498 — Know yourself to know others

So following on from that, we've picked out a quote from the forward of the book.

"What is a trait that leaders claim to value but actually don't train for, assess, or reward?" And that's empathy.

And you describe your own journey to becoming a nicer person.

[laughs]

So why is empathy important beyond just, well, being nice?

I wanna answer that question, but I also wanna say the forward, uh, is such a big piece of my heart-

Aw

... because the, the person who wrote my forward, Valerie Alexander, I met her by chance, and it's a very funny story in the book, and then she was doing a keynote and she asked that question, so that's where the question came from.

And I was the one who screamed out, "Empathy." But in general I love the question because being nice is the worst sales pitch for empathy there is.

Things that are nice are like scented candles, a bubble bath.

[laughs]

Empathy is more of a fire alarm.

Um, it is a performance necessity.

And it doesn't matter which research you look at, but consistently research is showing us that leaders who demonstrate empathy have teams with lower turnover, higher psychological safety, and measurably better problem-solving.

But the research also shows us that the higher up you go, the less likely you are to practice it because you feel like you'll be seen a, a, seen as weak if you do, which just blows my mind sometimes.

People who have empathetic leaders have the ability to tell their leaders things.

And it doesn't matter what the things are.

All the things are important.

But information is everything in leadership, and when you lack empathy, you don't get the complete data.

Your team stops telling you what they've learned or what they think because it's not safe or useful for them to do it.

And you think everything's fine right up until somebody quits.

[laughs] And another part of that story, and those people can take other people with them.

And empathy isn't soft.

It's the infrastructure that everything else runs on.

It kills me every time I read that quote from the forward because it's true, and the moment you read it you know it's true, yet when we look for people who we wanna hire, that's not a skill that we hire for.