As I love to say, empathy isn’t just a soft skill—it’s a powerful tool for strategic and creative excellence.
Joining me today is Vanya du Toit, the Associate Director for Wiedemann Lampe, a brand and business consultancy, who leads with empathy to drive brand transformation, team growth, and meaningful client partnerships.
In this episode, Vanya shares how listening—truly listening—is the foundation of successful brand strategy and how embedding empathy into both client work and internal culture unlocks innovation, better output, and stronger relationships. We discuss cultureful brands, regenerative economics, and a host of other important new concepts. We also dive into how their own agency is empathically designing their new studio space to support diverse working styles – rejecting the one-size-fits-all open office in favor of an environment where everyone can thrive.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- A brand is more than just the logo. A brand is how a customer interacts with every aspect of your company, which begins with listening and understanding.
- Listening is a key component of human respect. Listening builds trust and respect, which makes for a better relationship and better work.
- Honesty and directness are also empathy. You can have boundaries and give constructive feedback and still be empathetic. Lying is not empathetic.
“Without that internal change, you cannot manifest external change. You can’t get a team of unwilling employees to live and breathe your values and your vision and your mission.” — Vanya du Toit
Episode References:
- The Empathy Edge: Rebecca Friese: How to Build a “Good” Culture
From Our Partner:
SparkEffect partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their greatest asset: their people. Through their tailored assessments and expert coaching at every level, SparkEffect helps organizations manage change, sustain growth, and chart a path to a brighter future.
Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.
About Vanya du Toit, Associate Director, Wiedemann Lampe:
Vanya is the Associate Director for Wiedemann Lampe, a brand and business consultancy and she has over 15 years’ experience leading client relationships and project management teams in brand strategy, brand development, and brand delivery projects. Their firm creates brands that shape, unite, and inspire the world – harnessing the unifying force of brand to bring people together and inspire change from the inside out, and clients include the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, New York State Parks, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, and more. She’s responsible for all commercial and operational aspects of the business, new business strategy and conversion, and the integration of new clients into project teams, ensuring that the right focus and resource is allocated for every client.
Connect with Vanya:
Wiedemann Lampe: https://wiedemannlampe.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanya-du-toit-1068b992/
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books
Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
Threads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. As I love to say, empathy isn’t just a soft skill, it’s a powerful tool for strategic and creative excellence. Joining me today is Vanya du Toit, the Associate Director for wiederman lamp, a brand and business consultancy, and she has over 15 years experience leading client relationships and project management teams in brand strategy, brand development and brand delivery projects. Their firm creates brands that shape, unite and inspire the world. And clients include the louver Abu Dhabi Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, New York State Parks, Q Royal Botanical Gardens and more. Vanya and her agency lead with empathy to drive brand transformation, Team growth and meaningful client partnerships. In this episode, Vanya shares how listening, truly listening, is the foundation of successful brand strategy, and how embedding empathy into both client work and internal culture unlocks innovation, better output and stronger relationships. We discuss culture, full brands, regenerative economics and a host of other important new concepts. We also dive into how their own agency is empathetically designing their new studio space to support diverse working styles, rejecting the one size fits all open office in favor of an environment where everyone can thrive. If you’ve ever wondered how empathy fuels better design, clearer strategy and more connected teams, this episode is for you, take a listen. Welcome Vanya to the empathy edge podcast. I have been looking forward to this conversation with you as a fellow brand strategist, empathy advocate, all of the things I feel like our work is very closely aligned, so I’m excited for you to talk about how you bring empathy into your work for your clients from a design perspective, from a space perspective, and that ability to connect and engage with their audiences. So welcome to the show. Hi,
Vanya du Toit 02:51
Maria. Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here. Thank you. So before
Maria Ross 02:55
we kick off the conversation, as I always do, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to this work, and what are you so passionate about within this work? Okay,
Vanya du Toit 03:04
so I am. I’m from South Africa. I was born and raised in Cape Town. I studied art. I was a very artistic child, so, you know, a lot of drawing, and sort of, you know, art was my thing all through school. So I went to study art. I studied painting. And then very quickly after graduating, I realized that’s not a job, you know, unless you kind of figure a way to monetize fine art, you know, that’s not a career path for a lot of people. So I just found a job, any job, it was working for a sort of middleman agency that would do the production in between agencies and the producers, so like printers and people who make the physical manifestation of advertising lateral. And I love that job. I love learning about how to interact with people, how to deal with clients, how to get supplies to, you know, do you favors, you know, very short timelines, etc, give you the best costs, etc, which I think lay the foundations of empathy and sort of understanding how to work with people empathetically. Yes. But really, what I was interested in, and what really grabbed my attention was we would work with these very glamorous, you know, account managers and all these advertising agency executives, and I just thought, I want to be one of those guys. I don’t want to be driving in my little car off to printers, even though I really enjoyed the job, and it was a fantastic rounding in my career. I just saw this world of advertising, and I thought, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to be. So I then got married. I met my husband, who is Scottish, so we moved to London,
Maria Ross 04:25
yay. Dated the Scottish husbands. I love, yes, wonderful things.
Vanya du Toit 04:29
Great accent. And I use that as an opportunity, really, to get into that world in London, you know, just making that jump from the job I had, which wasn’t in this at all. People generally don’t know this, but there’s different streams within this world we work in. You have brand which is more brand strategy, that’s the personality of a organization. You’ve got advertising, which is the ads you see on TV, radio, ads, promotion, yes, promotion, etc, yes. You’ve got marketing, which is all of these activities thrown together. But there’s different. Disciplines within this world we do. So I just landed this job as an account manager at, again, not the right place. It was a company that, you know, the big output of all the collateral. So, spreadsheets upon spreadsheets, not very interesting at all. But I kind of worked my way through this world, and then slowly within time, discovered what it is that I was attracted to what really sort of floated my boat. And it was, you know, discovering or working with clients in the world of brands specifically to understand, what are they? What are what’s their core DNA, what how do they speak? How do they express themselves? You know, people often say, you design logos, but logos are the last exactly.
Maria Ross 05:39
I always say a brand is not a logo. Yeah, exactly. A
Vanya du Toit 05:43
brand is how a customer, you know, how you speak to your customers, how the security guard interacts with customers. You know, it’s everything about how a company portrays themselves. And then, you know, there’s a logo at the end of the day, right? So that’s how I sort of found myself in this world. I’ve always worked on the client services side of things, that’s evolved over time to be more client, you know, overseeing client relationships as a whole for the business, new business strategy, etc, but it’s always been on the client relationship side of things, right,
Maria Ross 06:13
right? So obviously, you know, so much of your saying resonates for me. Obviously, that’s why I was always interested in brand and marketing. Was, was not only just how you can connect, but how you can tell stories, and how brands when used for good. I always say marketing can be used for good, not for evil, how you can leverage brand to provoke, to inspire, to ignite, to transform, to get people moved, to take an action. And it was the psychology of it. And it sounds like for you too, that I was really drawn to was the psychology and the storytelling of it. And when you see brands that embrace that from a very genuine perspective, it’s a beautiful thing. It becomes part of someone’s life. It becomes part of their story, and those are the brands that become the power brands, because they become part of our own identity, and not from a materialistic point of view, but just from a hey, this company, this customer service rep, this sales person, they understand me, and they understand what my life is like, and this is how you know for me, I even bridged into empathy. Was understanding that empathy is the superpower of branding and brand strategy and marketing and storytelling. So I want to dive into that because you, your agency, has worked with some big organizations, museums, cities, just, you know, really big organizations where can sometimes be hard to, I guess, for lack of a better term, herd the cats and get agreements. So when we talk about empathy from all sides, the importance of listening, how do you work with clients to engage that listening, so that you talk about not seeing things in black and white and understanding that there’s an openness to both sides, and that great design listens to all sides and appreciates people’s stories. So can you tell us a little bit about that philosophy and also illustrate it in action with some of your client engagements? Well,
Vanya du Toit 08:16
first of all, I’d like to say you know clients, even if they’re the CEO of a major you know, organization, if they are the top level of what they do, they’re just humans. So what we do is we build and we build these bridges and relationships with clients. Clients aren’t just commercial objectives. They’re not just, you know, their KPIs for that quarter. They, you know, they’ve got their own objectives, they’ve got their own agendas. They’ve got their own insecurities. Maybe they didn’t sleep well last night. You know, they’re just, they’re people we need to build relationships with. In terms of our process, what we spend a lot of time, budget and energy on, is the initial phase of discovery for all our clients. So we really spend a lot of time, you know, listening, having conversations, through interviews, through workshops. We’ve got, you know, very distinct and focused interviews and workshop programs that we do with our clients to get under the skin of what it is they’re about, but not just what they’re about. Why are they distinctive from their competitors? What is it that they are doing or saying? You know, in very crowded marketplaces often, you know, there’s 1000s of museums in London, why is the one we’re working with today? You know, worth your time, your energy and your money, you know, so we spend the time to understand who they are from everyone’s perspective. We speak to the CEO, we speak to the security guards, we speak to the, you know, front of house staff. We speak to a range of people. Obviously, it’s not everyone’s opinion will ultimately be what’s incorporated in the brand. We get that, but we really want to understand what the organization as a whole feel. What do they sound like? What really are the pain points where our clients, senior clients, often not, you know, what are they often not aware of, that the more junior people would be saying, etc. We work to understand. On that, and then we then, you know, distill that into a brand strategy that speaks to not just who they are now, but who do they want to be in the future, you know, what is it that they’re aiming for? How do they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors? And how do we build a commercial, you know, Proposition against that? Yeah, and
Maria Ross 10:16
I had a really interesting conversation on a podcast. I was a guest on Chris doe the feature, and we talked about because he comes from the creative side. And he was talking about how sometimes it’s hard for creatives to embrace empathy, because there’s a lot of ego, there’s a lot of insecurity, which I found working at ad agencies. And some of the most brilliant creative minds do need some lessons and empathy and listening. So how have you managed that within your own teams? What training do you do? What how do you hire? What are you helping them embrace so that they know that in the end, the creation will be the thing that is successful. That’s a
Vanya du Toit 11:01
big question. And what I don’t, kind of want to put my foot into anything creative, as you say, they’re known for, you know, really, but those creatives are not the ones that make it good. Creative and good strategic, commercially driven outputs is driven by what you have heard and how to reflect that back, not only to your client, but to the audiences they need to be reaching. So I think that sort of leadership, creative leadership, needs to come from the top of an organization I’m very lucky to have always worked with, and currently I’m working with, you know, some of the most brilliant creatives in the industry, people who really, genuinely understand how to listen to clients and to get that nuggets out of them. We work in iterative processes. It’s not always the right thing, but we will give our clients five or six creative routes, some really, you know, pushing the boat out and making them feel deeply uncomfortable. And they’re creative, not in it, but to see where that boundary lies, how strong you push a messaging or a creative proposal. And it’s through this creative leadership that, you know, top down, really creates that, that culture internally, of listening and distilling and so on. Obviously, there’s always broken hearts when the router client selects is not the one we wanted or but generally, we only can do our job effectively if we one work within a parameter. So we know what the framework is that we work within. We know that’s, you know, that’s a no go, etc. This is the clear brief, we’ve defined the brief so we know what we are responding against, but also if we’re reflecting back to the client, what will best serve them reach their goals and you know their objectives,
Maria Ross 12:31
right? Yeah, it’s very similar. When I was doing brand work full time, I only do it selectively now, but it was building a workshop of cross functional leaders. I wasn’t just working with the marketing team, because I don’t want just their perspective on the customer. I want the sales person’s perspective. I want engineering perspective. I want hrs perspective on the types of people they’re bringing into the organization. I’ve even had, you know, CFOs and chief legal counsels in the brand workshop, because when you can get that holistic view of the customer and the product or service I find. And I’m wondering if you do too that’s sometimes where the epiphanies lie,
Vanya du Toit 13:09
absolutely. So we work with major, you know, large scale transformation, client transfer and pivotal moments of their being, you know, often getting them ready to be listed for IPO. It’s, you know, big, big, big transformations, and we cannot do our job effectively if we don’t speak to those, you know, the CFO or the COO we need to speak to all those people to understand what the ambitions for the brand is, what you know the business looks like. We say, you know, good brand strategy is based in good business strategy, and good business strategy is based on good brand strategy. They are intertwined. You can’t separate the one from the other, and if you don’t have the one. So for a lot of our clients, we actually start looking at the organizational processes. We look at how they are structuring themselves, maybe not from an operational, you know, practical perspective, but certainly from an external how are they perceived by the world, and how can we make processes easier internally for them to fulfill the brand function. And sorry, just to come back to the point about business and brand strategy, if the one they prop each other one, you know, we give 100% to build the other one. So a lot of we work with the work we do, and that’s the foundational work, that’s the brand strategy. That’s not the articulation, that’s not the logo you get at the end, right? It’s the brand strategy, and that informs, what’s the positioning, you know, what is the future back? What’s it going to look like in five or 10 years? And without that understanding from the CEO, from the money people, from the HR team, yeah, you just can’t build a brand that attracts the talent you want, or, you know, the investors, or the all, yeah. So that’s, I mean, that’s infinitely fascinating to work with. We get to have some really interesting conversations with people. And one of the my favorite things about working in this industry is, you know, we’ve become this little micro expert in the industry that our clients work in. We’re not sector specific. We work a lot with culture and with cultural institutions, but we also work with, you know, I. Or telecoms, or, you know, companies, global tech companies. And so we become these real experts, micro experts, and very quickly, in the worlds of our clients, yep, and it’s because we listen, we we’re all extremely curious people. We read suddenly we’re like, oh, I need to read everything about this or that, or, you know, it starts popping up on my news feed something relevant to the client’s industry, and we really go very deep. And without that real listening and that real, genuine curiosity and understanding of what our clients are about, you won’t discover what makes them tick. You won’t discover why are they that bit different from their competitors? Why should their audiences buy into their proposition and not, you know, their competitors? Yeah, two
Maria Ross 15:41
things there. One, I’ve always said brand and culture are two sides of the same coin, because you can’t put a brand veneer on something if your own house is on fire, right? Yep. So if you’re going to say you’re innovative or you’re empathetic, or you’re, you know, customer driven, what are the internal processes, rituals, habits, compensation structures, hiring criteria, to populate that environment with the people that are going to live out that brand story and that brand promise. And that’s the disconnect for so many companies, and that’s the thing is they come to you of like, Make me the logo, make me look good, attract leads, but they sometimes don’t want to do the inner, transformational work that they need to do and that, you know, that’s what got me down the empathy trail from brand strategy, was seeing that there’s a lot of internal work that needs to happen, from a leadership development standpoint, from a culture standpoint, all of that. So I love that you’re already baking that into the process of, let’s take a look and see we can aim for an aspirational brand image. But then, What work are you willing to do on the inside to ensure that you walk that talk?
Vanya du Toit 16:53
Yeah. So I mean, as part of that, we have someone on our team called, well, he’s the director of regenerative economics, and his whole job is to help us advise our clients. How can they bring regenerative economics, not sustainability, not something that you know makes us break equal, but something a bit more, you know, that one plus one element, yeah, into the work we do for our clients. And we’ve, you know, we’ve worked with clients that we’ve given them, this is how you could, you know, take your city off the grid. Potentially, we’ve done that well for our clients, which has nothing to do with brand, right, or ostensibly nothing to do with brand. But if you have that as part of your business, you can speak about that, and that can become a selling point that would differentiate you from, you know, very clearly, from your competitors in this case. So we’re always looking for ways to to kind of help businesses be the best they are. And we have this line that we have coined. So we say we create culture full brands. It’s culture full is not a word. I saw that on your website. It was, what that means is not, you know, we have a brand and we have, you know, Taco Tuesdays or whatever. All of us support them. You know, that’s one thing, but we bring culture small c and Big C into every aspect of the business. We help them think about how they how their internal, you know, how they speak to their employees internally manifest. Because without that internal change, you cannot manifest external change that doesn’t you can’t get a team of unwilling employees, you know, to live and breathe your values and your vision and your mission.
Maria Ross 18:22
Yeah, and that’s, you know, the thing I often speak about is brand strategy, engagements are transformation projects. If they’re done right, because it’s and it’s not necessarily to completely change you. It’s to your point of doing heavy listening. This is why empathy is the key to success in marketing and branding. It’s doing heavy listening and getting curious and finding the nuggets that you know it’s you’re not a good brand strategist, because you bring something to the table necessarily. That’s something they’ve never thought of before. It’s taking everything they’re saying, everything they’re doing, the things that they might be overlooking. I always get with my clients, it’s sort of like, oh, yeah, we do this one thing, but that’s not very important. And I’m like, that’s the most important thing. What are you talking about? To getting them to connect those dots that they can’t see for themselves, and helping them understand that, you know, that is really where the differentiation lies. That’s where the story lies. But you can’t do that if you come in as a marketer or a brand strategist saying, without even doing any listening, here’s what I think you should do. Here’s how I think you should portray yourselves. Well.
Vanya du Toit 19:33
And I think that’s sort of one of the ailments of our industry. You often get agencies coming and sort of, you know, saying, Well, we’re the experts, and this is what you should be doing. And you know that we know this industry, and we know the landscape, and this is, you know, it’s sort of puts upon the clients. And what we often hear from our clients is, you know, you guys really listen. You listen to us, and you are reflecting back to us what we said you Yeah, you’re articulating us because you’ve listened. It’s that listening thing. And. And I can’t tell you how many big, big agency names we’ve been, you know, we have superseded with our clients, because they’ve just gone in and say, we’re the experts and we are the people telling you, you know, who do you think you are? And, I mean, it’s one thing doing that to a business. You know, often people do their jobs to go to work, to get money, to go home, and right
Maria Ross 20:20
companies want that, but if they want that, if they hope to ever differentiate, because all that does is tell you what everyone else is doing. Yeah, and this is why you should do this. It has no account for if it’s authentic to you, if you can actually deliver on that promise, if you’re even interested in delivering on that promise, right? So, yes, it helps to have some industry knowledge. But it’s about hiring people who are empathetic, who know how to listen, who know how to read the read between the lines of what’s being said from a customer or from a client.
Vanya du Toit 20:56
And I was gonna say it’s also, I think it’s a bit rude, you know, presumptuous just to, just to be like, well, you know, not to listen to people. It’s a basic on a human level. You know, just giving someone that platform, if they’re if, you know, you can always respect, say, respectfully. That’s, you know, this is what you’re saying, but this is what we’ve seen, or this is what we can see in your organization, right? And what you’re saying is not, there’s a say, do gap. You’re not saying. You’re not doing what you say. So that’s something else, but that’s also just reflecting back what you’ve heard, right, seen, right? But, you know, just on a on a human level, give someone that’s, you know, just the respect of the time of day to listen to them, right? We, I often think about, you know, what we do, especially from in my team, the, you know, the client relationships aspect of our business, you know, we need to kind of flip the script from just a pure service mindset, you know, you’re just there, to kind of, you know, take orders, yeah, and take orders and kind of, but into a relationship mindset, you need to be able to build that trust with your clients. I have a wonderful client who I love, Emma, who she’s extremely fair. She’ll give me direct feedback if there’s something you know that she doesn’t hold. You know she’s honest in our relationship, but she also, you know, when she sends me an early morning text, we’re in a different time zone, she said, I’m really, really sorry. I know you’re probably getting the kids to school or, you know, there’s that real relationship between my clients and myself, where you can build greater trust. You You know you’ll get more done. You’ll get more out of someone when there’s and bringing that back to help businesses, the work we do for businesses, if you if we were just going in there and telling people this is what it is, then we didn’t do our jobs. We didn’t take what’s core to them and reflect that back. We’ve just created yet another generic identity in the sea of the same stuff.
Maria Ross 22:46
Yeah, you touched on it. It builds trust, because again, when you bring all those voices to the table, and I especially love it when I’ve done brand workshops where they bring someone in who’s antagonistic, like someone from the tech team or the engineering team who hates marketing and thinks it’s all a bunch of fluff, right? I actually love when those people come to those absolutely all day workshops, because, number one, they say the hard truths. Number two, you can actually listen to them and give them space to be heard, where maybe people were trying to silence them before because they were a squeaky wheel. And I give them space, tell me more. Tell me more about that. Why do you feel that way? Why do you think that’s not working? Because that’s where the gold is. And then when you’re able to let them be part of the process and weigh in, you get more buy in, and they become your biggest champions. Well, that’s
Vanya du Toit 23:39
the biggest thing about creating a new brand if you don’t have the buy in from everyone who will be using the brand this, you can’t deploy the brand. They
Maria Ross 23:45
can’t live it out if they don’t know, if they don’t embrace it, to be able to live it out every day. They work with
Vanya du Toit 23:51
a lot of museums, and we created the Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi. The identity will be going live soon. And for that, we spoke to the archeologists and the people who are doing the actual the work, work, right? And it’s so insightful to learn from their perspective, not the I mean, our main client was the corporate entity creating the museum. Their job is to get audiences to come through the door, etc, etc, but it’s also important for the scientists to speak to, to their audience, to do it correctly so to not use, you know, sometimes when we write brands, when we create a tone of voice, we use words that sound nice, but for them, it’s important to use the correct terminology, not exactly something that sounds nice. Yeah, and we created such a rich brand tapestry speaking to all these different audiences, because we really listen to these people. You know, the scientists doing all the work, the foundation of the work, when
Maria Ross 24:46
you get a new perspective and a new way to position it, or a new way to look at it, because what is the role of a museum? Or the role of the museum is to bring science to people, right? So if you don’t talk to the scientists, basically the ones providing the content. Percent, if you want to look at it that way, then it’s just an entertainment process, exactly. Then it’s just a building with exhibits in it. And then want
Vanya du Toit 25:07
to, you know, then go to all the other ones. That’s, you know, how do you Yeah, yeah. And it’s the
Maria Ross 25:12
same thing with, you know, name your industry, if it’s software, if it’s retail, if it’s clothing, if it’s apparel, if it’s sporting goods, whatever it is. It’s not about the company that’s selling it. It’s about what’s being made and how it improves the lives or the work of the end customers. Yeah, and for that, you need multiple points of view, absolutely.
Vanya du Toit 25:33
And without the multiple points of view, you kind of, I was saying just earlier, you can see when companies have just done a generic, oh, they’ve used the same fonts. They’ve gone on Pinterest together, and it’s so disappointing when you see these large, you know, rebrands coming out, and they’re just so blah. And you need to be able to respond to your brief and your client challenge that brief, by all means, tell them not you know, this is not the right yeah direction, or
Maria Ross 25:58
we think, you know, yeah, tough love is important to gain trust tough love
Vanya du Toit 26:01
is absolutely this is one of the points I wanted to, you know, wrote down honesty and directness is also empathy. It’s like being a good parent. If you you know, you can put your boundaries in place. You can give heart feedback, constructive feedback, constructive that’s, that’s what I was trying to say. Badly, give constructive feedback. But you know, if you’re going to be lying to or not being honest, that’s, you know, it doesn’t
Maria Ross 26:23
serve anyone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I talk about that in my most recent book, the empathy dilemma. That’s why one of the pillars is clarity. Okay, another pillar is decisiveness, because not done in a shaming or blaming way, but in a because I value you and I don’t want you to be confused. I don’t want you to be in the dark. I don’t want you to, you know, I know you don’t want to go down the wrong path. I’m going to present this information in a way that you understand what’s expected of you. You understand what results are coming. You understand what you’re accountable for. And so, you know, i radical candor is good, but kind candor is better. Absolutely. That’s what I always tell my clients, is, look, I if you want to hire someone that’s going to yes all your ideas, you probably shouldn’t hire me, because I’m going to with love, because I care, tell you to either rethink something, or, let’s look at this, or I don’t know if that’s the best way to say that, because that’s my job, like for you guys, that’s your job, is to help them find a path of success. And
Vanya du Toit 27:28
our success is our client success if we don’t exactly, we haven’t done our job properly. They did not have the best or the strongest brand. It’s also clients also often. We often push back, and then, you know, they say, Well, we still think, and that’s fine. That’s also there, right? But they can
Maria Ross 27:41
make the final call if they really want to, right? Yeah,
Vanya du Toit 27:46
but it’s our job to really, sort of show them all the options. And that’s why I mentioned earlier. We do sort of quite a varied range of creative approaches. When we do the work, we we show clients, how can we make something really innovative, you know, out there or different, and then often, we often land somewhere in the middle, which is, you know, away from the safe space, which is, that’s a good place to be, but it’s our job to listen, to reflect that back, and then to show them what’s the possibilities, what’s the blue sky, thinking, what can happen. And then, you know, we get brought back down to earth, and there’s budgets and right practicalities, but it’s our job, really, to do that creative thinking.
Maria Ross 28:22
Yeah, I love it. So I’m gonna switch gears a little bit, because I know that we were talking before we got on this recording, about the importance of brand in everything, including the space you’re in, right the space that you operate in. It’s not just your brand. Is everything. It’s not just your logo. It’s how you walk, how you talk, how you act, and even if you are a physical location, what that looks like, how that makes people feel, how it’s inclusive. And I know that you are in the process, your company’s in the process of moving to a new studio, and this is about building an empathetic workplace. Now we’re talking about this in the age of the debate between return to office and remote work and hybrid and all of that, and every company’s got to figure that out for themselves. There’s pros and cons to both. But if you are a company looking at bringing people back into the office, what type of office environment are you bringing them back into is it one where they can thrive? Is it one where they can do their best work? So talk to me a little bit about how you are bringing empathy into that process, because I think that would be helpful for leaders listening who are struggling with return to Office mandates.
Vanya du Toit 29:40
So I mean, I I’m, personally, I’m so happy about how the world has changed since the pandemic, and how it’s allowed us to be able to work flexibly. I think, yes, pre all of this, a lot of people struggled with aspects of the open plan, Office, the commute, etc, etc. And obviously, parents of young children, the flexibility is. Great. But as you mentioned, we need to also be in person. The it’s important for younger people, you know, the people coming up, in their 20s, learning how to do their job. It’s important to be together. It’s fun to be together. It’s a nice it’s a nice thing to be with your team, to be in person, to have that, you know, in person interaction with clients as well. I’m a big believer of in person meetings with clients, not just always over zoom. But how if we’re not going to be empathetic and respectful towards how people like to work and how they do their best work, then we won’t be getting the best talent, because someone else will be doing it today. But also, again, that’s just it’s disrespectful. You should be empowering your employees and giving them, you know, to certain limits, you know, whatever they need to do their best work. So we have actually just, we bought a building in London’s Hoxton Square last year, and we’ve moved in already. But we worked with some architects, also brand architects, called Universal Design Studio, to design our space. And what was really important to us was to kind of create the antithesis of the open plan office. I don’t know anyone who likes an open plan office, but they might be out there. Let me know one of those people. But people, some people are introverts, some people are extroverts, you know, we’ve got different working styles. I do a lot of thinking. I have to do spreadsheets and write, you know, proposals and write things I need to think about so I can’t have music around me. But the creatives, you know, they’re designing, it’s more of an auto, more automatic brain function, I think. So, you know, they’d like to listen to podcasts, like some music. So we really thought about, what do people need? And this office, our floor is quite sorry. Our building is quirky. It’s got six different floors, so already it’s inherently, you know, got these different spaces. But we worked hard to create sort of soft seating. So, you know, you can go sit on sofa. We’ve got curtains off bits so you can have a quiet call. We’ve got, you know, something we call Siberia, which is just the top of a staircase, which we just built a desk into, so you can go and hide out there, look over the terrace. We had a big window put in if you really just need to focus on the work you’re doing and you don’t want anyone to find you. And I think this will allow our team to want to come into the office, you know, to enjoy the space we created, to have that opportunity for collaboration, for having lunch together, but then to do the type of work you want to do, how you like to do it. Some people like to stand up and, you know, put lots of post it notes on the wall, and, you know, so we need to make sure that we speak to the people we also we also built a lovely, big kitchen with a stove. You can cook your own food. You don’t have to bring in your cold lunch if you want to, you know, eat up a pizza or something. There’s an oven. So just really thinking about people, what’s it like to work from home? What’s all the best bits from working from home? And how can we build elements into that, into the office.
Maria Ross 32:40
Yeah, I love that. And I was mentioning to you that I’ve been able to be on tour, kind of behind the scenes at Airbnb, but also some other workplaces, like Google and box I was part of some inspiration journeys done by a culture firm called Flynn consulting. I actually had one of the principals on the show, Rebecca fries, talking about the importance of culture, and I’ll actually link to her episode in the show notes, but we got to have a behind the scenes tour, and a lot of it, especially in recent years, has been about, what are we doing with our office design and our office architecture to accommodate different needs and make this a place where people want to come right now, Airbnb was doing this before the pandemic, which is kind of interesting. The way they designed their offices in San Francisco is just phenomenal. It’s, you know, open areas for people who thrive on that. It’s reconfigurable desks and spaces so that you can get into small groups. It’s solitary pods that look like phone booths. So if you need to work on your own and sort of be soundproof, you can it’s unique spaces like climbing up a spiral staircase into a tree house and doing your work there. And it’s also the food and the kitchens and all the perks and all of that. But the point was, it’s about adapting to different work styles, whether it’s introverted extroverted, whether it’s neurodiverse, whether it’s someone who has certain needs or is disabled, finding different ways to accommodate all those different work styles so that people can eventually produce what you need to produce. And something
Vanya du Toit 34:13
I’ve always been a big advocate of is, you know, getting away from your desk, you need to walk around the block. You need to sort of stand up and see outside and see outside and speak to other people. You need to kind of work so, you know, having spaces where you can go and sit on the sofa, you can see out the window. I think that just helps creativity, that helps thinking, that helps fatigue. You know, it
Maria Ross 34:32
helps burnout and stress on plants, and lots of plants, exactly, exactly. Well, I love this. I’ve loved this conversation. I want to kind of leave off, if you want, to share one final gem with leaders listening about how what’s a good step they can take to open up listening and open up curiosity for themselves or for their own teams.
Vanya du Toit 34:57
I think reading is a very important. Important thing, I think, not just of fiction, but of reading things. Long reads, you know, read The New Yorker, read the times by the weekend, newspapers, read books, read stories, short stories, kids books. I’ve some of my favorite things. You know, lessons I’ve learned is from my children’s books. And think outside of your industry, I think if you want to cultivate a culture of empathy and of listening to the perspective of someone else. You have to kind of you have to practice that muscle, and I think you do that. Reading is such an easy thing to do. Podcasts, obviously, that’s great as well. But you know, have listening, finding out that perspective of people beyond your experience, beyond your industry, beyond your culture, you know, reading about other cultures, etc. And then I think if once you have that sort of foundation, it naturally gets built into the way you work. It becomes important for you to have that curiosity, you know, to do that listening, that two way thinking and listening with any interaction.
Maria Ross 35:59
I had that as one of the habits of building your empathy, strengthening your empathy muscle, in my first empathy book, the empathy edge, which was explore with your imagination, and it was precisely that. It was consume art, music, podcasts, documentaries, you know, binge on Netflix if you want, but try to consume information so you can practice listening and practice imagining someone else’s perspective in a safe place where you don’t feel threatened by it, right? And exercising that muscle so it starts to become your default, as you’re saying, your default operating system. We get
Vanya du Toit 36:34
that often. We get ideas from industries that’s not even the industry we’re working for, 100% Yeah, cross pollination of ideas, it’s so important that finding innovation and things that’s nothing to do with the industry you’re working on. So that’s it’s about being curious and really wanting to get information out of someone that I think is useful for any leader in any industry.
Maria Ross 36:58
I love it. Well. Thank you so much, Vanya, for this great conversation. I could probably talk to you more about geeking out over brand strategy and brand storytelling, but we are out of time, so I will have all your links in the show notes. But for anyone that’s on the go or exercising while they’re listening to us, where’s the best place they can learn more about you and the agency’s work. Thanks,
Vanya du Toit 37:18
Maria, and thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure. We are. Wiedemann lamp. You might have to, I’ll spell that out for you. It’s a, W, I, E, D, E, M, a n, n, l, a, M, P, E, and that.com’s vedemanlamp.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. Vanya de toy V, A n, y, A, D, U, space, T, O, i, t, and thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed speaking to you. I also have so much more to say, but maybe, maybe another, I know we’ll have
Maria Ross 37:41
to have another conversation. Thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate and review or share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events, please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place. You.
