Leadership's Missing Link: How Empathy Unlocks Human Potential with Matt Breitfelder

Matt Breitfelder (0:00)

Human beings are complicated, and human beings have a lot of different styles. In my experience, empathy is the key unlock.

Michael Gervais (0:07)

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. This is the first episode in a series of conversations we've been having with global leaders and human resources. They are at the forefront of helping define modern leadership and what it takes to attract and retain and build the next generation of leaders. From the shift to and from hybrid work to the integration of emerging technologies like AI, these conversations highlight the leadership capabilities that will help teams thrive in the modern workplace. Today's guest, Matt Breitfelder, is one of the most influential leadership architects in modern business.

Matt Breitfelder (0:49)

The caring and empathy is the doorway in, but the work is helping someone explore the edges of what they're capable of.

Michael Gervais (0:56)

As a partner and head of human capital at Apollo, he's charged with creating a high-performance culture that brings out the best in his teams. How do you describe the modern leader?

Matt Breitfelder (1:07)

The work of a leader is about change. Leaders influence humans to do something that they weren't planning on doing. I'm looking in the mirror every day with gratitude that I got another day, but I'm also striving to be better and better and better.

Michael Gervais (1:20)

So with that, let's dive right into this incredible conversation with Matt Breitfelder. Okay, we're here in New York City. This is your stopping grounds. And the city is alive in all the right ways. And so I'm excited to sit down with you. You've been a titan in the industry for a long time. What is important about your journey for me to best understand who you are?

Matt Breitfelder (1:48)

Well, like most of us, and first of all, it's great to be here. It's great to have Finding Mastery on the road in New York City. Like most of us, I was shaped by my childhood and by my upbringing. I was raised by an entrepreneur and a therapist. I grew up in Chicago in a very diverse city, surrounded by great American melting pot. But my dad being an entrepreneur meant that I was his permanent intern, so I got very interested in business.

It's a 24-7 commitment of understanding what makes a business tick. My mom was a therapist, and so we're talking about being exposed to Meyers-Briggs, Deepak Chopra, John Kabat-Zinn, and lots of different tools and influences at a very young age. That taught me to be very curious about what makes people tick. If anything, I think my entire journey is just the Venn diagram of those two things. I guess in some ways that just makes me bilingual of what makes business tick and what makes people tick. And that really propelled my life forward in college, studying economics and being really interested in psychology. I went into international economics as a trade negotiator in government, which is really the psychology of markets and how you negotiate and make decisions with other countries. Went to business school, went into consulting, and then I had my epiphany. And my epiphany was why do 70% of corporate strategies fail? Why are only 20% of employees and companies highly engaged when you look at employee engagement surveys? And it just occurred to me that the HR field could be in the center of the action of solving some of the biggest problems facing companies around the world.

And I felt pretty uniquely qualified to dive into that space and really never looked back. I got my first HR job at PwC. So as an MBA, that was a wonderful place to learn this craft because I was surrounded by skeptical, highly analytical people who were constantly saying, prove it, let's prove this stuff works. Let's measure everything. Let's figure out which tools have the biggest impact. And they were thinking really big. So it was serendipity that I landed in the perfect place to learn. And then since then, I've been part of three great builds of HR teams. So I joined Mastercard when they were right on the cusp of a CEO transition. They ended up picking Ajay Banga, who was really a transformational leader. He's now the president of the World Bank. And the idea was, okay, Matt, can you help us unlock innovation and the potential of this company as Ajay takes the reins? So I spent five years doing that. And then I joined BlackRock right at the moment where they were ready for HR innovation and spent eight years at BlackRock and then joined Apollo five years ago. So really in each of those cases, these were really successful, bold, open-minded companies that were ready to reinvent HR.