and resilience, and exceptionally high quality products and high retention on your team, and also be achieving things that do make life feel more beloved, the teams and groups that we followed in the research, all we’re achieving kinds of success that people involved, not just the staff, but stakeholders, community, members, clients, whoever, many people involved were describing as bringing more purpose and sense of connection, and even joy. And the question that Jess and I really started with that began this journey many years ago was, if something else is possible, why are we so often trapped in very draining harmful modes of work, and what is possible when we innovate out of them. And so we ended up looking for examples of kind of bright spots of entities that were really departing from mainstream ways of work in their field in a significant way, and who are achieving kinds of success that felt very beloved to those involved, and that journey, and what we found and what we ended up kind of surfacing together with all those groups is what became the book that is now beloved economies.

Maria Ross  07:24

So when you were doing your research, did you find that people were using that term of Beloved, were they talking about love when they were describing where they worked? Or what they enjoyed? Or what motivated them? How did you come up with that term?

Joanna L. Cea  07:37

So we thank you for that question, Maria, because very importantly, as we lag in the book, we did not come up with that term. We were several years into the research, when we learned about the work of Dr. Virgil a Wood, who is an economic activist, and theologian and educator in his 90s, who has been working on these issues since his involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the US, and Dr. Wood upon hearing about our work and finding said, it sounds to me, like what you’re describing is a beloved economy. And we were both just instantly haunted and compelled by that frame. Because, you know, it of course, links to Beloved Community, which Dr. Martin Luther King and so many others spoke to. And it also it’s such a provocative kind of dissonance, you know, like how could beloved and economy go together. And something that Dr. would emphasize, which was also something we were coming to in our work is a beloved economy is not like a top down prescription that is exactly, you know, this mechanism and model, it’s more something that emerges from the bottom up, and is deeply informed by the way we work together. And by new possibilities for care and shared ownership, and different models of ways that wealth and the benefits of working together can be distributed, that make the economy feel more like an ecosystem and less like something We’re surviving every day.

Maria Ross  09:20

I love that idea of making it an ecosystem and not just something to be survived because that is the tragedy to me is that we talked about this before we started recording this idea of this is where we’re spending the bulk of our time exactly. Shouldn’t it be a place that’s nourishing us and where we’re able to bring our full selves and where we’re able to thrive and collaborate and I often talk about, you know, the workplace being a playground for developing the skill of empathy because it’s an auto immunity for us to practice. When we’re in an environment where there is so much give and take. There is you know, there are so many diverse individuals with different needs and different goals and different desires. And so I love the idea of let us it would be so great to stop looking at work as this drudgery that we survive until we go home at the end of the day, or the end of the shift. And I know that’s a luxury for some people. But if we could adopt this idea that this, what I call the both and, and I talked about it in my book, like we can be compassionate and competitive, we can have cashflow, and compassionate and we can have ambition meshed with kindness. Why do you think and in your research? What did you find to be the reason why even with all the research, even with all the data, you know, I had a guest previously that talked about all the data points around how well purpose driven organizations do versus ones that don’t have a clear purpose? I feel like all the data and research is there. And yet, we’re still operating in this, you know, kind of what you talked about this loveless model? What do you think is the hesitancy? Is it just fear? Is it they don’t know what to do? Is it just this is the way it’s always been done?

Joanna L. Cea  11:08

Her? It’s a very important question. And it’s one we did look at a lot. And one of the chapters in the book explores that in particular one called they may try to stop you. Because we found there’s a lot of fear and resistance to reimagining how we work, both before you start. And then most baffling sometimes in the cases that we were following groups were starting to be incredibly successful, based on big departures, going more toward purpose and empathy and care, as you’re saying, and then, you know, someone would shut it down, or a few people would freak out. And even if it This success was in their best interest. And so really looking at where this comes from, you know, there’s no definitive answer. But depending on who we are in our identities, and know many of us in our lineage, or communities lineage, have histories of economic alternative efforts being very violently shut down. And we also are all operating in a system where, you know, we emphasize that the economy is something we all make, and remake and reify every single day. So yes, there’s big structural forces at play. But there’s also the accumulation of 1000 little decisions and actions that we each make every day. But that’s not a message we get often we tend to be a formally taught event that the economy is this, you know, monolithic thing and structure external to us that we need to operate in its rules, or we won’t survive, you know, and the most exciting kind of big picture takeaway of our research, because many of these groups we followed for as long as seven years through the course of a pandemic, everything that the last few years have held. And we can see and quantify that when teams successfully reimagine and overhaul how they work in ways that center shared power and purpose and well being, it’s actually a very important force for economic transformation, we saw a ripple effect happening, like for many of these groups, their success, then embodying that something else is indeed possible, ended up sparking shifts in norms in their sector, it ended up like reinforcing labor, organizing efforts, even changing what can be on the table for policy. And so the kind of overall call to action, if you will, from our research and book is, hey, the way we work together matters. It’s not just a warm fuzzy for SNR teams, it’s actually a really potent force for change. And yes, we all have different kinds of latitude and different constraints, you know, facing how easily we’re able to question the rules. But generally, we all have a lot more latitude than we think we do. And this the last thing I’ll say on that is, especially right now, well, it’s very fresh, having come out of the pandemic, you know, we all just witnessed, we can rewrite the rules of business as usual, overnight on mass. And so what if we really lean into that on our teams, but rewrite them in a way that enables us to step into being examples of economies that do feel more like love?

Maria Ross  14:27

Right, right. And that’s, you know, so much loss, it’s hard to talk about the silver lining the pandemic, but it’s amazing what we’re all the things we say we can’t do until we’re forced to do them. And wouldn’t it be great if we, as humans can learn our lessons time after time after time and say, maybe if we can be proactive about this transformation? If we didn’t have to have some horrible catalyst that made us transform that forced us to budge? It would be so great and I feel like we come out of crises And we say that that’s how we’re going to operate. And then we get complacent again, as human beings, right. And I know that’s just, that’s the way our brains work, our brains don’t like change, and just the way it is of the human condition, but I know the kinds of changes you’re talking about, can lead to great transformation. When you talk about the approach you take, and you talk about the most seven practices in the book, in order to break out of business as usual, that can be really scary to someone who is like, yeah, I want to do it. But oh, my gosh, where do I start? And what if I’m the only person, you know, I’m just one person within this giant organization or giant company. So you know, like, I talk a lot about spheres of influence, and that you can become a model, you can almost create a micro culture within your team or your sphere of influence. What do you say in terms of someone listening to this going, I want to create a culture like that and an environment like that. But how do I even start? Is there a way you can give us a little bit of a summation, or maybe one or two of the principles because we want folks to pick up the book? But where are some starting points and access points for people within those seven practices?

Joanna L. Cea  16:12

Sure. Great question. And I will share that No. And I’ll also say we because we get this question. So often, we included a mini kind of bonus chapter at the end of the book called Getting Started, because that’s the hardest thing is getting started. And you mentioned the seven practices that we found in our research. And we did not expect to find those we weren’t going out trying to find you know, a list of best practices or a code or something. We were just exploring what happens when groups, you know, really boldly breakout a business as usual and are successful what’s happening there. But over time, we ended up realizing that even though the group’s in our we called it our CO learning community, so the cases we followed became part of the active participatory research group, everyone was doing very different things in their day to day work, we have everything from health care providers in the cardiology department, to a youth led social movement organization, to a tech startup, to educational groups to disaster recovery planning. I mean, it’s all over the map. So the language everyone’s talking about of their day to day activities is very different. But we started to realize there was a deeper underlying pattern in how they were working. That was very similar. And we were actually able to do a first in person gathering of folks in the color and community way back in 2016, and then keep the conversation going. And that’s how we together kind of did a sense making process to surface what are these deeper patterns, underlying list access of these groups, and you know, how they’re working. So we like to emphasize, you know, this isn’t a kind of abstract framework that Jess and I just cooked up, it’s actually kind of a backward sensemaking thing collectively surfaced by all these interesting organizations. And finding those seven practices and how strongly all these groups felt about them. That’s what compelled us to write the book. Because it felt like wow, there actually is a framework for how we all can get started and work together and have a greater chance of coming to the kinds of outcomes and ways of work that these groups are that feel really repetitive and replenishing in the context of our current economy. So I’ll just list the practices here. And then I’ll talk about one or two, but in no particular order, they are shared decision making power, prioritize relationships, reckon with history, seek difference, source from multiple ways of knowing, prototype early and often. And trust there is time. And maybe for your question of getting started, I’ll pick two I’ll do seek difference and trust there’s time. So I think one we often kind of don’t underestimate the power of seeking difference and seeking difference in the way that we call the groups in our cool learning community breakout actors that these folks do. So this isn’t just you know, check the box dei work is very important. And we also know some people do it in a problematically check the box kind of way, but we really saw breakout actors be courageous and who they’re bringing to the table together and in the way they’re making that table feel and operate so that everyone really can bring their brilliance and insights and opinions to the table. Whether those are factory managers and factory floor workers or suppose it beneficiaries of a disaster recovery process being brought in as designers are often when we feel stuck like well, I don’t know where the answer is the simple act of bringing together a group that broadly reflects the kinds of lived experience and roles and people who are impacted by our work or the question at hand. That, in of itself unlocks all kinds of wisdom.

Maria Ross  20:16

And it’s also getting a different perspective on the problem. If I’m in a room with people that just see things the way I do, there’s so much I missed, there’s so many other facets of the challenge, or the idea that because of my own experience, or our own experience, we’re missing out on we’re missing out on that innovation and creativity. And, you know, I’ve interviewed several people on the on the show that have talked about this idea of, you know, smart leaders, you know, hire people that say no to them, smart leaders hire people that say, Well, why don’t we do it this way, or, you know, they ban the words like we’ve always done it this way, their vocabulary, because they know that they come up with better solutions. And it might take a little longer to get there. But they waste less time, you know, on the long run. So I love that that’s actually a trait within these amazing breakout teams. And I love the term breakout actors, as a way to identify people who might have often been told in their work environment, they’re too much. They’re a squeaky wheel, right? Not that I’ve ever heard that. But you know, it’s a nice framing of like, the people that are going to challenge you and challenge the decisions. It’s actually good to tight those things with fire to test ideas to test processes. And because in the end, you come up with a better forged product, you come up with a better forged process. So I love that that’s actually a key. I like in what you’re saying to finding what like the common recipe was across all these teams, like what was the what were the you know, it was like, a dash of paprika. Everybody had it? You know what I mean? And so I love that that is actually one that very clearly came through in your research was this idea of like, once again, proving differences good if we embrace it in the right way. And that’s really where I see empathy playing a role is empathy is the fuel that helps difference work. Otherwise, you’re just a bunch of people disagreeing with each other and, and not thinking your point of view is valid over mine, or what have you. Empathy makes it all run. So sorry to interrupt you, I was just so excited by that being one little is what are your main practices? So? So what does that look like in action, like that particular practice? And then I do want to talk about the trust there as time because I think that’s an important one. But we’re what are some ways, you know, someone’s listening, they are a leader, they’re in a company. And they know, you know, from like, you were saying they need to work on D IB initiatives. But what are some ways they can start to seek difference within the teams they have now and start to put foundations for the future in place to start creating that beloved, economy within their organization?

Joanna L. Cea  23:00

You know, no formula for this. But one of the kind of simple practices we saw across breakout actors was, rather than just having one person who’s in charge of ensuring the EI or you know, that it’s really about whatever the key question or issue is at hand, asking multiple people who else needs to be here, who isn’t here right now? Who is impacted by this question, we’re asking by this work that we’re doing. And in kind of a meta way, you seek difference even in seeking difference, right? Like you ask a variety of people in a variety of positions in the organization, what kind of lived experience, job experience, training, whatever, you know, they think needs to be there. And sometimes that in itself, really opens up some new ideas. And then I think just that a number of the groups too, we saw kind of take these steps in widening circles. So you’d, you know, bring an initial group together and then think, collectively, both who else needs to be there? And also, how do we need to be inviting people in during this process so that it is really set up for each person to feel safe and be able to give their full meaningful contribution? Because I’m sure we’ve all seen that mistake done a lot of times to where good effort at recruitment, but not enough effort at process for it to be functional. But then hearing that I know can kind of feel paralyzing like, Oh, what if I do it wrong? What and again, it’s like if we kind of share that and we bring together even if it’s a small group, but with diverse perspectives to help think through that together. We’ve seen that be an effective baseline. So I love this

Maria Ross  24:47

concept of the other principle about trust. There is time because I mean, time is such an enemy of time crunch is such an enemy of innovation of creativity of rethinking the way that we do Do things, because we’re constantly feeling and I think part of it is a narrative, we tell ourselves that we’re short on time. And it was good talk to us a little bit about that principle and how it manifested in the research and in the CO learning groups.

Joanna L. Cea  25:13

Sure. This was actually the last practice that came into view, if you will. And then once we saw it, it was like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Maria Ross  25:23

For everyone, we need to that needs to be a seventh one. Yeah,

Joanna L. Cea  25:26

yes. And it’s the most challenging. I mean, for me, for all, it’s so wrong for exactly the reasons you said. And, you know, we open the that chapter in the book about that practice, saying, you know, this sounds so hard in the context in which so many of us literally feel starved for enough time, I mean, people working multiple jobs, deadlines, having very real consequences, if you miss them, so it’s, this principle isn’t about a idealized like, oh, just live a more spacious life, you know, take time, it’s more about kind of alluding to what you said earlier, Maria, like the go slow to go fast, it can feel hard to even carve out time for a conversation about how we might want to change a process or make it work better for effectively seeking difference or whatever. But when you create that time, and focus on kind of the fundamentals of how we work together in a way that are very transaction Do do do achieve achieved, achieved culture doesn’t usually let us do the results that come out, make it very worthwhile. So it’s this kind of paradox of you let go of a quick means to an end, we have operating to actually then get to an even more meaningful end. And what a lot of breakout actors talk about with this practice. It’s not just about, you know, pushing back to create time for this thinking about how we work for, you know, the time it takes to define what each of these practices will mean for us, and how we are going to activate them in our groups. But it’s also about when you do that, and attune to these things, people tend to kind of drop into a different quality of presence. So it’s both about that, you know, yes, the number of minutes we set aside, but it’s also kind of creating space for profound things that enable us to attune in a different way and even tap into different parts of our insight and innovation. And, yeah, that deeply fuel our work and help kind of reinforce people realizing Wait, it is possible, and in fact, imperative to create time together like this.

Maria Ross  27:44

Yeah, and I think that’s such an important aspect. When we talk about social and emotional intelligence, when we talk about building meaningful relationships at work. When we talk about forming friendships at work, we often see those things as distracting from the work that needs to be done, when those are the very things that enable the work to be done. And no matter how many times we try to tell people, it just seems like you said in the midst of deadlines in the midst of like, order clothes in the midst of Oh, our sales numbers are flagging, what are we going to do to you know, bandaid things, right now, we don’t have time for team meetings, we don’t have time for you know, mentoring, we don’t have time for all these things. But those are the very things that enable you to get through the tough times. And especially if you can be proactive to build those foundations first. And I love what you’re saying, because it’s almost like setting the tone as a leader, have that mindset of like, No, we have enough time. This was the meeting we were going to have but clearly this has come up. We’re going to address this now. And you know, we’re going to talk about different things that we might be, you know, especially right now with like, for example, so many companies doing layoffs, it’s like what is important to shore up and keep those relationships and that community intact, so that it can continue to function. And what I’m seeing is the smart leaders are making time for that in the midst of chaos, finding a way to make time for that. And I know that, you know from my own personal experience, maybe you can relate to this is as someone who’s very type A and very just like go go go. I did always appreciate those people in the meeting who sort of didn’t say anything for a while. And then would speak in a very, you know, even just speak in a very measured way. Like they would just take the temperature of the whole room down so that we can actually take a breath and think clearly. So I was really appreciated them and in the end, right? You’re like, Oh, someone like, you know, gave us the proverbial slap in the face to calm down. Right, actually, you know, someone I had on the show in the past talked about the fact that we actually need to spend more time asking the right Question than trying to come up with the solution. We should actually be spending the time on that and going, Is this really the problem we’re trying to solve? Is this really the issue in front of us? Or is it something else? And you can’t do that when you don’t think you have enough time?

Joanna L. Cea  30:15

Exactly. Yeah. And it’s interesting, because, you know, as we, in the process of writing the book, and each practice has its own chapter, there’s a little vignette in front of it. But it’s very hard to separate the practices from one another, because they all are, you know, very intertwined. And like you’re saying, you know, that operating in that kind of grounded way is very linked to also prioritizing relationship and tapping into other ways of knowing and, but what you’re sharing is making me think of one of the people in our cool learning community. Antoinette de Carroll is the founder of creative reaction Lab, which is a group that has really shaken things up in the design world, in internet helped pioneer at field of design called equity center and community design. And the way they work brings in very diverse stakeholders, if you will, as fellow designers and really gets to asking the right questions, and does processes differently so that you hear those really innovative ideas. And we ultimately decided to feature creative reaction lab in the vignette before trust, there is time. They had so many great stories have like their first session with any clients. It’s like, okay, we’re going to spend, you know, X number of hours today talking about power dynamics, and doing some deep look, history and power dynamics and stuff in our field and our organization. And they almost invariably get an initial big pushback and discomfort of like, wait a minute, I stepped away from my to do list to come do this thing. And you’re telling me we’re not going to get from point A to point Z by the end of the today. And we’re asking these big nebulous questions and, and then by the end of the day, people, or even the end of the session, people are incredibly present. No one’s looking at the clock. They’ve had breakthrough conversations. They saw things they never did before. The questions around history have sparked empathy that they didn’t have before for one another. And they’re like, this is incredible. We can’t wait and incident jianxin She and her team are like, do you remember you didn’t want us to do them so

Maria Ross  32:29

convenient? And not for nothing, but we told you so? No, I love that

32:36

hard to feel like we have permission to do

Maria Ross  32:38

that. Yes. And then you know, it’s a perpetuating cycle. Because in a culture where we think we’re going to be punished for trying to create that flow and create that time, then we don’t do it. And really, it’s what everyone is craving. But no one wants to speak up unless you get a really bold, brave leader that says we’re going to do this differently. Yeah, it gives everyone else permission to say Thank God, we’re gonna do it differently. Because this was not working. Yes. And so it’s almost like we’re in, you know, we’re in dysfunctional relationships. So often in work environments where I think individually, people know the way they want to work. But they’re stuck in this groupthink and this environment where they’re not psychologically safe to say, I want to try to do something differently. And it’s just sad, because everyone, there’s so many people that have the same idea of what they want. And then they go into this office environment together and they’re miserable together. It just erase me sad.

Joanna L. Cea  33:38

No, and we, along that research with the book, so many people, we ask the question like, okay, the phrase, beloved economy, you don’t know anything about what it means or where it came from. But what does it mean to you? Like, what would it feel like if you woke up one morning and stepped out your front door into oblivion economy? The things that people want and dream about are so similar? Yeah. It’s so and then it’s that, like, we are all wanting something very different. So why are we all document what we’re stuck in right now. And our hope is that this book can help us wake up to the power we have, especially with our teams and groups, to choose to imagine and build outside of it. You have to support one another to be living examples that other ways are indeed possible.

Maria Ross  34:29

I love that. I think we’ll just leave it there. Because this is such an important conversation. And I hope listeners will check out the book, beloved economies transforming how we work. Thank you so much, Joanna, for your time and your insights today and for the book that you and Jess have written because I think it’s important that we all embrace. We talk so much about innovating products and services. We don’t talk enough about innovating the way we work. Yes, you know what I mean? And so that’s, you know, what I hope to highlight In this podcast, I’ve highlighted a few other guests. One in particular is coming to mind. Rebecca Freese, who runs a culture of workplace innovation and culture firm called Flynn consulting. And she wrote a book called The good culture. And in the subtitle, it’s something about like creating a workplace that doesn’t suck isn’t the metal. That’s really where we’re not innovating there. We might be innovating with apps and technology, and, you know, ride sharing services and all this kind of stuff. But the organizational structure or the culture structure is still so outdated, and in desperate need of being revamped

Joanna L. Cea  35:38

the culture structure and the ownership and decision making and return structure and that we call that out too.

Maria Ross  35:45

Yep, absolutely. And the beautiful part of this, as I often talk about with rules of leadership, and the way we engage with each other is those are all rules we created, not laws of physics, and so we can change them at Linden if we don’t like them. So let’s do that. So let’s start with your book, beloved economies. Joanna, thank you so much. All your links already have the opportunity to be here. Yes. And all the links will be in the show notes. But for anyone on the go right now. Where’s the best place they can learn more about you and justice work?

Joanna L. Cea  36:16

Sure. You can learn more about us the book and the whole campaign around it at beloved economies.org.

Maria Ross  36:22

Wonderful, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Maria. Take care. And thank you everyone for listening to another great episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard you know what to do, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don’t forget to rate and review if you have an opportunity. Until next time and our next insightful guest. Please remember that cashflow, 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.

Want to save the world – & build a healthy profitable business? You can. My guest today, Lindsay LaShell, and I talked about everything purpose & profit! What is a marketing activist, how impact organizations can better leverage marketing to achieve goals, where folks go wrong when leveraging social media, & the marketing lies that detract all of us, for-profit & nonprofit – from achieving our goals. Lindsay explains her buyer’s journey framework & how it operationalizes empathy into your business model & marketing. We talk about B Corps & how any business that wants to make a difference can become one –  she has stellar advice for anyone longing to marry purpose & profit or paycheck. You will leave today’s conversation motivated to do more good with your work, no matter how large your organization is.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing is not about lying to people, it is about telling your story truthfully to do good in the world. Marketing is a communication tool to serve & lift. 
• Every sale you make is human-to-human. B2B or C2C don’t matter because everyone is human with their own thoughts, fears, wants, stresses, & human needs.
• Have a business purpose for everything you do in marketing. You do not need to do everything that everyone else does. You do not need to do something, especially on social media, just because you feel like you “should” do it.

“Mediocre marketing costs a lot of money because you don’t know who you’re talking to, & you don’t know what you’re offering. We don’t have time & money to waste. We need our s*#t to be more efficient, we need better. That’s where empathy focuses your range.”

—  Lindsay LaShell

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers & boosting revenue & growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

Resources Mentioned:

Heather Hiscox, The Empathy Edge: The Surprising Empathy Gap in Social Impact That Hinders ChangeElisa Camahort Page, The Empathy Edge: The Art of Empathy in Politics, Activism & Media BSIan Bentley, The Empathy Edge: Conscious Consumerism for the WinGay Hendricks, The Genius ZoneSPECIAL OFFER: Want to ditch the social media channels that don’t serve you without sacrificing opportunities? Use coupon code “EMPATHY” to get FREE access to Lndsay’s Social Media Solution course in Kajabi. Lindsay’s course: The Power of Delegation for Entrepreneurs: https://courses.open-lines.co/offers/78wKLz3E/checkoutAbout Lindsay LaShell, Marketing Activist & Founder, Open Lines Marketing:

Lindsay Dayton LaShell is a Marketing Activist & the creator of the Open Lines Marketing Framework. Her work is to advance justice, equity, & sustainability through access to excellent marketing strategies for women, indigenous, queer, or POC founders, B Corps, & nonprofits. Through workshops, speaking gigs, & consulting, she’s helped thousands of organizations reevaluate & realign their marketing strategies to be more empathetic, efficient, & effective. To see what she’s up to, follow her on LinkedIn or subscribe to her newsletter at open-lines.co.

Connect with Lindsay LaShell:

Open Lines Marketing: https://www.open-lines.co/

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Open_Lines

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/openlinesmarketing/

Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

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Facebook: Red Slice

Threads: @redslicemaria

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. Want to save the world and build a healthy, profitable business? You can you can have impact No matter your work. My guest today, Lindsey le shell founder of open lines marketing, talks about her evolution into becoming a marketing activist and devoting her marketing skills to help women queer or bipoc entrepreneurs, nonprofits, B corpse and other purpose driven organizations increase their opportunity through marketing strategy. We talked about everything purpose and profit. So you’re in for a treat. What a marketing activist is how impact organizations can better leverage marketing to achieve their goals, where folks go wrong when it comes to leveraging social media, and the marketing lies that detract all of us for profit and nonprofit from achieving our goals. Lindsay explains her buyers journey framework, and how it operationalizes empathy into your business model and marketing. We talk about B corpse and how any business that wants to make a difference can become one, and she has stellar advice for anyone longing to marry their purpose, profit or paycheck. You’ll leave today’s conversation inspired and activated to do more good with your work. No matter how large your organization or your skill set. Take a listen. A big hello to you, Lindsay. Today joining us on the empathy edge Podcast. I’m so glad we’re reconnecting and having this conversation. Thanks, Ray. I’m so excited to be here. So you and I met years ago at a wonderful Women’s Conference in Northern California, I believe it was called world changer women, women, world changing women and you are a world changing woman. And I’m so glad we got the chance to meet there and stay in touch. Talk to us a little bit about your work and specifically what marketing activism is.

Lindsay Lashell  03:12

Yeah, do you know it was like such a glorious day was the day that I realized that my experience and my skills could be aligned with the purposeful path that I was looking for. It was just it was just magical, because I had been. I mean, I’ll be honest, I say this all the time. Like I don’t actually care about marketing at all. Like that is not my thing. My thing is helping people get what they need from their organizations. And marketing happens to be the skill set that I’ve got. So the activism to me is that I focus on making businesses stronger for women, bipoc Queer entrepreneurs, for nonprofits and be corpse and purpose driven organizations. It’s like, if by my by my values, if your success makes the world a better place, then I want to help you. That’s my activism. So you know, if you are an I have a handful of clients that are straight white men, but they either run nonprofits or social enterprises or something else, right. On the other side, if you’re a black woman, and one of the things I say all the time is like as long as you’re not selling guns or drilling for oil, I don’t care how you make yourself Rich and I want to help. And so that’s how I That’s how my activism,

Maria Ross  04:37

I love it. Well, I’ve always said throughout my whole career in marketing and branding, that if we could only use marketing for good rather than evil, how world changing that would be. Absolutely. You know, you and I are so aligned in that we look at marketing, not as this schlocky, you know, I always tell people marketing is not about lying to people. It’s about elevating the truth of your story. So the Need what you’ve got can find you. And you can actually create a sustainable business where you can do more good in the world. Yes. And so again, those are the those are the clients, I think both of us have that kinship of those are the clients were drawn to. And I will say, even when I work with my high tech clients, if they have a deeper mission and a deeper purpose, to leverage their technology to make the world better, I want to work with them. Right? Absolutely. So I love this so much. And I love that you, you know, I don’t know if you coined the term, but it’s the first place I ever heard it was being a marketing activist, because I think it really gets to that idea of leveraging marketing as a communication tool. Yeah.

Lindsay Lashell  05:41

Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s super intentional. I made it up as far as I know, I don’t I have never met another marketing teams. But for me, yeah. But for me, it really is, you know, it’s funny, because I still do have clients, especially when I work with like an accelerator, where the businesses, the entrepreneurs I’m working with, didn’t necessarily opt to work with me, right, because I’m like writing them or a curriculum or whatever. Like, I definitely have to do a little bit of a karmic balancing soul cleansing exercise, first to get everybody on board with the idea that marketing in and of itself is not bad. That that is that you know, anything can be used for good or bad, exactly getting and if your business is good. And your marketing deserves to be good, and you shouldn’t get too caught up in the garbage that we’ve all experienced, and the exploitation and you know, ways

Maria Ross  06:32

I mean, this is why this is why people are sick of advertising and marketing is because there’s so much bad stuff out there and right, because it’s they’re spraying the wall, hoping to hit the right people. And I do love like you I love working with nonprofits and social impact organizations to Leverage Marketing to amplify their message, because they often they have such good intentions, but they don’t have that skill set all the time. So, so let’s talk a little bit about the framework you use, because your company open lines, has a unique method for operationalizing empathy in marketing. And I know again, you and I are very aligned on the fact that marketing begins with empathy for your, for your customer, for your prospect for the person you’re trying to serve, right? Not the person you’re trying to get money from. So talk about how the framework helps your clients operationalize empathy.

Lindsay Lashell  07:27

Yeah, it’s the man, when I figured out this thing, I got so excited. Like, in so many different marketing jobs I had had, the Mo was like, Yeah, you do some persona work fine, then you put together the campaign, and you like, take the client’s money, and you’re like, Oh, I hope the phone rings have a good time. And when I started my own marketing agency, that was just not good enough for me, like I needed to know that the work we were doing was really well informed, and that it was gonna be held accountable for being effective. Like, those were the two things I was like, if we can’t get the results, we promise you should take your money somewhere else, right? Like, I don’t want it. And so. So that was where the framework started, where I started to develop this framework. And I mean, the basically, the premise of it is, if we look at the buyers journey, I break it down into five distinct phases, right? Part one is what we call the problem stage. And that’s like pre action, right? There’s like something in the back of my head says, I’m going to need a solution for some problem someday, but I’m not taking action on it yet. Right? Then you have like a triggering event that puts you into the research stage, which is when you are really starting to gather all your options, right? The way I talk about research stages, like you are walking through the store, picking up things off the rack that you are then going to try on, right? If you and the trying them on, that’s the planning stage, that’s when you’re like going through each thing and saying like, what’s at stake? Is this appropriate? Can I afford it? Do I like the way it fits? Like whatever, right? Those are really the questions in the planning stage. And then you get to a decision which gets you to solution, right? And I am as a marketer, anybody who says that is not marketing, communications is missing opportunities, right? Like how you talk to your clients and your customers is a marketing opportunity and how you leverage them in Phase Five, which is the recommendation stage can be everything for how effective your message is, for how well your your product is received, right, whatever it is. And so so the thing that’s amazing about this is when you look at the really like the user experience through those steps, it turns out that there’s like specific marketing channels that correlate with those experiences. So nobody, right it’s like the solution stage is almost never on Your social media. So whatever people care about at the solution stage doesn’t have to show up in your social media at all. And so now we can start to get what questions? Are they asking when they’re on your social media? And just focus on answering those, you don’t have to answer every question everywhere, know where they are when they are like, so it’s an emotional journey. But then it’s also like a digital or physical journey. And so once you, once you map those two things together, it tells you pretty clearly what you need to say, and where you need to say it. And that simplifies things quite a lot.

Maria Ross  10:31

And it’s different for every company, because I know when I worked in enterprise sales, that, you know, we would always try to talk to the sales teams about that, like you can’t propose on the first date. Right, you’re not going to ask for the sale at that first meeting. Now there’s, there’s things you have to do. And also you’re not going to necessarily offer a demo, or reveal references, until they get to a certain phase of the journey, where that’s applicable. So there’s even like marketing assets that go within each phase of the journey. And it’s sort of like, you know, are you are you introducing them to mom and dad on the first date? Yeah, exactly. They will run it’s too much, right? In a b2b context,

Lindsay Lashell  11:12

it’s even more interesting, because lots of times the conversion point is telling your boss about the opportunity. Yes,

Maria Ross  11:20

it’s not even you, you’re just the researcher.

Lindsay Lashell  11:23

Right. And so you understand that journey when you like, dig in, and really empathize with that person, what makes them tick in their job, like, I am that person. I know. It’s so cheesy, and I don’t care, but like b2b, b2c, individual humans,

Maria Ross  11:39

yeah. And we’re selling to humans

Lindsay Lashell  11:42

are patient. And so we don’t care. Like when my clients want to tell me that their customers are the name of a company or a job title or something like that, like we have a lot of work to do. It is a human person with their own fears, and wants, and hobbies, and stresses, and we got to meet them there. And so that’s like that journey map is what I call it is like going through and in their own words, describing their experience of like where you’re at at each. Absolutely. I

Maria Ross  12:12

love that you said that, because that’s actually in a workshop I’ve been offering around how to create an empathetic brand, is learning how to ask an echo back. Because we have the way we fall in love with describing our product or service. And it might there might be a place for that. Because we might be creating a new category, we need to introduce new language. But are you talking to your customers and finding out how they describe what you do to their peers? Yeah, that’s the language we should be using. So that’s when you get that marketing and advertising where people read it and go, Oh, my gosh, they’re inside my head. Yes, that’s right. I love it. Okay, so how, you know, given all of that, talk to, you know, help us make that business case of how does leveraging empathy in that process, make your marketing more efficient?

Lindsay Lashell  13:01

Do you know what it’s exactly what you said about people who are like spreading the walls trying to collect it? Right? Really, mediocre marketing costs a lot of money, because you’re like, you don’t know who you’re talking to, and you don’t know what you’re offering. And so you got to iterate on 1000 1000 different offers and taglines and like all this kind of stuff. And it’s just wasteful. It’s easy when you have a big budget to like, get results, like that’s 100% of the time, if you have enough money, you can get your customers and you can have a completely garbage product, right? Like, brilliant examples of that in the world. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say yeah, but let’s be honest about it, like the people that I’m trying to help. We don’t have time and money to waste. That’s opposite of what’s happening. We need our shit to be more efficient, we need better. And so that’s where that empathy focuses your range. And it’s, you know, and it’s so funny, because it’s an experience that so many of my clients have, where they’re like, Well, I have this persona, and I have this persona. And I have this persona, and I start to talk about, like, what is your offer for them? Why are they accepting it? And it’s like, well, they would accept it, except for there’s this one objection, or it’s not a good fit because of this. And it’s like, not your people, not your people. And so we just like start to narrow it down and narrow it down until we have such a clear picture. And this is the thing that I do that really ends up happening a lot too is that like, I can help my clients confidently, no, who is not their client, who is not their customer who they don’t even have to try to sell to, I can give them permission to be like you’re not for them. Just don’t even try don’t worry about it. It’s a waste of time and money, like so. And so that’s really the that’s really where it gets efficient because when you’re only talking to the right people, right? Use language that really resonates really deeply. You can use channels and really clever ways and when you’re doing winging it right? Then it cuts out all the noise. You just don’t have to do all kinds of other garbage.

Maria Ross  15:06

Well, speaking of figuring out which channels to use, I know you have very strong opinions about social media. And they are very aligned with my opinions. So I would like you to talk a little bit about the, the myth we’ve all bought into. Because we forget there was a world of commerce before social media existed. And companies were built and made money and served customers. Talk to us about the mistakes you see, especially like you’re saying, These people where the resources are precious, like whether it’s a woman entrepreneur, or small business or a nonprofit, every dollar every hour counts. That’s right. So where are they you know, where are they going wrong with trying to leverage social media to amplify their message?

Lindsay Lashell  15:51

Yeah, do you know? So my, there’s a couple of different ways that this plays out, right? For me, there’s like Rule number one is, why are you doing this thing? Like what is the specific action that you are trying to generate? What is the specific business case for why this has to happen? And that could be social media, it could be a newsletter, whatever. But what is this supposed to accomplish? And is it doing that? Yeah, it’s not doing that stop, like, or change tack or something, right? We again, we don’t have time to waste. And so that so it’s like, let’s be honest about the fact that I like Sorry, but like I this message, often, I have to direct specifically to a nonprofit Ed, because there’s a lot of shoulds. There’s a lot of shoulds. I feel like we have to so we should we’re going to the board, no

Maria Ross  16:49

one else is doing it.

Lindsay Lashell  16:50

All this Yeah, wise, those are all lies. That’s all fiction, we don’t have to believe it. And so so let’s take a step back and really think very deeply about where are our people interested in hearing from us? And what do what are they interested in specifically, what is the offer that we are making to them, that they care about? And if those things are not connecting, be honest about it, and GTFO. And so, social media especially, is, I think it’s really difficult because it used to be good. It used to be a cost effective way to expand your audience. Because you had your people and your people would engage with your stuff, your people would see your stuff, and they would engage with your stuff. And then there are people would see your stuff, and they would engage with it. And you could very organically and efficiently grow your audience? Well, guess what? Step one in that chain is broken. Now Facebook has like a five in 10,000 Organic view rate, right? Twitter is half of that, and Instagram is even less. So it’s like, how many? How many followers do you have to have in order to get even 100 people to see your stuff? And of the 100? who see it? How compelling does it have to be to get them to engage with it? Like it’s just, it’s a losing battle, right? Because Facebook and Google specifically, like, These guys make money 500 bucks a time at from small businesses all over the world. And they just do that. So it’s like to you or me, or like the pizza guy around the corner, like 500 bucks a month feels like an amount that I should be spending on my advertising and that it’s a reasonable you know what I mean? Like it’s a reasonable, because it’s expensive, so you don’t think that much about it. And so that’s what they’re doing. They’re basically saying, you can’t have this for free anymore, because we’d rather have your 500 bucks a month. And if people are doing that, that, you know, they now can do whatever they want. Right? So yeah, it just to me, we just need to stop shitting on ourselves, we just need to like, go back and say for real? What’s it for? And is it? Is this a reasonable like investment? Is it a good use of our time to try to get that,

Maria Ross  19:10

and I always try to think about it too, in terms of, you know, if you are honest with yourself, and you’re using social media to just raise awareness and have a presence and be part of the conversation, you’re cool, but know that and invest accordingly. And, you know, like as someone who is going to be investing in some social media advertising campaigns, my goal is to get those people on my email list. And then I don’t have to rely on social media anymore, then they’re actually part of my community. And I’m not renting the space, I’m owning the space, right for as long as I am lucky enough to have them as I continue to offer value. That’s right, but so it’s just having your eyes open. When you make those investments. And you have a class for folks, the social media solution how to walk away from channels you don’t like without sacrificing opportunity, and I think that’s talking about asking and echoing back, that’s always what I hear is like, well, I don’t want to sacrifice the opportunity, I don’t want FOMO I don’t want to miss out,

Lindsay Lashell  20:10

you know, like, I have to be there. I feel like I have to be there. And the worst part of it is is like, especially as a like solo or small business, right, you’ve got limited resources. So your options are invest those resources in a channel, that is not going to pay you back. Yeah. Don’t invest in that channel, and then feel like crap about it. Right? Because either because you’re not showing up as the genius that you are, or because because it’s, you know, like, for, it’s just not representing you? Well, because you as, especially for a woman business owner, like feel like you should, and you’re not, you put this extra pressure. And so it’s like it’s lose lose. So for me, once I realized, sort of the way that social media can be, frankly, more of a landing page than a Yes, way billboard. Right. Yeah. And that I mean, spoiler alert, that’s what the course is about, right? It’s like, like, how to think through the process of like, what is your Instagram need to be? If all it’s doing is validating people who are coming, they’re looking for you. If you go to open, if you go to open lines, marketing, Instagram, literally the most recent posts says Find us on LinkedIn.

Maria Ross  21:29

Yeah, that’s that’s your, that’s your place. That’s where you engage. And I want to add to because in case folks don’t listen all the way through you are, we are going to, in the show notes, have a special coupon code for listeners who want to check out that course of yours for free. So this isn’t about trying to sell people on this, you are really just trying to get this message out there to help entrepreneurs, small businesses, social impact organizations, nonprofits, stop wasting their precious resources and be more successful. So we will have that coupon code in the show notes for folks that are interested in checking out that short and juicy class that you are offering. So I want to just ask, you know, with your own experience, as a woman entrepreneur, I believe you had a B Corp before or other agency a B Corp as well. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, that landscape of being a woman entrepreneur and trying to have social impact as a B Corp? And, you know, trying to make money while serving your purpose? What are some of the lessons learned that you have to share with people about that?

Lindsay Lashell  22:39

Yeah, it’s got, you know, I, I guess the the first and like, overarching, like idea that I would want to get across is just that, like, you absolutely do not have to choose between purpose and profit, like, Absolutely do not. The B Corp movement is, it’s really special to me, I have a great community of other women entrepreneurs there. And, you know, when we got so I started my eight, my marketing agency, it was the first business I started in this in this industry. And that was in 2015. And we got our first B Corp certification in late 2019 2018 2018. And it was such a great exercise, because it was really just like, ticking boxes of like, proving that we are who we say we are, right, we were already I was already in a place where I was like, we want to work with purpose driven businesses, we want to work with nonprofits and and that’s all you know, that’s all great. And then when I transitioned from the from the agency into more of a teaching coaching, advising role as I am with the framework, then the it just got even easier, because the lot the downstream impact, right? It’s just it’s a simpler, it’s a simpler model. And the way that the community and the assessments work is it’s very, it adjusts to your business model. Everybody’s evaluated based on whether or not they have a supply chain, whether or not they have physical space, like all these sorts of things. But the bottom line is that, you know, B Corp is working really hard to make sure that it’s available to everybody that this was like this is not an exclusive, it’s not elite it is like should be thinking about the, you know, carbon footprints of our businesses, right, you know, like, whatever that is. And so we should be forced to think through the impact of our work on our local community and on our global community and all the things so I think, yeah, I mean, like I said, like, the very first thing I said was like, the day that I realized that like, the things I wanted to do at work and the things that were impactful could be the same thing was just amazing. And so I Think. And so that’s the thing is like, even if you’re just, you know, selling office supplies, sell renewables and sell them to purpose driven businesses. And now you’re you know what I mean? Like, there’s nothing hard about taking a regular business model and making a purpose driven business business model. And I think this is one of the things that I’m really excited for him the next steps of this evolution is watching the nonprofit as like nonprofits are starting to be more revenue minded. And my sincerest hope is that that leads them towards more efficient business practices, and, frankly, more ethical business practices. Because I think that’s the philanthropy has a lot of legacy stuff that they need to outgrow right, to evolve out of, and I think the B Corp movement is a good a good model for how to do that.

Maria Ross  25:55

And we probably should have said this earlier in case there is anyone unfamiliar with the B Corp classification. Can you just give us a quick? Yeah, Intro to that?

Lindsay Lashell  26:04

Yeah, I think the talking line is like B corpse meet the highest standards of sustainability, inclusion and equity. Something else, it’s a series of business assessments that you take, and you get points there, it’s shift. There’s some movement there and exactly how it’s going to be evaluated. But basically, you know, you got to look out for your environmental community impact. And, you know, one of the things I love this, like, one of the requirements is your, if you have a healthcare, you know, benefits for your team, it has to include trans health care. It has to include mental health care, it has to include, right, and so there’s just all these kinds of things. It’s just like, really thoughtfully, making sure that everybody is on the right side of history, you know, well,

Maria Ross  26:50

and I love and I think it was probably around the time that I met you, when I realized that for profit businesses can be B corpse. So not everybody. There’s always been this binary thing of either I’m helping the world or I’m making a ton of money. And the whole point of the empathy edge, you know, as I’ll say, in my sign off, is that cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t mean we’re trying to exploit compassion to make money, it just means that you can do both. They’re both achievable. And you don’t have to choose one or the other. And so you know, through you, I’ve met, you know, website developers, developing agencies who have who are B corpse. I’ve met other companies, like you said, you can’t be an office supply company and be a B Corp. On my show, I’ll put a link in the show notes, I interviewed an Ian Bentley, who is the CEO and founder of Parker clay, which sells luxury leather goods that are made in Ethiopia, and helps keep women from being human trafficked. And going into lives of prostitution. And that is a B Corp. So we need to change our mindset about what we think philanthropy looks like what we think social impact looks like. And what I love about what you’re doing is you’re saying, Yeah, even marketing, consulting, even even, that can be something that benefits the world because of the way that you do business. And as you were talking about all, you know, some of the requirements of a B Corp, I couldn’t help but think, wouldn’t it be great if one day in our world those are the requirements for starting a company? Right, not a specific kind of company? Yeah, at any company.

Lindsay Lashell  28:35

This is what’s required to think it through on your on your incorporation docks. Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you like, quick plug, anybody else who wants to get involved I think be corpse in general, the next step really is to get to have it be a consideration and government contracting. That feels like right like right now you can have like minority ownership or women ownership is a consideration I think be corpse should also be a consideration. Like that’ll be a huge boost to our to that the movement when that happens. But I want to I just wanted this isn’t like a strictly answer to a question. But I want to name this other thing. Yes, please. Because it’s, you know, we’re talking about profit and purpose and all this kind of stuff. And then at the same time, I’m over here talking about how my clients are all really underrepresented, underestimated individuals, whether they are founders of a nonprofit, or you know, queer, bipoc, whatever. And I am going to make a lot of money by helping them in an equitable way. And so I really, I want everyone who does who offer services, but even some goods can do this, to start to think about what sliding scale pricing would look like in their business model. That is how that is how we control for opportunity, right? To me, the thing that I always say is that access to resources should never determine access to resources. Otherwise, we are just going to continue to perpetuate the, you know, investment models and really exploitative capital that has been making business run in this country since it was started. And so for me, it’s it is, I am so passionate about my work, and it is priced in a very intentional way, where I know I know what it’s worth. And I understand that a lot. And I’m making it available in a bunch of different ways, right? Like I’m working on like, I’m working on my book right now. So you’ll actually have access to like, a workbook where you’ll get everything you need for like, 25 bucks, cool, go do that, you know, and then there’s like, self serve online courses. And then I have like, small like cohort like entrepreneur cohorts that I work with. And so there’s all and then of course, there’s like, the big ticket is the is the like, one on one consulting, right. But it’s like, that huge range means that the work, the value of it can be available to anybody, because I don’t want, I just don’t want to continue to perpetuate the privilege that comes with this kind of business intelligence, really, you know,

Maria Ross  31:16

well, and I love it. Because you’re building the sliding scale, you know that I think the thing that makes a lot of entrepreneurs pause when they hear sliding scale is, but what if I end up doing all this work? For no money? Right? And I love how you’re flipping that on its head, it’s about having maybe different offerings at different price points. Yes, with that, you know, with your book, you write it once it’s available, it can actually scale, right? Versus your one on one bespoke engagements. That might not be something you’re going to offer on a sliding scale. Or maybe you will make that choice, right? And you get to decide what’s in scope of that threat. Someone can go, Okay, well, maybe I’m not gonna get 100% of the benefit of it. But I’m gonna get 80% And you’re not going to feel resentful offering it? That’s right. I think that’s the mistake is some entrepreneurs get so gung ho about that, that they start offering everything on a sliding scale, and then people are paying them like, you know, $100 for 40 hours of their time. And that’s not promoting equity and opportunity either for you. Right, that’s

Lindsay Lashell  32:18

including ourselves, which is something that a lot of women consultants will do, right. So yeah, no, I do. I think it’s interesting, because one thing I’m toying with, I’ll just like, mention it. I’m i This heard it here first, that Yeah, exactly. The entrepreneur cohort, that it’s six, it’s a maximum of six, required found, like they have to be founders because it’s like skin in the game. Right, right. And so and I’m actually thinking about offering this as a little bit like pay what you can model, like, there’s the price, there’s the equity discount, and then there’s the I have the privilege and opportunity to help cover the equity discount. And so I think that’s the the, you know, there’s the retail, the retail plus and the retail minus sort of pricing structure that I’m going to that I’m going to introduce this year. So I’m excited to see how that goes. Yeah,

Maria Ross  33:14

definitely. You’ll have to report back. Yeah. Well, any other final thoughts to folks listening, whether they’re working for themselves, or they’re working within a larger organization and really struggling with trying to and I know, I struggled with this early in my career of like, how do I take my business skills and still do good in the world? Right? What’s your advice to people as they try to look at aligning their purpose with their paycheck or their purpose with their profit?

Lindsay Lashell  33:42

That’s a good question. I think, I think it’s really kind of, it feels so cheesy, but I really do believe this. I think it’s just like, being empathetic with yourself. Like, understand, listen to yourself, when you that little voice tells you what you actually want to be doing. And it’s it’s not what you are doing. Because I think, you know, is it Gay Hendricks that writes about the zone of genius. Right? Like, that’s like, the most powerful thing is when you know you are doing what you are great at. And so I think as entrepreneurs, especially, it’s really easy to get sort of blown around by what clients or prospects are asking us for and stuff like that. And I when you get to a place where you know what you are for this is one of the reasons why I am so grateful like this. I had a wonderful conversation with a client slash friend slash coach. And it was about knowing what you’re for, and what you’re not for. And, you know, to use some like relevant examples like roe gets overturned. That’s upsetting to me. But I am not the best person to fight that battle. I can help the people who are here to fight that battle. But that is not the best use of me, right? Something like the school shootings is another thing that’s like really upsetting when it happens. And I am comforted by knowing that like, I know what my battle is. It’s not gun control. It’s not abortion access. My battle is entrepreneurship opportunity and equity. And that’s what I’m here to do. And I think if you figure out what it is that you are here for, there’s a business model there. There’s a business model that that part is not the hard part.

Maria Ross  35:34

I love what you’re saying because it reminds me of a past guest, Elisa camel, hoard Paige who co wrote the book, roadmap for Revolutionaries, she often talks about the fact of a term called triaging your it’s not your passions, triaging your causes. Yeah, and making this a community effort because one person can’t fight on every front. Exactly. So if you can get yourself into a collective or in a group where, okay, these are all the issues that that are important to me. And Lindsay, I know you’re on this and this and you know, Jane, over here you’re doing, you’re focused on this, and this, and I’m going to focus my genius on this in this and as a group, we’re going to tackle these problems. But I love that she’s got an in her book roadmap for Revolutionaries. Like I said, she co wrote that with two other female authors, they talk about how to become an activist. And without burning yourself out without thinking you’ve got you have to be the one to solve all the problems, right. And so it’s kind of goes to also towards purpose. And I think many of us, at least speaking for me struggled with that in our 20s. And you know, there was just so much and it and it paralyzed you to actually do nothing at the time. And so when we

Lindsay Lashell  36:47

Sorry, I was gonna say like, I was an elementary school teacher in my 20s. Because that’s, that was the path that I could see to how I can contribute. Right? Yeah, turned out that I mean, I love teaching and I learned a ton, I wouldn’t be great at my job today, if I hadn’t done that, then right. Also, student loan debt, and, you know, trying to pay rent by myself and all these things, like I burned out in five years, as many public school teachers do. Because it’s just, it’s a, again, it’s an exploitative job, taking advantage of the purpose of purpose driven individuals that want to do it. Yeah. So yeah, so that’s I we’re, like, wandering around trying to figure out how to, where does the purpose get applied? And I think, just figuring out which is the which is the thing that that is, you know, from you first, and then whatever marketing activist accounting activists like they like, right, like anybody

Maria Ross  37:44

activist Yeah.

Lindsay Lashell  37:48

thing, because if you’re, if you’re purposeful, and thoughtful, and really care, you know, like, yeah, you know, know what you’re doing like this,

Maria Ross  37:55

find a way to apply those skills. I remember when I was getting ready to go to college. And I was a little bit for Lauren, about the fact that I really loved marketing. And I knew I wanted to major in like marketing or advertising. And I remember having a conversation with my mom in the car, and saying, but it’s not really noble. And she was like, well, Maria, society still needs to function. Not everybody can actually do a noble profession, but you can be noble within your profession. And that was, I think what I was always trying to seek out was like, of the thing I loved to do, and that I was good at. How could I apply it to better the world to better other people to help other organizations or other individuals? And maybe they’re the ones on the frontlines? Yeah. And I’m not I’m just helping to market and amplify their work. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. Such a great conversation. It’s so inspirational. Lindsey, I

Lindsay Lashell  38:48

know I love talking to you can I just throw out like one more idea that popped in my head, I just want to, because we’re talking about really purposefully, like reaching out trying to help whatever. And I just want to like raise a flag on white savior complex, and just like name, that if you are like me, white, and also very committed to making the world a better place, you need to educate yourself on white savior ism, because it’s really easy to have great intentions and be an asshole.

Maria Ross  39:20

But it can backfire. Really, really.

Lindsay Lashell  39:24

And so if you are transitioning into more purpose driven work, please educate yourself about how to avoid being the white savior. And, you know, think a lot more about collaborating with and partnering with, rather than, you know, gifting

Maria Ross  39:41

or doing for this is a great segue into an episode I did with Heather Hiscox, who was yeah, she’s amazing. She’s, she talks a lot about about where social impact organizations and advocates go wrong. With the best of intentions, the to try to solve problems for people versus solving problems with people, and I’ll put a link to her episode because it opened my eyes to so much and especially for those of you listening who want to have impact and want to do good, there’s a an effective and an ineffective way to go about that. And so please, if you get a chance, after you hop off this, take a listen to Heather’s episode that I’ll put in the show notes. But, Lindsey, thank you so much for your time, we’ll have all your links in the show notes and your generous offer to take your social media course free. Again, it’s called the Social Media solution, how to walk away from channels you don’t like without sacrificing opportunity. And there’ll be a coupon code for empathy edge listeners to get that $50 course for free, open access. And again, all your links will be there. But for folks on the go are working out right now as they’re listening to this where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your work?

Lindsay Lashell  40:53

Yeah, so my website is open dash lines.co. There’s all kinds of information you can like download a chapter of the book or sign up for a course or whatever. And then if you want, like more my very strong opinions, just search for me on LinkedIn. Right?

Maria Ross  41:10

Yes, thank you. You’re very strong opinions are very insightful, so keep them coming. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. As always, if you liked what you heard, please share it with a friend or a colleague. Don’t forget to rate and review as well. And until next time, always 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.

In this special episode, I deconstruct Ted Lasso’s cultural impact and golden lessons on leadership and empathy with one of my favorite people, Elisa Camahort Page.You may recall her from a past episode – she is a leadership and business expert, as well as a devoted empathy and pop culture fan, like myself – and we both enjoy finding lessons to apply to leadership and life in our favorite stories and characters. 

We discuss why the Apple TV+ show hit such a nerve with viewers (and us, as fan girls) and created a cultural phenomenon. We explore the leadership and teamwork lessons the show gracefully imparted, as well as how it expertly tackled themes of female friendships, toxic masculinity, mentorship, fatherhood, and mental health. We also dive into the brilliant storytelling construction and character arcs that kept viewers wanting more – and what we think might be next for the Lasso universe.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• Good ideas can come from anywhere. Stay curious, keep listening, and give others an opportunity to fill in where your skills don’t cover. 
• The little moments matter. They are what lead you to and away from the big moments and are equally as important. 
• There is freedom in allowing yourself to feel vulnerable and embrace the challenges that come your way. 

”On the surface, there was the super warm fuzzy and so much to love, but underneath, they were tackling the complexity of human nature, how nothing is what it seems, and we don’t know what’s behind everybody’s behavior.” —  Elisa Camahort Page

MARIA’S COURSE

Learn more about Maria’s new Brand Story Breakthrough course, starting September 8. Spots are limited so grab yours before it’s gone to start attracting more of your ideal customers and boosting revenue and growth: https://bit.ly/BSBcourse

Episode References: 

• The Empathy Edge podcast: Elisa Camahort Page: The Art of Empathy in Politics, Activism, and Media BS
• Ted Lasso
• Scrubs

About Elisa Camahort Page: Elisa Camahort Page is a fractional executive and strategic consultant who works with organizations to launch and scale authentic community and/or user-based initiatives, harnessing the power of people — community members, employees, and partners. Elisa was at the vanguard of the social web as co-founder and COO of BlogHer, Inc. In that role, she represented the face of the company to the user community and drove the transformation of a movement into a market. Elisa had oversight of the practices, policies, and procedures that modeled how organizations can build community, grow a business, support inclusion in words and action, and defend transparency and civility. Since BlogHer was acquired, and after instilling BlogHer’s community ethos into the acquiring company’s practices, Elisa has consulted with organizations that want to create compelling products and content, foster passionate community, and bring constituencies together in alignment with their brand values. A frequent public speaker and freelance writer, Elisa is also the host of The Op-Ed Page podcast and the This Week-ish newsletter, as well as the co-author of Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy for All.

Connect with Elisa Camahort Page:  

Website: elisacp.com

Find all Elisa’s Links at https://bio.site/elisacp

Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

Welcome to the empathy edge podcast the show that proves why kashflow 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. Let’s get connected. If you’re loving this content, don’t forget to go to the empathy edge.com and sign up for the email list to get free resources and more empathy infused success tips, and find out how you can book me as a speaker. I want to hear how empathy is helping you be more successful. So please sign up now at the empathy edge.com. Oh, and follow me on Instagram where I’m always posting all the things for you at Red slice Maria. Hi, Maria here with a quick announcement for all you business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers out there. Does it feel like no one knows who you are or the value of what you do? Or worse the wrong people are showing up at your door prospects who won’t pay you what you’re worth can’t make the most of your offerings or suck your energy dry. My problem you say is I know I could get the right customers if I could nail how to talk about this thing. You may know what you do well, but figuring out how to talk about it and market it can be overwhelming. If you’re here you know empathy is the key to a thriving culture and perfect brand story that attracts all the right people. Join me to build the brand story that will attract more of your ideal clients and boost your business success. The authentic genuine story that is unique to you and your business and that helps you stand out brand story breakthrough. Five weeks, playbooks videos, live weekly coaching and even my eyes on your work. In the end, you’ll have your elevator pitch brandstory, website, copy, and everything you need to start moving your business forward and getting attention for your amazing work. Next cohort starts September 8. Get more details and sign up at Bitly slash BSB course that’s bi T dot L y slash b SB course right now before the spots are all gone. I hope to see you there. So welcome to a very special episode of the empathy edge podcast. I am joined by my lovely friend Alisa camel Hort, Paige. And Elisa, tell folks a little bit about you. You’ve been on the podcast once or twice, but remind us of who you are. And all you do and what you’re passionate about. Because today, we are going to be dissecting Ted lasso.

Elisa Camahort Page  03:55

Yes. Am I passionate about Ted last? Yes, that’s because I’m quite passionate about a lot of things, including pop culture in general. And one of my latest topics I’ve really been digging in on is what are the lessons we pull from and learn from pop culture good, bad and ugly? And since we consume so much of it, how can we sort of sit with ourselves in our choices and be more conscious about those lessons? But I, I’ve been in tech for more than 20 years and about, whoa, 18 years ago? No, oh, my gosh, I co founded a company called Blog Her with two other women. And I ran that company with them for nine years before we were acquired. And over the last six years, I wrote a book about activism and advocacy. And I think that’s the topic I came on. Yes. Asked and talked about Paulo jab for Revolutionaries. roadmap for Revolutionaries. That’s right resistance activism and advocacy for all. I also wrote that with two other women, and I am fractional C level for early stage startups and organizations. So I’m really all about out helping people scale and stabilize their models, their plans, their resources, I can help them get to the next level without breaking the bank for them. And while I have all this bandwidth available to pursue my many interests, including pop culture, and its lessons,

Maria Ross  05:17

yes, and we should mention your amazing podcast, the Op Ed page, which I love, because you do span all these categories, you go deep on everything from politics, to tech to pop culture. And I love how so often you tie those things together somehow, yeah, you find

Elisa Camahort Page  05:34

that the Op Ed page podcast, and then I also have a substack. That I mean, you know, that’s the thing now this week ish. And I don’t even want to derail this and start talking about social media and everything that’s going on there. Because now that’s a whole nother advertisement for that. But I’m either at least to see, or in most places. Now. I’m at least a CP and Elisa camelhair page, and you can find me and most places,

Maria Ross  05:55

right, and we, and we will put all your links in the show notes, of course. But you and I were personal friends. And we both were so impacted by Ted lasso, which for anyone living under a rock was a show that was on Apple. For three seasons, they did have the show or 433. And it just recently ended. I’m putting that in air quotes, because who knows what will happen next. But it’s from the creator of Scrubs if people are familiar with that sitcom, which was very smart, and very pointed and did make a lot of commentary about things going on in the world. But really just like lasso married poignancy with humor. And you and I got this idea to talk about this because we were talking about all the things and just the cultural phenomenon. That was Ted lasso. And I just want to get your thoughts about why you think it struck such a nerve?

Elisa Camahort Page  06:54

Well, if we can take our minds back three years ago, we were in lockdown. When season one was available, we were in lockdown globally. And you know, you have to really remember that, that global lockdown was the most impactful global, everyone experiencing some of the same thing. At the same time. That certainly has happened in my lifetime. I can’t think of other really momentous days or occasions. But the way it was experienced across the globe would have been very, very different. But that lockdown pretty much got us all in some way. And, and there was a lot of stress and anxiety and fear. And there was starting to be this divisiveness and conflict. So it was just a maelstrom of emotions. And when Ted Lassa came out, and I didn’t go with you, there was started to be a lot of hype about it. And I didn’t start watching it right away. And so by the time I started, I don’t remember if most or all of season one was available, but I binged it, you know, I saw I was able to watch a lot of it. And there was something so kind. So warm, empathetic, but not saccharin, not sugary, and it. And I think also the character of TED is transplanting to this British culture and having that cross cultural exchange and having that the complex that we’re had were cross generational across culture. I think it helped us process a little bit of going through this global pandemic and locked down together and feel like it just almost felt like you were putting on a warm, comforting blanket,

Maria Ross  08:36

I experienced the same thing. Because after every episode, especially when I had been consuming too much news and too much negativity and too much vitriol in social media or other places. This was my respite. It was sort of like the Great British baking show for me to be like, Oh, it’s making me believe in humanity again. And like you we were late to the party. Actually, last year was what got us on Apple. We after every episode, I would just always tell my husband like, I just feel warm inside. Like, I just feel like I’ve been comforted. And I don’t know if that was magnified because of what was going on at the time. But it just, it’s a TV show, but it just gave me hope that like, the world was not lost that humanity was not lost

Elisa Camahort Page  09:22

on because at every level, every character was really about defying expectations and being more on the inside than they appeared on the outside. I’m sure one of two of the reasons I probably didn’t start watching it right away is I don’t care about football slash soccer. Like I follow other sports, that’s not what I follow. And so I’m like, I really gonna watch a whole show about soccer. And to if I’m just admitting my own internal bias like Jason Sudeikis his character with that really broad southern accent and that gosh, shucks kind of you know, that’s like not like I’m a I’m one of those coastal elite guys. I’ve lived in New York and I’ve lived at Cal Warren Yeah. And I’m like, you know that I was like, How much am I going to relate to this? This right? Southern guy? Coaching Soccer, like, how am I going to relate to any of that? Right? Yeah. And the show was so beautiful about letting you be curious, which is a key point that comes up in a critical scene in TED, last of the dark throwing scene, with Anthony Stuart head as Giles, who are as Rupert, who I love back as exiles from Buffy, you know, of course you do. Yeah. My favorite actors. And we’re TED talks about oh, you know, people don’t have curiosity. They look at me, and they make assumptions. And they just, they don’t wonder, hey, Ted, did you ever play darts when you were young? And oh, yeah, I played every week with my dad, you know, they don’t have curiosity. And their that was a very pointed way, explicitly articulating what the show was nudging us to do throughout, we just have curiosity about these characters, and how what they are on the outside is only part of who they are. And there are layers, that we all have layers, and that they’re worth exploring.

Maria Ross  11:04

Right. And we’ve talked about the fact that the storytelling structure of the show was so brilliant in terms of that was how I would describe it to people that hadn’t seen it as you’ve got to see it. But don’t make assumptions from the first or second or third episode. Because the arcs these characters go on are just brilliant, and thoughtful and intentional. And they are not the same people that they were at the beginning of the season to the end of the season. They’re not even the same people. They were from the beginning of the show, to the current end of the show, right? And just that no one stayed static. And I think that that’s what kept for me. That’s what kept bringing me back episode after episode was seeing the tiny incremental changes in the characters without it being this like, shocking moment, every time or this cheesy, you know, sit kami moment. It was like it was like, huh, that was an interesting facial expression. That was an interesting gesture. That was an interesting thing for that character to say, what are they going to do next. And it was such a masterclass in writing and character development of how these characters grew, and how we grew with them over the course of the show, which is why I thought

Elisa Camahort Page  12:16

it was an interesting choice for Apple TV plus to make to release it week by week, even though the show itself had many arcs. And it really was a throwback to me. I felt like there was something very 90s about the show, because if you look at the great cult, epic, my favorites and pop culture, pop culture from the 90s, Buffy The X Files, lots of other shows, they have an overarching mythology that gets, you know, ticked away at Little by little, and then they have some standalone episodes, and they have some, but those are the longer seasons TV shows back then had 2030 Season 30 episodes, and to Lhasa had like 10 or 12. And but it had that feel to me. So it was interesting that it was written for the binge, but it was released in a kind of time release manner week by week. And I could see people getting impatient, they remembered the satisfaction of watching on season one or watching all of season two, but they forgot that that satisfaction was doled out in small doses until it all came together. And I thought that was an interesting choice on the part of the producing company to do it that way. I do think it’s a show best benched because you can really see that arc and get all the easter eggs and remember all your bring all your feelings forward. And it’s a very satisfying binge. And we’re not used to anymore. I mean, I think part of that is that culturally, we are not used to anymore consuming things on a week by week basis. We’re used to being able to really get this an epic saga going and watch five, six hours in a row.

Maria Ross  13:56

I mean, it was addictive. That feeling I would get from that show was addictive like a drug to me. I like I just I really needed it during the time period that you talked about. And I would have this such a feeling of anticipation, especially once we caught up and now we were like week by week of like, Sunday night or whatever night it was, I can’t remember now but like, oh, there’s a new tub so out and then how defeated I felt at the end. Because I’m like, I gotta wait another week to like, revisit these people that I love. And they’re fictional characters. Right? So and you and I talked a lot about, like, so many different themes that this show tackled. And you and I both being in the in the business space, leadership, development, empathy. So many of those obvious themes came out for us in terms of leadership and teamwork and how the the unique way that Ted ran the team, but there were also all these other themes, these cultural themes that were touched on. So maybe we just go through them one by one. And let’s talk a little bit about what the show He taught us about leadership and teamwork, because that again was a masterclass in, in how you lead and motivate versus command and control which, you know, Rupert was the antithesis to that. Rebecca was very much about command and control. And by the way, we also need to touch on all the very intentional Star Wars references throughout the season as but yeah, yeah, good, the good and evil, the colors used all the things, but what, what do you feel were some of the takeaways around the the lasso way, so to speak.

Elisa Camahort Page  15:35

So one of the things I have always said for years and years about what makes for good co founding teams, is having complementary skills with an E complementary and that if you just have overlapping skills, you’re going to basically knock heads, and it’s going to be competitive more than collaborative, when you really want people to fill in gaps. And so for example, Ted comes in he doesn’t know anything about football. And if he hadn’t had beard, who it was the walk, I mean, beard was the walk. And if beard hadn’t been there to first of all, put Ted on the right path. Sometimes when he said things that were true, but also educate Ted, the F beer, Ted hadn’t had beard, I think he would have been insufferable. Like he would have just been a Rube who didn’t know what he was talking about.

Maria Ross  16:19

Right. The shutdown wouldn’t have gotten him very far with Yeah. Meanwhile,

Elisa Camahort Page  16:23

Nate obviously had strategic vision. And really, he knew the game as well. But he also just had this kind of almost prodigy strategic vision, but he had no idea how to motivate people. He was a classic example of hurt people hurt people, because the beginning of Titleist so Season One, he is being treated abominably. While fast forward to the beginning of season three, and he is treating people abominably, in fact, that even started in season two, he is just passing on what he learned from people who were not very evolved themselves. So he had no idea how to motivate people, he had no idea how to be an empathetic leader. So but you put them together, and then you have Roy, the guy who’s been there, who’s done that, who people look up to, who people want to emulate. And now you have this team, that all together, fill in all the blanks and are like a superhero. cogen. And at the heart of it, though, is Ted, who cares about not just making them better players, but better men. And they needed that they were young, I think a point was made frequently that these were young guys, that a lot of things could go to their head being a professional athlete. And, and there were obviously some probably there were some wonderful father figures doesn’t Sam Sam’s father, they had a wonderful relationship, but but distant, geographically distant, right, Jamie? And there were some difficult father, relationships, mate, Jamie, and so Ted rod, kind of turtle, warm hearted, empathetic, you know, education to these guys that they weren’t getting in other places. And so I kind of feel like that was one of the key things that was brought up was this, you know, find people to fill in your gaps and appreciate and respect the people who do and give them give them authority? Right? Well, and that’s that their

Maria Ross  18:14

magic he he gave people agency he gave people he trusted in people to perform beyond their title or beyond their level, giving Nate the opportunity to, to lead to be to have a say to be a strategist and then eventually be part of the coaching staff. He was not threatened by where ideas came from. And that was such a clear, right? It’s what endear him to me. But also, it was such a again, a great example of leadership, where when you’re not threatened the way Nate was threatened when he got into a leadership position, and then other people wanted to have ideas and he sort of tamped them down. He didn’t really learn from Ted’s lesson. This idea that good ideas can come from anywhere and also seeing the potential in people you know, Roy was a player, he retired, totally cantankerous, some would say difficult to work with, and he saw that he was exactly what the team needed. And, and gave him an opportunity that he didn’t, that Roy didn’t even necessarily think to ask for. And so that idea of seeing the potential in people and not being afraid to harness it not being afraid to just let someone take something and run with it, and see where it went. I thought was such a powerful lesson for leaders everywhere.

Elisa Camahort Page  19:33

The other thing I will say is that it really it pushed back on the notion of caring the most about the big stars, the big moments the big. A lot of people got aggravated that there are key scenes in TED last so that you find out about afterwards you don’t see you don’t see it think it’s season two, you don’t see the winning shot. You don’t see Rowan Keeley breakup. You don’t see how Nate, you know the whole How did he quit? How did he quit? It route but Rupert’s team, there’s a lot of big moments, you only see that they’ve happened. And then you’re dealing with the little fallouts afterwards. So that was I think there’s lessons in there about, we tend to over focus, but it’s really those little moments that are leading you to and leading you away from the big moments. And they are important. And the other thing is that every time they kind of thought they would rely on the senior year, the lawyer, big star and big that’s going to deliver those big moments from a competitive point of view. zawacki insufficient. Yeah, Baba. But it was also Jamie and David Young, one, you know, and it’s insufficient, it’s insufficient for their needs. It isn’t even when they when there’s there’s loss there, you know, and, and so I feel like the show was really about honoring everybody’s contribution, and honoring that every small moment is what leads up to and comes out of those big moments. And if you gave them the attention, if you focused on them, you would actually be it’s transformative.

Maria Ross  21:03

Yeah. Okay, let’s shift gears a little bit. Because again, something related to our work and your own experiences running a company with other women is the the models of female friendship are presented in lasso. And you’ve heard me probably in the past, go on my rant about reality TV, not competition, reality TV, but like Real Housewives, all of these depictions of women being horrible to each other. Yeah, it drives me up a tree, because those are not things I want my nine year old boy to see. Because no women I know, act that way. Right? And so this idea of Rebecca and Keeley and their friendship and sort of these two, what seemed like polar opposites in the first season, until they both evolved a little bit, how they became friends, and also how Rebecca became Kelly’s mentor. Yeah, and mentor in a way that even at that point, I think it was season two, when she basically told Keeley to go to leave the job and go start her own company. That was, it was so moving, and so wonderful. And those are the friendships that I feel like many professional women have in real life. They’re just not depicted on screen.

Elisa Camahort Page  22:16

It was what are your thoughts on that? It was maybe my favorite part of season one was their relationship because it was born out of conflict, right. Keeley finds out that Rebecca was behind those pictures of her and Ted and she comes and instead of sitting on it and stewing on it, and then doing a bunch of passive aggressive stuff. And instead of it being a soap opera, where it just takes weeks for the truth to come out, she goes to her office to confront her, and then Rebecca, instead of reacting defensively aggressively, she apologizes. And they make up, they resolve their differences. And they build a friendship from there. And I thought that was just a beautiful depiction of for any gender, you know, the value of having the tough conversations, ringing them up early and often so that you’re not taken by surprise, moaning, you know, resisting the urge to resist owning what you’ve done. And that the I always say like, apologize if you have something to apologize for. Sometimes women get told, we say we’re sorry, too much. I’m like, okay, yes, maybe we say we’re sorry, too much. But sometimes you need to, yes, sometimes you need to sometimes if you’re sorry, I did a tic toc video about this earlier this year. If you’re sorry, it’s okay to say you’re sorry. Just make sure you’re actually sorry for something ran twice in season one, Rebecca, and Keeley. And then at the end, Rebecca and Ted, she has to apologize. She has to just own it, give a real apology, that shows she knows what she’s done and what she’s going to do to make it better. And in both cases, she has to take action to make it better, to make sure she’s not in that position again. So there’s this this amazing model of that and then their friendship was super fun, but also, like you said super much more relatable to me to the kind of friendship I have with women lately, and and so, so much about this is you know, people talk about women supporting women and, of course, you know, people often bring up like, if they’ve had one bad woman boss, then all of a sudden it’s like that’s working for women. And I’m like, No, you know, individual women can be jerks. Like no dial.

Maria Ross  24:25

It’s even an asshole is not gender specific. Right. Right.

Elisa Camahort Page  24:30

But but I really liked that you bring up assholes. I really feel like Ted Lascaux did a great job of saying why you don’t want to accommodate asshole geniuses. Why it’s never a really the thing that’s gonna make you succeed.

Maria Ross  24:41

Right? Well, and also just follow that thread a little bit. Why they didn’t give up on Jamie, who could have been written off as the asshole genius. And they worked on him, I guess in a way the mentorship what they realized he was missing was the mentorship and the support, so they took the time to actually see him and not just make a blanket assumption about, he’s just an asshole athlete,

Elisa Camahort Page  25:09

right? Even though he’s a star. And they they deflated his balloon a little bit, because that’s what he needed. You know, his ego needed to be taken down a few pegs, but they could have just written him off. And they die. He his character had a beautiful arc. Amazing. Roy’s arc was I think, less extreme. Like he just had to, like chip away a little bit like at the end when he wants to join the Diamond Dogs that’s like, oh, that’s the big vulnerable moment. But yeah, delta delta between ROI in the beginning and ROI at the end, is really not that wide, and just had to chip away a little bit open up a little bit. Yeah, Jamie had this transformation where he was really a deck in the beginning. And then he was kind of a hero of the third season. And I just thought that was beautifully done. And something you also don’t see all the time. Just like with the female friendship, you don’t always see well, how do you? How do you move beyond toxic masculinity? How do people like leave that behind to become better men? And I think we sort of swing behind this between this people saying everything is the fault of toxic masculinity without necessarily having solutions for it. More people who are like, that doesn’t exist in men are, you know, who are still mired really in patriarchal perspectives on gender? And like, what’s in between, like, how do you actually move someone forward?

Maria Ross  26:33

And how do many men actually relate to each other? You know, it isn’t it isn’t those polar opposites. And that’s why, you know, for folks listening that might not know exactly what we’re talking about. The Diamond Dogs were the group of men that led by Ted and beard and Leslie, Leslie Higgins. And it was their sort of support group, they could call a meeting of the Diamond Dogs, if one of the guys needed to talk about something like talk about a breakup or talk about a difficult decision they made. And it was hilarious. It was you know, them all going to like Ryan VI in the group of the Diamond Dogs, but and how, you know, Roy represented the looking at that from the outside in and going this is weird and uncomfortable. And I don’t know what the heck you guys are doing, and then ultimately, realizing the benefit of it. Yeah, and getting involved himself, even if it was a little tentative, and a little, like, I’m not really sure how this works, but I’m gonna I’m gonna go with it. And one of the most poignant things for me, was when Nate went to work for Rupert, and tried to recreate the Diamond Dogs with the males on the staff there, and it just didn’t fly, because they were all working in such a toxic environment. Yeah, they were they were too busy trying to save their own skin. Yeah. And present themselves in a certain way. And there was no, there was no room for vulnerability there. And you could tell it was just so poignant. You could tell that’s what Nate needed. And that’s what he missed. And he finally realized, sort of the secret sauce of what Ted had provided over at Richmond. And I just, I thought that was so I really felt for him, even though I was so mad at that character for so long. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, Oh, okay. He’s, he’s suffering from the decisions he’s made.

Elisa Camahort Page  28:11

I think they were also really great at not, everything wasn’t so wrapped up in a little bow. You know, at the end, Jamie and Roy, despite all the evolution they’ve had, they end up in a bar fighting over Kili. And acting like she’s a piece of property, they can fight over and go to her house and say, Well, you have to choose what I loved is that she was like, You both need to leave now. Right? I’d already to choose.

Maria Ross  28:35

I do love that her first response was like, oh, oh, I get to choose who I’m with, like this very sarcastic, like, Oh, that’s amazing that you’re giving me that opportunity. And then the next one is me the door. Yeah.

Elisa Camahort Page  28:47

You know, and also with Ted, I think the whole season three. So here’s now we could talk a little bit about the future. I think they’re going to do is show like the Richmond way or something. And it’s going to carry on with these characters. And I think they were teasing. They were kind of preparing you. So I always think about that song and Hamilton of the George Washington sings teach them how to say goodbye. Thanks. Season three was all about teaching us how to say goodbye to Ted the character and care about the the ripple effects of the last away becoming the Richmond way being as he really wasn’t in it as much in season three, and there wasn’t as much magical Ted and fixing people it was much more about them fixing each other Roy helping Jamie T. Lee and Rebecca like there was much more of that. And at the end, you know, they don’t they don’t give you a necessarily all tied up in a bow ending for Ted, but he has gone home. And I think a lot of people were expecting either he and Rebecca would get together which I never saw. I also liked the fact that there were male female friendships in this yes, that weren’t 100 NEXT LEVEL attraction or romance? Yeah. Or they thought I thought they were I thought they were teasing to him getting back together with his wife. If, but there that may still occur. Well,

Maria Ross  30:04

I have a question for you on that last scene when he’s he’s meeting his son, he goes home, he’s meeting his son at the door. Was he going home to his wife there and son? Or was he just was going to their son?

Elisa Camahort Page  30:18

Yeah, they’re home. I don’t know if it was his,

Maria Ross  30:20

there were so many little moments when the wife and her new boyfriend, their old marriage counselor, were in London. Totally unethical. They’re in London, and you can still see the spark. She’s still laughing at his jokes. She’s still like, enjoying his company and the other boyfriends not necessarily shown in a very complimentary light and a few of those situations. That’s where I started thinking like, Oh, yes,

Elisa Camahort Page  30:42

I did to understand his honor. It was it was extremely subtle work about what was different about Ted, that the wife could maybe that you could envision that the wife would want to be with him again. And I think it’s about him finding his vulnerability, him not having to plaster, a smile and a joke on everything. Him being the way he confronted his mother, who by the way, I did summer stock theater with Becky and Baker who played his mother back in 1985. So I just got nominated for an Emmy for this. And I Oh, my gosh, oh, so I feel connected even more to that. The way he confronted his mother the way he was able to not always have be ready with a joke and an old saying, you know, that there was a real human under there who was actually more authentic. And yet still funny. Still, you know, still all the things you love that Yeah, but but but a more well rounded, authentic character. Well, that was brought us along.

Maria Ross  31:42

That was the whole other theme, as is really confronting mental health as a whole was at the second season when he was seeing the psychologist.

Elisa Camahort Page  31:51

Yeah, he started he had panic attacks and the first season right, the second season, they brought in Sarah Niles as the sports psychologist. Yes.

Maria Ross  31:58

And that was a whole exploration of it’s okay to get help. It’s okay to not be okay. As a man in professional sports, and the fact that that was the team, psychologist, and other members of the team, were leveraging that resource and going to her. And there was actually a brief moment. I don’t know if that happened for you, where I thought maybe he was going to end up with a therapist, again, totally unethical, but there was sort of a chemistry between them. Yeah, I didn’t know what was gonna happen there. She was a hard nut to crack.

Elisa Camahort Page  32:30

I think that we’re trained to look for the romantic outcome. We’re just trained. So yeah, I did feel that at one point to maybe that will maybe when he got her up, she got the concussion. And yes, he had to take care of her. Yeah, take care, you know. So I don’t think it’s unusual that we end up having all of these kinds of shipping, as they call it in the, in the pop culture with all these characters, you know, so I’m shipping Colin and Trent from training grim, you know, because I’m just trained to ship people. Right. Seemed like Colin had a very nice boyfriend. And so, yeah, the thing about it also is, I think it’s, it’s great to show this resistance, because a lot of people are resistance to therapy, and a lot of men a lot of everybody. And I think that was a pretty realistic portrayal of why it’s so uncomfortable and why people are super resistant and, and yet that it can help and make a difference than just change your perspective.

Maria Ross  33:26

Well, and going under the surface on that, too, what was revealed through that was Ted’s, you know, Ted being this great guy with this big heart, treating his team, almost like a father figure, being a mentor to all these people, and then to find out his painful story, with his father passing away and leaving, and it was just, it was very eye opening. Again, it’s one of those things, you know, we say it over and over again. You never know what’s going on for people. Yeah.

Elisa Camahort Page  33:53

But it’s a fascinating thing that he came overseas away from his own son, yes, was probably afraid of damaging in some way in order to be a father figure to two dozen strangers. Yep. And that was a really interesting when you thought about it, you’re like, what? Wow. And that’s what his mother kind of came over to be like, hey, snap out of it. You know, your son needs you, right? You’re delving all these dies? But what about your own kid who was getting in trouble, and was having his own kind of acting out? And I thought that there were so many layers of nuance to what they did, which is why I admired it as a show. You’re on the surface, there was the super warm fuzzy on the surface, there was so much to love, but underneath they were really tackling the complexity of human nature, and how a thing is as what it seems, and we don’t know what’s behind everybody’s, you know, behavior and that grace and curiosity and all of those things will serve us and really, that all comes back to empathy right now, and and I think it just did that in such it. It did it Such a great way it taught us but in a really unprepared he

Maria Ross  35:04

yes that, uh, when funny, light hearted way. Let’s talk a little bit about Nate and his arc because I know you have you have thoughts on that. And I have to say one of the things, yes, it was very clear he was damaged and insecure. And even when given the opportunity, even when being mentored, even when being encouraged and supported, he betrayed Ted and the team. And I’m wondering, I’ve had this conversation with my husband a while, like, why, like when he was finally getting treated, I didn’t understand they were listening to his ideas, they were putting his plays into action. What’s your theory on what, what made that break for him, we understand it,

Elisa Camahort Page  35:50

I read a whole thing. I read something from the actor. And then I read a someone who pulled all the moments, the actor referenced a bunch of moments that he used in his process, and then some somewhere kind of pulled together a kind of sequence. And then I watched Season Two again. And for me, I was like, That is insufficient to explain your behavior, young man. But I could, what they tried to do was say that, hey, he has this totally withholding father. And all of a sudden, he finds the person who is going to be the loving Father who encourages him and supports him, but he has to share him with two dozen other guys and the staff. He has to share him with everybody. And so let’s see, he constantly notice the lack, not the abundance. He was scarcity mindset, like, oh, you you said this to me. But then you didn’t notice when I did this, or you didn’t comment on this, you didn’t give me praise for that. And you’re giving this praise to Jamie and that praise to Roy and this phrase to, you know, whoever, so he was always noticing the scarcity, not abundance. So he crafted a story in his head that, that the guy he thought was going to be his dad, you know, was really just like his dad, and didn’t care that much about him didn’t prioritize him didn’t put Him first. Like he didn’t see the picture of himself that he had them together that he’d given Ted. He never knew Ted had it at his home next to a picture of his son. And so not only did he have a mindset of scarcity, he felt constrained to ask for what he wanted to ask questions about what he wondered about, he just bottled it all up. So the opposite of Qilian, Rebecca, having things out and dealing with things in a healthy way, meat just bottles it up and holds on to it and just he writes us like Brene Brown would say he tells us himself the story about what’s happening. And and he sees opportunity and he has manipulated it. He’s looking for his next father figure manipulates him and he falls for the manipulate right. And so I still think that they took that they took him back without really hashing that out was crazy to me. And I’m like, and they didn’t show us that scene either. And but

Maria Ross  38:00

but we did learn more about the relationship between beard and lasso frown variants,

Elisa Camahort Page  38:07

which was like a shocker of you that was a highly impactful scene, right where

Maria Ross  38:12

Ted, you know, Ted reminds beard that hey, I gave you a second chance. Yeah, you need to give Nate a second chance. And that’s what that’s what we do. Right. But getting back to the Star Wars references, which I didn’t catch right away, but my husband was all over.

Elisa Camahort Page  38:26

You’re gonna educate me here because I’m not all I mean, I know that Darth Vader like Rupert is Darth Vader. Rupert is Darth Vader. He’s

Maria Ross  38:33

got the black robes. He’s walking like Darth Vader. But in the scene where it’s revealed, I think it was was it the end of season two that Nate left for Rupert’s team or was it the end of season one?

Elisa Camahort Page  38:43

The end of season two?

Maria Ross  38:44

The end of season two when the the camera closes in on their team practicing on Rupert’s team practicing. Yeah, all the players are in white. Like Stormtroopers. Oh, we don’t know. It’s Nate. But he’s standing there with his arms behind him and his hair. Did you notice his hair was getting gray. And that was happening? offseason? It was but I think that was a nod. I’m gonna get this wrong and someone’s gonna fact check me on this but I think it was Anakin Skywalkers hair started turning Great. Somebody started turning gray when they started turning evil. The Star Wars universe. And like, every time something like that happened, Paul would be all over it. He’d be like up. There’s another one up. There’s another one. But there was a whole thing where I was like, this is very dramatic. He’s like, it’s supposed to be there. The stormtroopers he’s like, learning from the Emperor like he’s the young Darth Vader you take out on his Anakin? Yeah, he’s Anakin Skywalker. And yeah, that was that and that was very intentional on the part of Bill Lawrence, the career Oh, so

Elisa Camahort Page  39:44

lots of musical theater references a child loved. Oh, yeah, of course. We love that. And lots of easter eggs. These are three was full of callbacks, season one and two. Yeah, the callbacks, and that’s what builds cult following some pop culture in my opinion is winter sand service. Things you We’ll catch because you’re a loyal fan and it makes you feel appreciated. You’re in the know. Yeah. Like I’m in the know I recognize that guy with a C from episode one season one, write your report in the airplane. Like I recognize his back and that means I’m a fan and now they’re recognizing I’m a fan.

Maria Ross  40:17

Okay, before we wrap up I real quick want to talk about beard because I loved that the show had latitude to take some of these tangents and some of the episodes and other

Elisa Camahort Page  40:26

time loved his episode when he wore the psychedelic pants. And yeah, when he

Maria Ross  40:30

was this whole was his what is it? Was it his day out in Amsterdam, or his night out in Amsterdam? I can’t remember what

Elisa Camahort Page  40:36

city they wrote. I mean, there. There wasn’t another episode in Season Two. That was a different one. Yeah, yes. But also, yes, he did.

Maria Ross  40:42

But there’s been a few shows that we have watched on the various streaming networks where you can tell it’s like they have just trust the network has just trusted the creators so much. Yeah, they’re gonna let them go off on this tangent. And I felt like the beard episode was that Yeah, so what do you think was the significance of the beard episode other than character development? How did you explain it briefly, for people that might not recall what we’re talking about?

Elisa Camahort Page  41:07

Well, there was an episode where he was trying to connect with his girlfriend, they were in a fight. And he ends up it’s like, if you ever saw the movie after hours, where it just, you know, he just runs into obstacle after obstacle before finally finding her and at the end, he’s dressed in this weird outfit. He’s in this weird club, but he starts dancing and you’ve never seen beard, let go physically, let alone emotionally and he starts dancing. And it’s just this incredible catharsis, really. And I, first of all, I think it was just reinforcing there’s more to people than you ever know. And that, you know, and that if you stick with something, let yourself be vulnerable encounter, try to work your way through the challenges. There’s freedom in allowing yourself to do that. He seems so free. Yeah, I have whole a whole thing about like, his girlfriend’s seemed really controlling and weird. And like that, that being part of the happy ending that he marries the weird controlling girlfriend. I’m not so sure.

Maria Ross  42:05

I know. I wasn’t loving that. Yeah. Kind of went with

Elisa Camahort Page  42:09

the whole Jamie and Roy regressing in the last, you know, couple episodes. You know, like, everything isn’t always just forward, right forward. There’s sometimes there’s a backlash. So

Maria Ross  42:19

yeah, yeah. And so you predict that they’re going to maybe do some sort of a spin off of the regimen. heritors, the Richmond array

Elisa Camahort Page  42:26

rang book titled actually,

Maria Ross  42:29

I think we didn’t even go into Trent Graham and his whole arc, but that was amazing as well. So I got four minutes. Yeah, no, no worries. So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and digging into this with me, this was so fun.

Elisa Camahort Page  42:44

I was super excited to do it. I could talk about it all day. And

Maria Ross  42:49

thank you everyone for listening to this very special episode of the empathy edge. If you like what you heard, please rate and review and follow me on your podcast player of choice. And until next time, 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.

Leading with your heart might be a scary phrase to some old-school leaders out there. But my guest today knows a thing or two about leading a fast-paced, successful company – without sacrificing human connection.

Claude Silver believes showing up with heart and humanity is the key to unlocking greatness in people. Today, she shares her incredible personal story, what a Chief Heart Officer does, how it differs from HR, how empathy has fueled Vayner Media’s growth, and their value of kind candor, as opposed to radical candor. We debunk myths and fears many leaders have about empathy at work, and she shares so many examples of how Vayner Media walks its talk in being a people-first organization while still holding everyone accountable and achieving success.

To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.

Key Takeaways:

• The old models of command and control leadership are not going to take you into the future, they will not attract top talent, and the companies will be gone in less than 20 years if they aren’t willing to evolve.
• Empathy doesn’t just roll downhill from leaders to staff, it needs to roll up hill to so that we’re partnering, no matter what our level, but also we’re accountable, no matter what our level.
• You are a giant. Create your mission statement, your northstar statement, that will help you to understand what your purpose is every single day, not only when you have time to do it.
• You were hired for a reason – amplify your skills and your strengths. You are not anyone else around you, you have your own light to shine and your own greatness to bring to your organization at whatever level you are at right now.

“People are not assets, people are your company. Heart is the central operating system of any human being and human beings right now, and probably tomorrow, are the central operating system of your company and culture.” —  Claude Silver

About Claude Silver: Chief Heart Officer, Vayner Media

Claude Silver believes showing up with heart and humanity is the key to unlocking greatness in people. As the world’s first Chief Heart Officer at Vayner Media, she sees it as her job to infuse empathy into every aspect of the organization. As a speaker, podcaster, and LinkedIn influencer, she’s now inspiring other leaders to do the same.

At a young age, Claude was repeatedly told she thinks too much with her heart — something she has now learned is her superpower. As a non-traditional learner, she left college after two years and had an epiphany while on a 93-Day Outward Bound trek: it was up to her to change the narrative of her life, and in order to do so, she had to change her thinking. This power has evolved into what Claude calls “Emotional Optimism”: a concept that is key to her Heart-First leadership style.

With Claude as Chief Heart Officer, Vayner has grown from a team of 400 to a Global team of 2000. She has proven that empathy plays a role in fueling growth and does everything she can to make each and every human feel safe, seen, valued, and included. This involves taking a hard look at how leadership is showing up, identifying cynicism and toxicity, and taking the crucial steps to flush it out.

Claude’s success coaching and leading people and guiding client relationships come from a mantra that she teaches to everyone she crosses paths with: “Be someone people want in the room”.

Connect with Claude Silver:

Website: http://www.claudesilver.com

VaynerMedia: http://www.VaynerMedia.com

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

Instagram: https://instagram.com/claudesilver

Don’t forget to download your free guide! Discover The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Connect with Maria:

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

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. Lead leading with your heart might be a scary phrase to some old school learners out there, but my guest today knows a thing or two about leading a fast paced, successful company without sacrificing human connection. Claude silver believes showing up with heart and humanity is the key to unlocking greatness and people as the world’s first Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia. Working alongside influencer marketer and best selling author Gary Vaynerchuk. She coaches inspires and empowers everyone to uphold the culture of connection and empathy that Gary has built as a speaker podcaster and LinkedIn influencer, she’s now inspiring other leaders to do the same. With Claude as Chief Heart Officer Vayner has grown from a team of 400 to a global team of 2000. She’s proven that empathy plays a role in fueling growth, and does everything she can to make each and every human feels safe seen, valued and included. This involves taking a hard look at how leadership is showing up identifying cynicism and toxicity and taking the crucial steps to flush it out. At a young age Claude was repeatedly told she thinks too much with her heart, something she’s now learned is her superpower. As a non traditional learner. She left college after two years and had an epiphany while on a 93 day Outward Bound track, it was up to her to change the narrative of her life. And in order to do so she had to change her thinking this power has evolved into what Claude calls emotional optimism a concept that is key to our heart first leadership style. Today Claude shares her incredible personal story what a Chief Heart Officer does, how it differs from HR how empathy has fueled VaynerMedia is growth and their value of kind candor as opposed to radical candor, we debunk myths and fears many leaders have about empathy at work, and she shares so many examples of how VaynerMedia walks its talk and being a people first organization while still holding everyone accountable and achieving success. This was such an enlightening conversation. Take a listen.

Claude Silver  03:40

Hello, Claude silver Chief Heart Officer of VaynerMedia I am so happy we are finally having this conversation. Thank you so much for your patience. I’m delighted and honored to be here. We are speaking to each other from opposite coasts, which I always love. Let’s hear a little bit about you know, we heard your bio prior to us queuing up this interview. But tell us a little bit about your story and your epiphanies in your career just briefly, and then let’s get to what the heck a Chief Heart Officer actually does, because I think your story is important talking to how you got to that role. So tell us how it all came to be. Okay, great. Well, what I will say is I was a very poor student and because I was a very poor student, that’s probably the first time the first topic I guess, where I didn’t feel like I belonged. I was a great athlete, friend. My parents have degrees up the wazoo. My brother has my brother’s younger than me, but he now has degrees up the up the wazoo. And I was wildly dyslexic. My mom at the time was a elementary school teacher. So she figured that out it all those tests, whatnot. Now she’s a family therapist, social worker, but I’ve really struggled in school to just fit the pieces together. The things I could remember song lyrics, the things I could remember or poetry, the things I could remember were things that really spoke to me, right. But at the end of the day algebra didn’t speak to me. So taking that three times on time, taking the SATs three times on time does well, and I just had this I just felt like I had this missing chap, all throughout Junior High in high school, even though I was the captain of the tennis team, or the president of the student, class Council, whatever, I just didn’t feel whole, quite frankly. And I spent some of my adolescence and early 20s trying to fill up those holes in the ways that we do it with substances with relationships, and so forth and so on. Until I took myself out of college. When I was at my sophomore year, I was going nowhere fast I was making bad decisions with with bad boys and bad drugs. And I told my parents that I needed to find the longest wilderness course I possibly could, because I needed to get my ass kicked, quote, unquote, and be careful what you wish for I found a 93 day wilderness Outward Bound course, that took place in start in the Colorado Rockies, then went into the canyon lands and Grand Canyon and Joshua Tree. And off I went and I was the only young woman with nine young men, we were all 1819 20 years old, carrying 80 pounds on our back. And the first day, I literally just wanted to break my leg, I was breaking my ankle would break we were it was snowing, we were climbing traversing up these mountains, you know, 13,001 mountains. And I was so unprepared. And I was at the bottom. And the story is actually very significant for me. I was at the bottom of the trail all the guys were in front of me. And I was crying and it was snowing. And it just stank, right? Even though I asked for this, this was day one. And the instructor came all the way down, down. I had a female instructor for this time. And she said to me, what is going on in your head. And I said to her, Well, I’m singing Nine Inch Nails had like a whole black is your soul, I’d rather die than give you control. And she says to me, you better get another song in your head. And that was the first time ever it clicked that I can change the story up here. I can change the narrative. I don’t have to be the dumb dyslexic. I don’t have to, you know, I don’t have to be that person. I don’t have to be that person that’s into drugs. I don’t have to tell myself the stories or sing those songs. And so that I will say 93 days later, I came out a very different person. That was when I first learned the term servant leadership. And I wanted to be a servant leader. That’s what I knew I no longer use the word serve and use the word empathetic or heart based. That’s what I came out knowing I came out really like getting in touch with who I am my strengths, my superpowers and the fact like I’m a feeler, that’s who I am. And that’s okay, more than okay, so what I’ll say is I eventually went back to school, studied a lot of psychology and human development and everything I could possibly get my hands on in terms of spirituality and growth and development, and clarify buoyancy and all of that stuff. And then I was in San Francisco, right place, right time. 1990 eight.com. Boom, the first one. And there I went, I found my first internet, internet. I was here then too. So I’m assuming I see where this is going. Yeah. So off I went. And the rest is really history. When I say I’ve only worked in digital companies. I’ve only worked at advertising companies, you knowing San Francisco at that time that was ripe for innovation and creativity in the wild, wild west. And I was part of that, which was incredible, especially someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do. It didn’t have options necessarily. I just kept on going to where the job was. So one thing led to another. I had an incredible career as a strategist. I moved from San Francisco to London, I was moved for a role right before I turned 40. And my whole world kind of opened up in a new place, learning new things about myself. It didn’t have people to hang on to I didn’t have kind of old stories and beliefs and and I and I had a wonderful time in London and had a really, really successful career. And I met Gary Vaynerchuk and I met him in August of 2013. We hit it off. We had a three minute conversation on the phone. I came to New York in September of 2013. And we had a great meeting of the heart over a coffee and a grapefruit at a coffee shop on 70 up in Lexington. And the rest was history. I left that meeting, saying to my best friend, I know I need to work with this guy. And I have a feeling he needs to work with me. And so I joined VaynerMedia nine years ago, which is my longest relationship and certainly my longest job and

10:00

I started, let’s see, I was it was May of 2014, I was one of the three or four oldest people, a woman in a fairly kind of machismo boys club at that time, it was amazing. Off I went, and I was his first senior vice president that he hired. And I’m almost gonna get to the point where we got Chief Heart Officer, but I’m gonna stop in a second, I ran our largest account. And while I was running that large account, I kind of had a team of 60 people, and really just was, we were teaching each other liberal arts, I would have them read poetry, I would have them bring in Jim Morrison poetry. And we would digest that rather than going through kind of like the campaign we just launched. And Gary started to have me go to the other offices. And I said to him, hey, super cool, love to go to San Francisco. I’m happy to go to London. But you know, my work is over here in New Jersey. And he said, just go to that thing that you do, the thing that you do. And that was it. Bingo. He saw, he saw me not for the strategy or the client schmoozing. And all that stuff. He saw the superpower of being able to change narratives, being empathetic, having a big heart caring, having a group of 60 people, and literally just having a good time making them feel good. And one thing led to another and I actually decided to quit, because I didn’t want to do advertising anymore. All I wanted to do was be with people. So I went to him. Thank you so much. This is the best place ever love it here. You’re the best. I no longer want to do advertising. I just don’t care. And he said, What do you want to do? And I said, I only care about the people here. I only care about the heartbeat. And that’s where I’ll stop. Because then we created the role. Chief Heart. Yeah, oh my God, that’s like, long, that was much longer than you wanted me to go on, but meandered about meandered. I don’t have a linear Yeah, career journey at all. So there’s so much in there to unpack for a second, because first of all, I’m sending my nine year old an outward bound when he is old enough to go because that sounds amazing. And he I think he needs it. But also the fact that you finally embraced a model of leadership that was heart LED. And I think we’re in a time where these discussions are starting to happen. I do keynotes, I do leadership trainings, and I’m being brought in to talk about empathy. And like you, my background is marketing and brand strategy, I came to this empathy, work through connecting and engaging through marketing with people as human seeing their humanity, and having that be effective. And then building that out now into researching my first book, and now on my second book, which is about how to be an empathetic leader without losing yourself in the process, because that’s the struggle now, now that there’s enough converts out there to what you got converted to, and really not converted to you actually just uncovered and unearthed what was already inside of you. And understood that that was a superpower for business success for leadership success and for unleashing potential in people. And that’s where all of us, I call all of us empathy warriors, we’ve got to keep banging the drum for the skeptics to say, Hey, this is a bottom line benefit to your business to operate in this way. And the old models are dying, the old models of command and control and Work is work. And it’s nothing personal and all this crap, we’ve been fed our whole careers, it’s not going to take you into future success. And I even with the book that I wrote, one of the generational experts I spoke to went so far as to say the companies that have those cultures are going to be dead in 10 to 20 years, they’re not going to be able to attract top talent. So I love that you found this place and you carved out this role. And tell us a little bit more about what you do in that role as Chief Heart Officer and what how that differs from I assume you have a head of HR, maybe you don’t, I don’t know. But how does that differ from a classical HR role? Yeah, first, just to echo what you said. I mean, those leaders in those corporations are going to be our care very, very soon. And Gen Z is here. And they’re proud. And they’re feelers, and we’re all going to be working for them very soon, which is a great thing. So when Gary said, you’re going to be Chief Heart Officer, cool. I knew what that was. It made sense to me in my soul. And I said a couple of things. One, I’ve already been at this company for 16 months, what are we doing? What are we building? And he said, we’re building the single greatest human organization in the history of time, wonderfully aspirational. And that is our vision still today. That’s great. Okay, I need to know that too. What is success look like for me? How do we know if I’m successful? I’ve never done HR, I never wanted to do HR. He said you will touch an impact every single employee and fill the agency with empathy. So we were 310 people then or 2000 across the globe. Many many companies under

Claude Silver  15:00

Have the umbrella of Vayner x. And so the first thing I did first things I did one, I could not step into an HR role, because I never did HR that would be out of integrity, and I don’t believe in HR. So I changed the department name to people and experience to, I changed the way we hired from culture fit, which we had been doing, which is how we grew very quickly to skill set fit and culture edition. And that allowed us to start to look in different places for people. And that allowed us to diversify the floor, which was very important for me walking, three, I removed the need for college education. These are all things I did within the first month that was like, boom, boom, boom, why? Because it’s college isn’t for everyone. And you’re looking at someone who struggled through my first rendition with college, I mean, so, which is fantastic. And we now have an incredible residency program where we bring people in at 17 a team. And that’s fantastic. And then I really had to work on scale. So to touch every single human being means high touch means I need to be available and accessible consistently. And so I have what I call 15 minute meetings, and I’m able to get a lot out in 15 minutes, people come to me i proactively go to them, we do now have someone that oversees the people and experience department, it’s not me, my job is literally to, to mirror Gary, in those rooms. And wherever I go is to really help someone feel safe and seen and that they matter. And then north really helped them get out of their own way so they can thrive so they can soar. Right. And you know, I’m sitting here in my office here, I don’t have an any desk in the office, I never wanted a separation. You know, I wanted to be a psychotherapist when I grew up. And then I figured there were other ways to be of service. And I found a wonderful way where I can be here in the great thing is that I have all that business acumen I’ve worked for 20 years on the floor. I know what a p&l is. I know when we work with p&g, one of the things they’re going to talk about is efficacy and peace of mind. You know, I know these things I can help people out. So my job is really to put their hearts in the center of my heart, and to hold space to create and hold space with them. Learning and Development, recruiting, retention, scaling, whatever it is, we’ll build it, and it will dot line to me, right? So I love that you had discrete things, concrete things that you wanted to accomplish when you first came into this role. You mentioned earlier that Gary especially has a value of empathy. I’ve heard him speak about that. How does that show up? How does that value of empathy or being able to strengthen your empathy? Can you give us some examples of how that shows up in the business? One or two just notes in terms of how meetings are run, or how you work with clients or dealing with folks that are having difficult circumstances? Give us some examples about how that value shows up in practicality, because especially in my work, what we’re talking about, we want to be an empathetic organization or brand. Great. What does that actually mean? How are you walking your talk? And so I always want to get to what are the actions and the behaviors that happen at VaynerMedia. So you all know you’re going in the right direction, and you’re continuing to maintain that value that’s so important to Gary and the entire executive team of empathy. I mean, it’s who we are, we call our culture the Honey Empire. It’s not the empire of honey is 51%, honey 49% Empire. 51% is how we treat people, how we show up in rooms, how we make people feel, this is what it’s all about. This is it. This is the Alpha and the Omega, removing fear and cynicism and confronting that with a kind in a kind way. We are rooted in kindness and compassion. Empathy is an emotion, the way that comes out is the kindness and compassion. Which Yeah, yeah, we learn when we’re two years old, three years old, basically, right? It just gets there we go. We forget about it. And we stop being you know, are these imaginative mystical beings that we are as children and start to live this very linear, I have to follow the rules. And there are no rules we trust first, how does that show up? Every single person that comes in here, every single one, you can be a CFO, you could be a copywriter, we all have you in one orientation, which we run every two weeks. And in that orientation, they are sitting down with subject matter experts, three days, subject matter experts, they’re sitting down with me, they’re going through our culture, why we think the way we do, how we think the way we do, why, how this organization was built, it’s, you know, we’re built from an entrepreneurial mindset. We’re built from a disrupter mindset. We’re not built from an agency guy. We’ve just so wonderful. We put ourselves first our consumers Second, our clients third, how does that show up? We really do our best to hold people account trouble for themselves, their team, and then the work to be done the job to be done, which is reaching those consumers with videos, which is what we do. Removing fear is not hard, if you know where to look and you know how to do it. Providing psychological safety is not hard if you know how to do that to yourself. And so we teach a lot of these, what is called soft skills can stem that word, universal skills, human skill, a long human skills, we have vast trainings on how to give feedback, how to get feedback in a very kind and clear, specific actionable way. We have manager training up the wazoo one on 1102103. And you learn how to walk in this world how to walk in this agency, and I truly believe that has an incredible knock on effect to how you are in the world, I really believe we are teaching hard and universal human skills here. And this is so interesting. And this is what I knew would happen is we’re going to go into all these topics because I couldn’t wait to get my hands on you. With the book I’m working on right now I’m talking about the pillars of being an effective empathetic leader, as I mentioned, while still expecting excellence, while still setting boundaries, and while still avoiding burnout. And one of the pillars is this idea of self awareness. And across all of this, though, is this idea of accountability that you can have empathy and accountability can coexist. So what does that look like for folks listening that are like, how do I tie those things together? In my culture? Is there a specific way that you tie that together? Is it through rewards and recognition? Is it through performance evaluations? Is it through peer nominated recognition? How do you actually tie the empathy and the accountability together? Or the compassion, heart led leadership and the accountability together in your organization? Can you give us some examples? First and foremost, it’s everything that you said. And it’s well being concentrating on that it’s making sure that we’re providing people in a very holistic way. With wellness programs, it’s making sure that we are leaning in on creating an inclusive place inclusive, yes, religion and race and ethnicity and seen and unseen disabilities, we have the CR G’s learning resource groups, which are for people that identify as LGBTQIA plus, or allies as Latina, X and allies as African American or black and allies. And these are wonderful, wonderful groups that people join, because they want to be even closer to those that they identify with, which is really, really cool. And that is all over the place. That is one way that empathy and compassion come out, because we have places for people to go, that really, really want to feel like they belong, because that’s it. That’s the ball game pair. You give people psychological safety, and then you create spaces where people feel like they can belong. They don’t have to deal with a title. They don’t have to, oh, I have to be quiet, because my managers managers in the room, and oh, we know that he or she is really smart. No, anyone can talk. In fact, we have roles here that we now we have entry level roles that we have now, put on a pedestal here to be like this is the role of the work we do. They’re called post creative strategists. And at the end of someone’s signature, or asking them to also put account director, post creative strategist, it’s that important because it’s the work that we do is finding ways in through emotion through empathy, to reach our consumers. So again, the trainings that we do, I would say, our leadership team is better than it’s ever been. It’s accountable. One of the things that Gary has taught me, and I know he’s taught many, many people is what real accountability looks like. And real accountability is being the bigger person. real accountability is taking the responsibility when you know, it’s yours. Now, I’ll give you an example. When someone leaves and I read their exit interview, and they say, Jack really treated me poorly, and no one did anything about it. Well, most often, they didn’t tell anyone about it. But guess what? That is on me. I oversee every person and their experience here, the culture, and that’s on me, which then means I go and talk to my team, whoever’s covering that discipline and say, hey, my friends, when you see smoke way in the distance, because you have a spidey sense, because you’re intuitive because you’re human. And that’s what we do here. We work on intuition. You need to let me know about that smoke. And then you need to go in there with with an extinguisher way before it gets to be 10 feet away or the alarm goes off. That’s how you get rid of cynicism. And that’s how you get rid of fear. By being kind and brave. We are kind, compassionate and countable and wildly ambitious people here and that all works together. It’s called the Empire. After you put the people first is how to get now that it’s us first, then our consumers, then our clients that’s like funky. It’s very, very funky in today’s day and age. And when a client says to us, no, make it red or make it blue, what we say to them is, actually, we provide them with the data, and we provide them with the intel that what your consumers aren’t going to want it blue, and they still say, You know what we want it blue. And we say to them, okay, we are going to go into this with our eyes wide open, we’ve had this conversation, we want the best for you. We are in partnership with you remember, we don’t serve them, we are in partnership with them. And we’re going to go into this with our eyes wide open, which means we have accountability. And you my friend, the client have accountability, because you’ve just made the decision to go against what we know is happening out there on tick tock today. So it’s walking the walk, it’s not just talking the talk, there’s nothing hanging on these walls here in any of our offices that says, Be empathetic VaynerMedia citizen, you are kind like no, you have to act these you have to take action consistent. Is that action in evaluations is that put in meaningful examples of actions for people so they understand as they look around? I’m asking this question because one of the companies that I spoke for health care system last fall, their change management team did this amazing thing. And having a background in change management from earlier in my career, I was really impressed by this. They took their company values, which are often just a pretty poster on the wall. For a lot of organizations, they don’t actually mean anything in day to day activity, but they took their company values, and they created documentation, not a lot of documentation, very simple to say these are examples of this value in action. And as you write your reviews for people, these are the types of things you need to be looking for. So that when you evaluate them on that value or that value, there’s something concrete behind that. And I just thought, so simple. So almost so obvious, but never done in so many organizations where they just again, they just have that pretty poster on the wall. But they don’t give folks any guidance of here’s what we expect that to look like in practice, is that something at VaynerMedia that is talked about is documented is highlighted, how is that brought to bear so it’s a continuous learning cycle for people. I’m really glad you brought that up. So it took the PTT a year to create core competencies, we have just rolled them out, core competencies are both foundational how we behave and functional are skills. Foundational comes first honey comes first before the Empire. And the foundational skills are leadership communication, accountability and growth mindset. And within those four buckets, there is a this is how we expect you to act for every level, every department, and then we can do that for the functional ones. And that is in your peer review that’s in your quarterly review. That’s in your annual review. That’s everywhere. I love that because then everyone’s speaking the same language. And this is why one of the other pillars in the new book is about clarity. Because clarity is kind clarity is compassionate, because now we can understand each other and there’s no guesswork, there’s no assumption, right? So you can be responsible for your growth, I’m going to help you, I’m going to help I’m going to do everything I can can’t change your behavior, I have no control over you will give you training, we’ll give you this, you want a meditation app, we’ll give you that too. But at the end of the day, very clear. This is what you’re expected to do here. And to get that promotion right here. And so what that has done, because I have a feeling you’re going to ask me about this in a second is that has removed a big chunk of entitlement, a big chunk of coddling. And that’s huge because as a very empathetic and kind organization that can be our kryptonite, and was our kryptonite for sure for a while there when we didn’t have such structure and such rigor because we are osmosis learners here, but we’ve grown up, and now we have to hold ourselves accountable. You know, I had to go to a very, very, very senior person the other day and say, I just need to let you know that your client has come to us with this set that you said this, what do you got to say about it? Like, I’m not here to punish you. I’m just here to say like this is an issue. What happened in that meeting? When can that person rise to the challenge? I’m not here to punish I trust them. But I have proof right here in writing that there was pretty big misstep. So what are we going to do about that? And how are we going to prevent that from happening because that’s not who we are. Well, and that’s such a great example because again, talking with leaders

30:00

Many of them who think they’re challenged by empathy are actually not practicing true empathy. Because empathy actually takes a lot of strength, you have to really be well grounded in yourself to be able to see another person’s point of view without defensiveness, right. I say that all the time on the show. But this idea of, I’m empathetic, so I’m going to avoid the difficult conversation is actually not empathetic, that no cowardly, you can have the difficult conversation with empathy. This is what I’m constantly beating the drum on. And that was just such a perfect example of you can be empathetic and not run from conflict, not run from difficulty, or what I call the crunchy conversations. Yeah, we call it having kind candor, but not radical candor, kind, candor. And that’s really what works for us, because this is a community and culture rooted in kindness. It is, I mean, how many times have I, we should have a drinking game? How many times have I mentioned kindness already? In this interview, but everything that we do is rooted in Hey, I trust you first, it’s not you’re guilty, and then get out of right. It’s curious how you’re gonna? Yeah, it’s like, well, just tell me what happened there. I’m really curious what happened. And like, let’s figure out what we’re gonna do about this. Now, that kind of stuff. But we have that conversation with people that are entry level jobs all the way up to the C suite. Because why? Well, we’re human. And that’s actually an important point, too, is that it’s at every level, it goes up and down the chain, if you are thinking of a hierarchy, and that’s the thing it doesn’t, the empathy doesn’t just roll downhill from leaders to staff, it needs to roll up hill to so that we’re partnering, no matter what our level, but also we’re accountable, no matter what our level, that’s the thing. And so you know, those entry level roles and the residency I told you about, like, we’re teaching accountability, we’re teaching what it’s like to try to be the bigger person in every situation. Whereas you and I have had more reps, and we’ve had more life experience. So we know that we need to be the bigger person in every situation. And we’re going to fail sometimes, because we are not perfect. And this is not utopia. I’m glad you said that. Because the pushback from a very small chorus of people with the work that I do now. But I’m not here to teach people how to behave. I’m not here to teach people values, I’m here to get the work done. And I always say actually, your work at this is the work as a leader, this is not additional work on top of your work, this is the work. So what would you say to that line of that narrative that some people have of like, well, we just need to get shit done. And I don’t have time to teach you how to be a compassionate person. People are not assets, people are your company. I mean, people will say to me, what is heart mean? And you know, love and this it’s like, heart is the central operating system of any human being and human beings right now, and probably tomorrow, or the central operating system of your company and your cultures. This is my responses, then what are you doing here? Exactly, then go be an individual contributor someplace, my friend. But like, if you can’t get involved are you’re not going to take down your armor in today’s day and age, and you’re going to let someone be vulnerable in front of you and you’re not going to extend grace, generosity, God forbid love, then you really should go someplace else. And that’s okay. Really, it is. What else are we doing here? This is life. And we are now in a very funky time in which it’s work life. It’s live work, I don’t even know, hybrid, it’s this but the pandemic did change us. And we’re not going backwards. And like vulnerabilities cool. My friends. Brene. Brown is like very famous for a reason. Right? There’s another speaker who has a talk called vulnerability is sexy. I always liked that one. So what can you give us some examples around how this culture has fueled growth? Are there any stories you can tell or specific things you can point to? That you definitively know that this is correlated with this movement within the company to codify and articulate empathy and compassion as central to the business model? Sure. I mean, I’ve real life examples, because they come to me all the day all day long. So we had a SVP who really was looking forward to a raise last August didn’t get the raise, and he was told by his manager, and it was stamped by me as well, that he had these things to work on. And those things were very interpersonal, very interpersonal. And so he asked me if I could coach him and we went on this four month coaching spree where he came in, have a lot of questions, I asked people and all that kind of stuff. And what really like came to fruition was that his insecurity and his imposter syndrome is so loud that that’s all people see and hear when he walks in the room. And he didn’t understand why he wasn’t

Claude Silver  35:00

being taken seriously. But I’m funny. I like to joke around, you know, this is how I dress. And all of a sudden it’s like, Yeah, but what do you cover? And guess what? We all have limiting beliefs. All of us do. So we got into, like, why this impostor syndrome was so loud? Where had it started? It’s kind of like therapy. I’m not a therapist, by any means. And we really work together on at the end of the day, what do you want? Aside from the race? What do you want? I want my team to really value me, okay, well, let’s figure out how they’re going to do that. What are the behaviors that you are doing now, in which you feel as though contradictory to you being valued, and he had a list of those, and we would work this every week, knee, and homework, and all of this stuff. And he finally landed on who these two might be hit, he got very clear, this is a very smart person, these are the behaviors I am going to change. And these are the behaviors I’m going to go all in on. What I will say is Yesterday, we were just done a talent planning meeting where his name came up. And every person on the C suite said, if you would have asked me this question, six months ago, nine months ago, the answer’s no. What I will say is this guy has grown and evolved. And he’s really a pleasure to be around. So things like it’s just spending time with people. It’s having high touch, it’s giving a shit about people. And these are things that I believe, like I believe everyone needs to embody. But certainly leaders need to embody in today’s day and age, and so this was a period of someone that’s probably very close to my age. But the way we do this with other people with all different levels is having these conversations, which is what is that behavior that you just did, preventing you from doing when you don’t manage your time and manage your energy? Well, like, what are you left with? Yeah, I feel burned out. Okay. Well, I understand that, let’s figure out what got you to this burnout place aside from work in an advertising agency, and we move fast, it’s today. And so really talking to people about how my job is facilitate growth and change. It always has been. And if I can do that, then this person can thrive, when they can identify what is blocking them, and make a pact to really move on from that, you know, I work with people on what I would call mission statements, or Northstar statements. And first of all, they come in and we do this whole whiteboard exercise here. They might say, Yeah, I think they might come in with a mission statement already, which is, I’m really good at this one by halftime. Okay, well, when I have time is not part of your mission statement. So let’s figure out what we’re gonna do. Change that sentence or win the battle when I have time? Yeah. Because we want this to be powerful for you. Not for me, I got my mission statement. But I want you to walk away after three or four weeks of working together, and be able to put the poster right on your laptop and on your refrigerator. And wherever else you need to see it. So you can be reminded that you are a giant, my friend. I love that. Talk to me a little bit about some of the challenges that come from operating the business this way, and creating a culture, what are some places where things might have gone awry, I’m thinking especially the people listening going, ha, my company will never get to that point. My company is so soulless right now, it would feel like a Herculean effort for us to ever get to that kind of point. If they’re even going to try they need to be aware of where some of the pitfalls might be. So what are some challenges that you have one or two challenges that you have with this kind of culture? So a challenge that we may have had, if this was a different company, we had a different CEO and CFO is Yeah, but like people are here to work. Like, what are you doing there? What are you doing with these trainings? Or what are you doing? Like why do we care so much about people? Like why is it so important? You know, it’s costing us money, those types of things. What I always say to people, and I’ll get to the question, but what I say to people when they say to me, well, we don’t work for Gary Vaynerchuk now Well, I didn’t either for X amount of years, and I was still may I was still me. I was still the same person. Let me help you out camino. Yo, you want to mentor okay, I’m happy to mentor you like can I do what they want? And we talk about that within your sphere of influence? You model and then people go well, clods killing it. How is she doing that? And you give people permission to act and lead in a different way when they see it? And so that they can like shine their own light. Let’s not go back to Claude, like Claude has taken and I got my own set of issues to deal with you don’t want my Gaby Karen go be Jack OB you know, do you that’s the most important thing. Now. The reason I say to you, is because that can be a pitfall when Pete When I can remember. So I’ve been doing this role for seven years now. I would say the first two years, maybe two and a half years Gary used the word hustle. And I would have a lot of people come into this office freaking out with anxiety. I want to be just like Gary, but I can’t work 18 hours a day. I want to be just like Gary I want to hustle harder, all of the stuff that I just, I can’t work like that. And I was like, hey, no one’s asking him to do that he does it because he loves it, his work is a hobby, this is what he does. You want to go play soccer on the weekends, that’s really important for you to carve that time out. And I want to help you help empower, you have that conversation with your manager that you need to shut off at seven, or at nine or at six, whatever that is, you got to go be you. Anyway, Gary does not use the word hustle at all anymore, which is awesome. And you know, he has an enormous influence out in the world. And I’m sure that he got a lot of information on, maybe that wasn’t the best word to use for the time that we’re in. So being you not wanting to emulate, yeah, it’s great to look up to people and learn from them. But here for a reason we chose you. And so let’s figure out how to amplify all of your life skills. Remember, we hired you for skill set fit, not because you like John Mayer, and I like John Mayer to like, Okay, that’s great. That’s how people hire, they’re like, oh, yeah, I can go six hours on a Greyhound bus with this guy. It’s I don’t want to talk to anyone for six hours on a Greyhound bus, please. So, you know, I don’t want to talk to my husband for that long. Yeah, exactly. So when we were not honest with people in terms of, and we brought this up already, when we were not forthcoming with really truthful feedback. And this is what you need. Right? Now, this is a vulnerability. And this is what we need to see. And we’re going to help you get there and hear the action. When we did not do that we created entitlement. And it felt as though people could just kind of hide out do their thing. I don’t know what they were doing YouTube for 20 hours, like, because we’re not micromanagers. It’s funny, because that’s actually what led to the second book I’m working on is that I was hearing from leaders going, I’m really trying to be empathetic. But folks are actually taking advantage of my empathy now. And they’re using the words and the language back at me, you know, I’m telling them to do a spreadsheet and they’re going, I’m sorry, that doesn’t bring me joy. And now you’re disrespecting my boundaries. So I’m going to need to take a break. So things like that, and we would talk through it. That’s not actually empathy. But also that idea that I said earlier is that empathy needs to flow both ways. And so there are groups of people, that muscle has atrophied. It’s innate to all of us as human beings, but it can atrophy. And if we don’t, if we neglect it, and we don’t strengthen it on a continuous basis, even when it’s hard to even when it it hurts to strengthen it, it doesn’t mean you stop, you don’t stop working out just because your muscle feels sore, right? And you also don’t expect six pack abs the first time you go to the gym. So for some people, it is that ability to keep working at it. Okay, Curiosity is the number one trait of empathic people, right. So let me ask questions. Ooh, the first time I ask questions as a leader, when I’ve never asked anybody on my team questions before, they’re like, what’s going on? Why is he interrogating us? Why is he asking about how our weekends went? It’s gonna be weird. And so but it’s okay. It’s okay to add, it’s okay to let people know, you, as a leader are on the journey, to strengthening your empathy and to share that with them and say, Hey, I’m working on this. It’s gonna be weird for a while, but just go with me on it. Right? That we just the vulnerable conversations. Yeah, or afraid to because we’ve been taught to armor ourselves from pretty much everyone except ourselves. And this is all a journey that we’re all waking up to. And I say all that’s a generalization, but many, many, many, many, many people are waking up to the fact that work can be done differently, and from different places, that it’s okay to be vulnerable. Be courageous, it’s okay to have emotion in the workplace. What we want you to do and we will help in any way we can, is to be able to regulate your emotion. We don’t practice toxic positivity here. We practice positivity. Emotional optimism is what I call it, which is the fact that shits going to happen, clients is going to yell at you, this is going to happen your dog is going to get sick. I don’t want to work with this person, but the sky is not going to fall. And that means listen, we are all going to go through emotions. We are all going to have hard days and hard moments, but we have hope for another day the sun will shine we will reach out for support. We don’t have to suffer in silence which is a huge thing. I think we just need to have posters across the sky right now please silence and that’s a whole nother issue. But most importantly going back to down before the one you serve the nine bench now story I told you about. You can change the narrative in your head. This doesn’t this might suck right now. It’s not gonna suck forever. You might feel really dumb right now. But if you reach out to someone, I guarantee you they are going to show you all the ways in which you matter. And what you’re smart and what you’re valued all that stuff. But if you keep everything in

Maria Ross  45:00

Inside, you will burn a hole in yourself. That’s dramatic, but it’s true. I mean, it is. And I think the thing we all want to get across that are trying to talk about this shift in leadership and the shift in culture is that I always talk about it as both. And it’s not either or it’s not empathetic, or competitive, compassionate or ambitious, it’s both they can coexist. And all the things you’re talking about, you know, a skeptic listening might go and go, Oh, my gosh, it’s gonna take so much time, when am I going to actually do work. And you’re doing all this in service of the goal of the organization, which is to get work done, which is to meet KPIs, which is to crush your goals, whatever that is, you’re doing this while you’re doing all that work. It’s not either or, and by the way, it is work, and you are getting paid, and you do have benefits. And this isn’t a free for all, we is not a playground, we don’t work on a playground, we can have fun. There’s ice coffee, but there’s no Foosball or ping pong. Like we have to remember like, there is a job to be done here. Just like there are journeys for us to go on. As humans, there are journeys and jobs for us to do hear, and you are being paid to do a job. That does not mean you need to show up every day and hit homeruns. That’s impossible, right. And for leaders that fear, this blurring of emotion being brought to work, number one, hopefully we’ve learned when I when I wrote the first book, it was pre pandemic, and people didn’t get it. They didn’t understand if it was a business book or personal development book. And I was like, No, it’s a business book. But now they kind of get it because those lines are blurring. And that makes old school leaders very uncomfortable, because they have spent their careers separating emotion and, and work or ambition and compassion. Now we’re saying there’s no rules, you know, and so I have empathy for them of like, they’re like, Wait, what just happened? Like, it’s 30 years, I was operating this way. Now you’re telling me I can do this. But at the same time, it also doesn’t mean when I talk to C suite, and I say that doesn’t mean you’re crying on the floor with your employees every day, because I know that’s what you’re imagining. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Claude Silver  47:11

Might be crying, but not every day. Yeah. People take things to such extremes when they’re afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of comes to letting a person be their authentic self. Like, that’s who you hired, I hope. And if by the way, you find out that you hired Jack, you thought Jack was like this, and Jack turns out to be that well, then you’re gonna have a conversation with Jack, like, Hey, what’s up, I notice like you used to be really peppy, or you said you crush up with clients. And you’ve kind of really been not going out to see clients lately. Like, you have to feel comfortable enough to have these honest conversations, again, kind candor. And back to you what you were saying one of our things that we say all the time is yes. And and that’s the growth mindset. Yeah, yeah, sound. And because there always is an ad. And people like to think in binary terms, it’s black, or it’s white, but it is gray. So much of what we’re talking about is gray. And so much of what we’re talking about was also extremely subjective. Well, that’s why empathetic and Compassionate Leadership can look different to your point, depending on who you are. You don’t have to fake it and be overly emotional, and sappy and whatever. You know, if that’s not you, you can find a way to tap into your human emotion and compassion in whatever way is still true to who you are. As a leader. Yes. And being a leader that leads with heart. I mean, you’ve now talked to me for 45 minutes. I’m there’s nothing gooey gooey about me. This is the real for not crying. So no, it’s not about unicorns and fuzzy rainbow exactly about life, life and having the acceptance that this is about life. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. You and I have no clue what’s going to happen. In 30 days. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens. But I could talk to you for another hour, but I won’t keep you so thank you so much for your time and your insights today. We’ll have all your links in the show notes. But can you tell folks, where’s the best place to connect with you? Yep, thank you so much. Dan is awesome. My website, Claude silver.com. And you can always write me there. And I would love to hear from everyone. Awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you liked what you heard you know what to do, please rate and review and share it with a colleague or a friend. And until next time, please remember that cash flow creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind.

Maria Ross  49:50

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 booked 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.