The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Chris Steer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
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)
Well, welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and our special guests who were introduced in a moment. So research shows that employees with highly empathetic senior leaders report significantly higher creativity and engagement, with 61 percent saying they are more innovative and 76 percent saying they are engaged compared to only 13 percent and 32 percent under less empathetic leaders. And it's also estimated that companies perceived as unempathetic are putting as much as $180 billion in employee retention costs at risk each year. So when leaders practice real empathy, people do better work, stay longer, contribute more fully. And when they do not, the costs show up in burnout, disengagement and those quiet exits. So today we are exploring what empathy and leadership looks like in practice and how it shows up in high performance environments and what it takes to scale empathy across an entire organization. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:22)
Yes, very excited for our guest today. Our guest is Christopher Steer. He's the founder and CEO of Steer, LLC. Chris leads an organizational advisory firm that helps leaders, boards and teams build better organizations through leadership development, strategic planning and organizational excellence initiatives. He brings more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, as an attorney and an operator, and describes himself as a chief energy officer, helping executives and teams adopt a permanent beta mindset that is always learning and never done. From elite athletes and board members to small and mid-market organizations, Chris works at the intersection of performance, service, empathy and humility. Chris, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. We're excited to have you.

**Christopher Steer** (2:15)
Thank you, Tullio. Thank you, Stephen. Appreciate what you are doing. Thank you on behalf of all of us that are leading, operating, doing life out there. The idea of, Stephen said this before we got on, the idea of systemizing kindness just really lands with me and our team at Steer. So thank you both. Also, thank you for putting some of the metrics and the data to it.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:42)
Yes.

**Christopher Steer** (2:42)
Right? That carries weight. So thank you for that.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:47)
I know.
You have to do that, we realized, to sell it in to some people. So otherwise, I think a lot of people, when you talk about empathy, that word, maybe they're just these days thinking, oh, well, it's just like being nice or emotionally expressive or something. So when you talk to leaders about empathy, how do you define it and what does empathetic leadership actually look like in action?

**Christopher Steer** (3:15)
Sure. So empathy is so interesting. When I think about the last 31 years of my professional career, I don't know that I mentioned empathy, gentlemen, 15 years ago. I don't know if I ever used the word. Over the last 10 to 15 years, it has become such a part of the lexicon, of the language of leadership.
I'm happy to say, and you all are really helping to drive this as well, I'm happy to say that when we do engage with leadership, whether that's in for-profit, non-profit, small, large, leadership is at least connected to the word in some way. It's not like it's the first conversation, thankfully. But to your question though, Stephen, at the end of the day, people produce performance. If I'm leading an organization, I need to be able to find the ways to be able to get results through other people. Unless I'm a solopreneur, that's going to be my principal charge. For that to be true, how can I operate in an optimized way without empathy? How can I operate without being in the shoes of someone else and seeing their perspective, which is hopefully what's going to make me a better leader anyway, that I'm surrounding myself with people who are going to make me better, who are there for a reason to see and to complement the ways that I don't see. And so empathy is in terms of leadership in the world that we live in, Tullio and Stephen, it's the ability to see and understand and really live in the shoes of someone else's perspective. And without it, you will never be, and this is not just anecdotal, this is data driven, you will never be fully optimized in your organization. That requires you get results through people. So thank you for the forum to talk about it. We're pretty passionate about it.