Empathy and Neurodiversity in Teamwork with Gloria Folaron

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. We're talking about the importance of empathy and neurodiversity in teamwork today. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Mike Liwski, who is one of our outstanding teammates. Mike's experienced in building and leading large teams, helping organizations identify their brand purpose.
We try to build authentic connections for our clients with our digital marketing and Mike is knee deep in those efforts. Mike, introduce our guest to everyone.

**Mike Liwski** (0:44)
Steve, thank you so much. And yes, we are absolutely elated to have Gloria Folaron with us today. I can't think of a more perfect guest to join us at this time. For those of you who have been tuning in, you'll know that we've been doing a series on teamwork and empathy and Gloria's a perfect guest to have to continue the conversation on that topic. But to introduce Gloria formally, we're really excited, as I mentioned, to have Gloria Folaron with us today. She's the CEO of Leantime. You can find them at leantime.io.
Interesting, she transitioned from being an ER nurse to a startup product manager.
And then herself, having been diagnosed with ADHD and also a mother of an autistic child, Gloria brings a really unique, empathetic and holistic approach to project management, particularly emphasizing cognitive accessibility for all, which we'll talk a lot about today. So, Gloria, you're breaking new ground with us today. We're honored to have you. Welcome.

**Gloria Folaron** (1:51)
Thank you. I'm honored to be here and really excited to have this conversation.
Appreciate it.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:57)
Yeah, I think we're gonna have a great discussion. Gloria, probably a question you get a lot, but what prompted you to change careers from being ER nurse to getting into what you're doing now?

**Gloria Folaron** (2:10)
One thing I realized when I was working in the ER in particular was that I was seeing problems over and over again that I could see a solution to, but I couldn't touch it as a 12-hour floor nurse.
And so in that shift, that there's a bigger hospital system, ecosystem, but to be mindful of, and what I realized was that business and technology could touch things in a way that I couldn't touch where I was locally. And that actually ended up with me at a startup weekend, and I built a health tech company, my first health tech company out of a weekend excursion where we built telemedicine for pediatrics before telemedicine was even a thing.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:01)
So did you have kind of an aha moment when you came up with your idea for Leantime, or how did that evolve?

**Gloria Folaron** (3:09)
So from that startup experience, there are a couple of things that happened out of that.
One of them was that I went from healthcare where I spent most of my time taking complex and terrifying concepts and simplifying them for people who were in duress and terrified or in pain so that they could understand and leave and treat themselves. When I moved into the startup business world, we were using very complex words and concepts to describe things that I was like, if we had said it this way, I would have gotten this right away. I don't understand. So there was a big disconnect in the language that I found and it even contributed in some ways to some very early imposter syndrome for me, trying to figure out, well, I'm not speaking their language. How do I learn that language so I can connect?
And that started a lot of the core of where Leantime is, where we looked at the very beginning and said, the language needs to be accessible for this to be usable. And we see that in other tools where folks are leaving their tools to go translate their tasks somewhere else and then go back in, or they just don't even use them at all because that's a software thing or that's a marketing thing and they're not connecting.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:28)
You know, I like when people have a different perspective, a different background, when they bring it into a whole different, you know, into a business life, into building a startup, it's this real kind of strong pivot instead of people who are going through like the basic, you know, business school, the same direct path and they speak the language and all those things, but they don't have your background. And so, you know, it's this diversity of thought, right? That comes into play here. That makes for some unique things.