Empathy Expansion Kit: Laying the Foundations - Empathy in Organizational DNA

**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.
This episode is part of our new Empathy Expansion Kit series. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:26)
Hello, everyone.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:28)
One of our main goals of our podcast is to help you be a more authentic business or build a more authentic work life. One of the best ways to do that is build empathy and love into what you do. In this series, we're diving into some bite-sized topics to build empathy into your work life. Today, we talk about laying the foundations, empathy in your organizational DNA. Basically, how to embed empathy into the core values and the operational structure of your business from its inception or as it grows.
A couple of key areas here for me I want to dive into first. The first is the practice we do in our operations, and that's our BLISS practice. BLISS stands for Build Love Into Scalable Systems.
So making that part of a practice is something that we continually look for opportunities to add love into what we do. So over time, you just start stacking little changes on top of little changes. And after a while, you look back one year, two years, three years, and suddenly now you've built this more empathetic loving business. And it doesn't have to be something where you've got this real specific agenda or this real specific outline of here's what we're going to do. You can just do it even at your own desk right now. Whatever you're doing, you can figure out a way to add love into what you're doing.
And then the key here is to see if you can systemize it. So culture gets stretched when you're growing and scaling a business. You don't want to systemize the wrong things. You want to systemize the right things.
So that's what this is about, is like that's why building love into scalable systems, why it's important to think of it that way. It's a very simple business mantra, something we've been doing for years and years. And it's just helped us get to where we want to go internally. Tullio, I know you kind of jumped into our culture here recently. What are your thoughts on our Bliss approach?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:36)
Well, first of all, I love it because there's a commitment to creating an environment where people feel heard, their needs are being met, and so it's an opportunity to grow as an equivalence-based organization where everyone's treated as adults with dignity and everyone's expected to also be adults. So there's accountability that comes into that that's automatic when you treat people that way.
And you spoke of something really interesting, what happens when you're scaling and you could lose some of that. And I'll tell you, I've gone through a number of post-M&A integrations, very large ones at that.
One was almost 10,000 employees, six different companies coming together. And I'll never forget a few of the acquired company CEOs nominated me to be the global CMO to put this thing together. And I accepted the challenge, but it was like the CEO was like, OK, let's come up with a new name and rebrand ourselves. And I was like, wait a minute, slow down a second. We just have thousands of people coming together who had their own culture and their own ways of doing it. The name is not going to put us all together. We have to redefine who we are as a business. What do we stand for as a company?
And it was a commitment to do that. Maybe that's why some of the other CEOs sort of voted for me to take on that role, because they knew that I would take that approach. As if we need to define who we are and let the employees define it collectively so that when we step into this new brand, we step into it together. No one feels like the conquered or the losers or the acquired. That's a horrible feeling. But we all step into this new entity with new defined values that we did as an organization, as a joint organization together.
And it took a little time. It took a little over a year to do that. So we did that first, and then we started to use the input of all the people to define the new name of the company, the logo, the color scheme, all these other nuances, right, that everyone also participated in. But I'll never forget how empowering it was for all the employees to feel like they were part of this new entity being co-created together.