The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Marisa Leigh Valente

**SPEAKER_2** (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 Cache** (0:17)
So you're in Florence, Italy, you've been there for a month, is this what I'm understanding?

**Marisa Leigh Valente** (0:22)
You are understanding that correctly. Yes, you've been.

**Stephen Cache** (0:25)
I'm living my life wrong right now. Welcome to the show. Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Marisa.

**Marisa Leigh Valente** (0:33)
I just want to say, we came to Italy because I wanted to really kind of immerse myself in more culture and get a wider perspective than just being in the continental United States. Mike knows, I shared with him when we caught up the other day, that I've been living in Hawaii for the last five years, and that has had a really profound effect on my practice. Yeah, that traveling piece is all it's cracked up to be is what I would say.

**Stephen Cache** (1:03)
I'm trying to figure out a way to work at least a month a year somewhere else, just work remotely and just live in that culture.
Yeah, I think you're doing it right. Anyway, welcome everyone to the show. I'm Stephen Cache here again with Mike Lusky. Today, we're diving into a leadership approach that's gaining momentum in today's evolving business landscape. Thank goodness. Warm leadership. Unlike traditional leadership rooted in rules and control, warm leadership is about presence, resonance, creating conditions where greatness can naturally emerge. We're going to dive into this. I'm excited for this one. Mike, introduce our guest.

**Mike Lusky** (1:44)
Absolutely, Stephen, and I'm super fired up about it as well. We have a great guest with us today. Not only is she an incredible leader herself, former colleague of mine as well. Our guest today is Marisa Valente. She's an executive coach and she's also the founder of the Center for Modern Workforce Strategy. Marisa's also pioneered a way in redefining leadership through warmth, presence, and human connection, which we know our audience loves to hear about. She helps executives and teams merge strength with care, moving beyond just the rigid structures that exist in leadership styles of the past, let's say, and then essentially empowering, inspiring, and amplifying a person's highest potential. So Marisa, we're so excited to have you on the show today. Welcome to the show.

**Marisa Leigh Valente** (2:38)
Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be with you both.

**Mike Lusky** (2:43)
And maybe to kick us off, Marisa, let's just start off with a little bit, Steve mentioned, you know, warm leadership in his intro. Can you share with us a little bit about warm leadership, you know, what it means to you and, you know, how it differs perhaps from some of the traditional leadership models that are out there?

**Marisa Leigh Valente** (3:01)
Yeah, warm leadership is this notion, and I think Steven used this in the intro, and I'll just say it again for simplicity. It's merging power with deep care. So much of our business paradigm dating back to the Industrial Revolution is about really kind of using power in a very sort of strong and sort of traditionally masculine way to drive results.
And where we are in the development of our culture, as well as thinking about human evolution at large, we need a different strategy. We're not about creating widgets anymore. We're about facilitating creative potential. And in order for that creative potential to really be achieved, there needs to be a warmth that allows the sort of hardness of where we came from to literally melt away and reveal what is left. So there's much to say about warm leadership. We can spend a lot of time defining it with language, but what I really like to do and where we have a lot of success in our practice with our clients and with firms that work with us is really thinking about how they would experience warm leadership. Where have they experienced that in their life first and then at work? And what does that mean to them? And then how do they very uniquely using their own gifts and interests apply that within the spheres that they have the ability to influence?

**Stephen Cache** (4:34)
Yeah, I think when you read about where the future of business is going, and particularly this topic, however they describe it, it's really about leadership. It's not about control as much as it is curation or even, I think I've heard the term holding space in a way if that makes sense for people.
Can you talk about how we're shifting from leadership that's rooted in rules and routine to one that's more about catalyzing human potential as leaders?