The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Sherrill Kaplan

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
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.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:18)
Welcome back to the Bliss Business Podcast. I'm Tullio Siragusa, and I'm going to introduce our guest in just a moment. We're talking about something that is near and dear to a lot of businesses today, empathy. Empathy is increasingly being recognized as a measurable leadership advantage. According to Business Solver's State of Workplace Empathy Study, nearly 90 percent of employees say empathetic leadership improves morale, and many report that they are more likely to stay in an organization where they feel understood. As companies scale digitally and expand customer reach, empathy becomes even more important. It ensures that strategy and technology remain grounded in human experience. Today, we explore how empathy influences leadership, marketing, digital engagement, and long-term growth. Our guest today is Sherrill Kaplan. She is the Chief Revenue Officer at Hand & Stone, where she leads marketing and digital experience. Prior to joining Hand & Stone in September 2024, Sherrill served as Chief Digital Officer at Planet Fitness, driving digital vision and strategy and leading the continuous enhancements of the mobile app to strengthen consumer engagement and loyalty. With more than 20 years of experience, she has held senior leadership roles at global brands, including Zipcar, Duncan Brands, American Express, and Citigroup, and also serves as Global Operations Advisor of Marketing for Advent International. Sherrill, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Sherrill Kaplan** (1:50)
Thank you so much. Thrilled to be here.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:54)
Excellent. Looking forward to our conversation. Now, Sherrill, you've led marketing and digital strategy at some pretty big consumer brands. In your experience, what does empathy and leadership look like in action?

**Sherrill Kaplan** (2:08)
Yeah, it's really fun to think about this. Because empathy is, if I look up the definition, it's really about putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
And when you think about that, there's and the role of a brand and trying to solve a customer problem. It's kind of what I've been trying to do my whole career, which is put myself in the shoes of my customers so I can best guide what our product or service or experience should look and feel like. So, you know, when you think about empathy, you often think about interpersonal relationships, but it's really, really very prevalent in consumer brands and consumer marketing and trying to drive growth and problem solving for brands. And, you know, if you think about the brands that I mentioned, which was a very long list, it made me feel very old. But, you know, if I go back to Dunkin, a big consumer brand that many folks know of, when we were trying to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers, we were trying to say, how can we start everyone's day off well? You know, we have a crazy morning and you have kids to get out the door for school and you have to get ready for your job. How can we get a coffee in someone's hands very quickly so that they can feel okay about their morning? And Planet Fitness was all about, you know, new folks to gyms and being a place that's welcoming and not intimidating for someone who's just starting to work out. So how can you put yourself in the shoes of someone who's completely terrified to walk in the doors at a new gym? And of course, Hand & Stone, where I am now, it's really easy for me to put myself in the shoes of our customers because I'm right smack dab in the core of our target market. But, you know, folks that live very busy lives and have a lot of daily stresses and stresses of modern life and how do we take some time and really provide a relaxing respite for a regular relaxing respite for folks that live normal everyday lives and kind of normalize what that is for people. So, empathy is really, really present in all sorts of business context as well.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:26)
Yeah, I love what you said. It's not just about the transaction. It's how and why it matters. Like the plan of finesse, I love that traffic meter where you could see how busy the gym was because I didn't want to be there when it was full. I wanted to be there when the meter was like at the lowest, right? So it was my way of saying, this is the time for me to go. So because that mattered to me. So it was beautiful that you talked about it that way. And I've seen it in action. And this is one of the reasons I fell in love with design thinking because the pillar of design thinking is empathy and being curious to know beyond the transaction why people do what they do, what matters to them. But in a digital world, we're very digitized today with AI and everything.