The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Andrea Goulet

**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** (0:18)
All right, all right, I'm gonna try not to geek out on today's show a little bit, but may not be able to. Hello, welcome back to the show, everyone. We are exploring empathy-driven systems and leadership. And technology today. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski and our special guest. We are live. So if you have questions or comments, send them along and we'll try to get them in the mix during the conversation. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Michael Liwski** (0:48)
Absolutely, Stephen would love to. And so, oh my gosh, I can't believe I just did that. Andrea Goulet is an accomplished.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:59)
It's like being live and having a blunder.

**Michael Liwski** (1:01)
Nothing like that right at the intro.

**Andrea Goulet** (1:04)
My name is a hard one.

**Michael Liwski** (1:07)
I know, I even practiced it.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:09)
I know.

**Michael Liwski** (1:11)
So Andrea is an accomplished entrepreneur and a thought leader in the software space, known really for pioneering empathy driven leadership. She's a serial entrepreneur.
Having started six organizations, most recently, she's the founder of Empathy in Tech, where she's empowering technical teams to build better software through human connection. She's the co-author of the book, Empathy Driven Software Development, and has been recognized as a global keynote speaker, sharing her insights at TEDx and conferences around the world. Her background spans a unique combination of technical acumen and soft skills, allowing her really to blend software development with a focus on collaboration and trust. Her work emphasizes really the importance of leading with empathy, which we're going to talk a lot about today, and I know our listeners are really interested in. It's about an approach that not only transforms technical projects, but actually impacts the direction that businesses take at a fundamental level. So with that, welcome to our show, Andrea.

**Andrea Goulet** (2:22)
Thank you so much. Just a quick correction on the bio. I haven't actually spoken at TEDx yet, but I know. I keynote at software conferences and leadership conferences all over the world, but just for some reason hasn't, so maybe that will happen.

**Michael Liwski** (2:36)
Well, hey, if TEDx people are out there and if you're listening, you got to get this lady on your show.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:42)
We're making predictions here.

**Andrea Goulet** (2:45)
Yeah.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:47)
Andrea, this may sound like a simple question, but what is empathy?

**Andrea Goulet** (2:51)
That is not a simple question. And it's a really fascinating question. And that was one of the things that really launched me into this big journey. So I used to think empathy was a character trait, like a psychic ability. That's what Deanna Troy thing from Star Trek, where you walk into a room, and I was in sales when I started my career. So I was good at this stuff. And it's about reading minds, inferring what people think, right? There's a little bit of inference, like that's a big part of it. But what we're learning is that empathy is really what I describe it as the mechanism that humans developed over time through evolution that enables us to collaborate, communicate and solve complex problems together.
And so empathy is part of our bodies. It is like our respiratory system. And there are many functional components for it. My favorite researcher here is Jean Desity. He has worked, his research agenda has been on the functional architecture of human empathy. So like how does empathy actually show up in our bodies? And there's four things, emotional regulation. So if we can't listen and like handle our own emotions and stay calm and present, we can't empathize, right? Affects, so emotion sharing, right? Feeling, that's important. Cognitive empathy, which is perspective taking. It's using the more logical and rational side of our brain. And then motivation. And in the literature, this comes up as empathic concern, which is also compassion. So caring and wanting to do something about it. So seeing somebody struggle and then actually being motivated to learn more and then take action. So in a nutshell, that's what empathy is. But it's much more. I had somebody once and they were like, why are you writing a book about empathy? It's not that hard. Just look it up in the dictionary. But when you look it up in the dictionary is actually like so many things, it's not accurate. So that was why as I started to learn more and in my work, I came from marketing and then went into software and the people that I'm around are super kind and compassionate people who didn't get communication training in their computer science programs and they want really precise definite like how explicitly do I do this? Like what is the process? And I couldn't answer that, so I just started learning more and more and more. And it goes deep, it goes just as deep as any software, anything. So that's why I started describing it as technical empathy. Because when we own it and we say there is a deep amount of knowledge here, and I'm going to do my best on learning more so that I can apply it effectively, that's what takes it from kind of a virtue. Yeah, I mean, we want to have empathy, but there's also places that it can go not great. You know, so an example of that is if you have too much cognitive empathy, you're able to see somebody else's perspective, but you don't care about them, right? We see this a lot of times in marketing and around deceptive patterns, right? Where an example might be like having opt-in first, and there's a whole bunch of those. So paying attention to those details, knowing where they show up, knowing the technical terminology of these things, I think is one of the most important things that humans can do. Because if we have big problems to solve, we need to understand the mechanism that helps us solve it.