How do you balance empathy and business results? | Liesel Mertes, Founder & Workplace Empathy Consultant, Handle With Care Consulting

Rachel Downey: Rachel downey. Empathy. It's an interesting word, empathy at work. Not usually a word that you apply. And when we think about the unavoidable things that happen to us as people, the people that we lead, empathy is sometimes misconstrued as weakness, as not holding people accountable to the work that we need them to do. And so that can often sound like we're giving away too much. That comes at the expense of results. But when we take a step back and we think a little bit more clearly, when you don't exercise empathy, when you don't give people an opportunity to take care of the things that they need the most, which include themselves, it carries an extreme cost, both personally and professionally. The business case, well, it shows up in retention, shows up in trust, shows up in your culture. Other people choose to stay and do their best work, or do they quietly disengage? Something that I'm always thinking about as a leader is how do I balance outcomes with realities of the people that we have an opportunity to lead and work with? How do we meet them where they are in seasons that are outside of their control? And I've had an opportunity to sit on the sideline and watch Liesl over the last few years build the company that she has. She's the founder of Handle With Care, and she has spent years helping organizations navigate these types of situations. And at Sherry Genius, our mission is to foster human connection. And there's nobody that I can think of that does a better job than of helping navigate these seasons of change and challenge with employees and teams with more humanity than diesel. Her work sits at this beautiful sweet spot of empathy and accountability. And that's where a lot of leaders like myself could get stuck. So as I was thinking through this, I called Liesl and I asked her a really simple question. How do you balance empathy and outcomes? Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message.

Liesel Mertes: Hey, Rachel, thanks for your question. Uh, it's a good one. And the way that I sometimes also hear it is how do I measure balance empathy with accountability at work? If I embrace one, do I let go of the other? Or even just. Does empathy have a place in the workplace at all? Does it really affect the business of doing business? And first, I want to affirm it's a good question. These are the kinds of questions that people should be asking. And the good news is there's some really strong data, both just the raw numbers and experientially behind the why of how empathy should enter into business. So let me first start with the numbers and then we'll talk experientially and at the end I'll just leave you with one or two things that you can do even later today to help incorporate more empathy into your business. So the numbers are really strong and you don't just have to trust me. These are being gathered by really reputable sources, places like Forbes or Harvard Business Review. The data just continues to come out, especially after Covid on the really clear case of how the way you care for people shows up in the bottom line of your business. Here's one just from a recent business solver empathy at work study. They showed that 82% of respondents would switch jobs for increased empathy and 76 directly related the presence or absence of empathy to their bottom line. This is something that people are showing again and again that they want. It's a hinge point of why they stay or why they leave. Frankly, I hear this all the time when I speak at conferences. Maybe one out of every three people that comes up to me says something like, if my last boss had only sat in a session like this, I would still be there. The advent of disruptive life events really are moments where people either choose to stay, they say this is a place that lives their values, or they choose to leave. I can't believe that they didn't give me any grace as I was putting my dad into Alzheimer's care. This isn't where I want to be anyway. A little asterisk also, as we're talking mid-2026, something that I hear a lot is as much as we're talking about AI and what we should give to like artificial intelligence, we are also implicitly talking about what we should keep, what is really a human advantage at work. The things that people will pay a price premium for. These are the things that we should be training our people and optimizing them for. And this is the second aspect of experientially, when we talk about empathy in the workplace, there's empathetic policies. There are things in like, have you actually thought through what happens if, if someone gets sick at work? Or do you have medical leave there? Or what are your paternity policies? Or what are your bereavement policies? There are still places where you have to show like proof of a funeral in order to even get time off. And lots of times those are cut and paste like bylaws. When you're really young and you don't even think about it. It is always good, especially if you're in HR to do a review of, like, what are our, uh, actual policies around these things and how are they affecting the people? But the second aspect of just empathy and accountability in the workplace is really mediated through that manager and coworker relationship. And that's oftentimes where some of the biggest gaps are. People tend to feel themselves as overwhelmed and under equipped when it comes to facing disruptive life events. They don't know what to do, they don't know what to say, so they end up defaulting to saying nothing or saying, please, please just go talk to hr because I don't know what to do or say. And what studies show again and again, here it is, looking at the data, is that people want to be able to be supported more than from HR by their managers and their teammates. So how do we democratize empathy as a skill set? How do we invest in training people for it and skilling them up? Where do you even begin? Let me just give you two practical tips. One, if you find yourself going, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to say. I don't want to mess it up. Something is better than nothing. You might have somebody going through something hard and you're feeling that frozen sense, say something like, I don't even know what to say right now, but I appreciate that you told me or I want to let you know that I care. Two, plan for your follow up and empathy in your calendar. If you are a manager or a teammate and something hard has happened, reach out the first day and on that first day, put in a reminder for a week later and a month later. This will keep you honest. You know, check in with George who just put his parent in memory care. And finally, the way that you will actually have the privilege of knowing some of the hard things is because you have a team that shares on that more human level. Build this into your rhythms. I love the stoplight check in. That's just a way at the top of every meeting to get a kind of a gauge of the room. Ask people, what energy are you bringing? Red, yellow or uh, green. And listen as people share. It's a great low barrier way to really be able to queue up meaningful follow up. If they're red or yellow, ask them afterwards, hey, do we need to shift anything? And if they're green, be a place that celebrates empathy and business imperatives. They are all tied up together and the good news is it's a skill that we all can and should be getting better in. So thank you for the question. You've got what it takes. Finally, there are some things that we get in our own way with empathy. I call these the empathy avatars. They're these default postures we take in response to other people's pain. So you might be a, uh, cheer up, Cheryl, always looking on the bright side. Or a commiserating Candace who's like, I know exactly how you feel. If you want to learn more about what empathy avatar you are, we have a free online quiz where it'll give you a diagnostic. It'll give you some of your growth path that is on the website. That's lieslmertis.com l I e S E L M M E r t e s.com and you can learn more about Handle with Care consulting and what we do to make workplaces a little bit kinder and empathy a little bit more accessible. I'd love to keep talking about this. You know that you can call or text me anytime. I'll look forward to it.

Rachel Downey: Thanks for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast. You can find it at, uh, shareyourgenius. Com.