Empathy is no longer a “soft skill”; it is a hard skill, a disciplined practice, and a foundational architecture for organizational success

Research shows that leaders effectively employing empathy boosted productivity by 87%, innovation by 86%, and profit by 84%. These aren’t just “soft skills”; they’re hard metrics that directly impact your bottom line.

Melissa and I talk about why leaders often underestimate empathy and how to move past that. If you’ve ever felt like you’re hitting a wall in your leadership, or that your team isn’t as connected as they could be, this may be part of the answer. This is a common leadership pitfall: expecting people to adapt without understanding their perspective.

Leaders who lack self-empathy often create roadblocks, forcing their teams to “go around” them to get work done. This isn’t just inefficient; it erodes trust and hinders progress.

I particularly loved Melissa's analogy of Stradivarius violins. They are beautiful instruments, but you only get their true value if you know how to play them. Without that skill, its potential remains untapped.Empathy is similar – it’s a powerful tool, but you need to know how to “make the strings sing” in your leadership. Our conversation made me reflect on how many leaders might intellectually understand empathy but struggle to connect and operationalize it daily.

We discuss how actionable empathy drives innovation, scales across teams, and why top organizations are placing it at their core. We explore the critical difference between empathy and self-empathy, and how a lack of self-awareness can derail even the best intentions.

How do you actively cultivate empathy & perspective-taking in your leadership approach?

Melissa shares her experiences, research and insights from working with leadesr and teams all over the globe.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

1. Making empathy actionable to help leaders operationalise empathy for themselves and their teams, using it to drive innovation and understand connection through perspective-taking.
2. Leaders don’t view empathy as a skill and are often not connected to their people, representing an immovable object that people have to circumnavigate; without actionable empathy for themselves, they cannot apply it to lead others.
3. Helpful to reframe empathy as strategic awareness rather than weakness – it takes courage to practice empathy whilst making difficult decisions; leading well requires the correct perspective.
4. Four steps to self-empathy: self-observation, which leads to self-reflection, which leads to self-awareness, which leads to self-compassion.
5. Judgement and empathy cannot exist in the same place: empathy in action is compassion, and a low-empathy culture ultimately produces weak leadership.
6. An empathic culture has a leader in touch with what’s going on, making everything more efficient - empathy is important for middle management because they lead both up and down, and touch the most people.
7. Practicing empathy takes discipline and energy and empathy fatigue can set in, especially with emotional empathy, which drains neurological reserves.
8. Scaling empathy within leadership is about building a culture, living the asserted values - leaders are often unaware how their actions affect their people, which is the very opposite...

The biggest illusion organisations have about being product-centric is that adopting buzzwords or frameworks alone guarantees success.

What does it mean to move from KPIs to outcomes, from silos to more interconnected ecosystems of teams ?

Moving from project to product is more than a process change; it’s a mindset shift. Tim and I discuss who to help organizations connect their outcomes, their work and their teams into living value streams so that they stop measuring activity and start measuring impact.

Our discussion highlights a crucial point: “When work is still being organized as programs or projects, and there are plans that have got start dates and end dates, that’s usually an indicator that the mindset is still in that project mentality.” This perspective reveals a core issue in many “agile” transformations.

The traditional project approach, with its fixed timelines and temporary teams, often hinders true value delivery. Instead, long-lived, cross-functional teams that “roll the valuable work into the team” rather than “staff a project over people” yield superior results. This fosters psychological safety, boosts performance, and increases adaptability.

The best foundation for success is collaboration and starting small. The perception of mindset and metrics can be changed using value stream mapping/metrics-based process mapping, quantifying before and after, crossover times and rate of completeness to provide data and success stories right from the beginning.

How are you shifting your teams from temporary assignments to continuous value delivery units?

Tim share his wealth of experience and insight from orking with teams and leaders all over the globe.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

1. Helping organisations connect their outcomes, work and teams into living value streams to measure impact over productivity and bring about sustainable transformation in the delivery of outcomes.
2. Claims to be agile or devops-driven are often waterfall projects in disguise - a clear distinction between project mode and product mode is often stymied by organisational infrastructure.
3. Cohesive teams outperform projects that are simply resourced, a model that is very dependent on specific skills and requires a shift (from t-shaped to i-shaped) towards m-shaped - cross-functional teams deliver value and are adaptable, permitting value management instead of scaled resourcing.
4. Value streams – comprising two components of flow and end-to-end – begin with a need and end with a perceived value, but the entire process and how it all fits together must be understood.
5. The perception of mindset and metrics can be changed using value stream mapping/metrics-based process mapping, quantifying before and after, crossover times and rate of completeness.
6. Shifting from output to (connected) outcomes involves mapping the constellation using simple visualisation to demonstrate connections within the organisation and what values each team delivers.
7. Constellations of bright stars then join together to meet strategic goals and boost engagement; keeping an eye on KPI dashboards within the confines of safety and governance allows progress to be determined by OKRs (create focus, then align).
8. The best foundation for success is collaboration – leaders need to make way for an...

"the microphone is a mirror for our culture – when leaders start listening, cultures start changing..."

What if your voice, not just your words, could build deeper trust and connection? Tom highlights that audio communication activates the brain’s pleasure centre. People often trust what they hear more than what they see.This trust mechanism is invaluable for leaders aiming to foster genuine two-way communication. It moves beyond formal messaging, making leaders more relatable. Human trust is becoming more and more important as we move into an AI generated era.

AI will not replace humans enjoying each other’s company, having interactions that an audience can feel, and building niche communities that create impact beyond monetisation, spark movements, and give rise to new communities in turn.

Think about it: have you ever felt like you “know” a podcast host, even without meeting them? This phenomenon creates a powerful, intimate connection. Tom Fox calls it “your voice is in my head” and notes how listeners pick up on inflections, emotions, and authenticity. Tom and I discuss how organisations can leverage this and Tom outlines five reasons in the business world to have a podcast: thought leadership, relationship building, audience engagement, content creation, and sales – a B2B podcast does all five, conveying information and creating an authentic voice.

The power of this approach is also that people get the chance to use their voice to build and inspire communities, wherever they sit in the hierarchy, and all voices can be heard.

What untapped communities or conversations exist within your organisation that, if amplified, could lead to significant cultural shifts?

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

1. Initially a segue from corporate compliance (making businesses more successful) and blogging (for marketing purposes as a sole trader) to podcasting (and the community behind it) as a means of communicating beyond writing.
2. The audio format of podcasting is very different from video - hearing something instils more trust than seeing it, and voices/inflections are remembered and recognised – despite being as old as humankind, storytelling still resonates.
3. The effectiveness of podcasts is measured in terms of social media touchpoints with an audience (listens, engagements, views, etc.) based on an IAB certified download (listened to for 60 seconds or longer).
4. This method highlights customer engagement and the impact of voice - leaders can use internal podcasting as a supplemental form of communication to share messages and foster two-way communication within their organisations.
5. Podcasting is about having fun while learning - it is informal and very important in the hybrid world; its democratising power offers companies leverage to surface diverse perspectives and facilitate bottom-up communication.
6. The choice of guests and hosts on internal podcasts must be considered –successfully navigating the politics of internal podcasting must focus on the ultimate goal, e.g. personalise the C-suite or explain a policy.
7. The human attention span has changed dramatically, and a corporate podcast could replace other forms of communication, being used for short-form content as snippets for inclusion in a video, for instance.
8. AI will not replace humans enjoying each other’s...