12MinuteLeadership

Episode 4: How YOU Can Lead Anyone Part 3 - The Leadership Superpower You're Probably Ignoring | 12MinuteLeadership

• Elise Boggs Morales • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Are you overlooking your most powerful leadership advantage? Think about your most pressing challenges—underperforming team members, high turnover, lack of engagement—what if the solution isn't more strategy but deeper understanding?

In this eye-opening episode, we explore the counterintuitive power of empathy in leadership. Not as a fluffy, feel-good concept, but as a strategic tool that drives measurable results. We bust the myth that empathetic leadership means sacrificing performance standards or authority. Instead, you'll discover how pausing to understand actually accelerates progress and multiplies your influence.

Through the compelling transformation of Tom, a brilliant but intimidating CEO whose leadership style was sabotaging his team's success, we witness how simple shifts in approach can revolutionize performance. His journey from defensiveness to curiosity offers a roadmap for any leader feeling frustrated by team underperformance. The distinction between the Golden Rule and the Platinum Rule provides a practical framework for adapting your leadership to individual needs without losing sight of organizational goals.

Whether you're naturally empathetic or skeptical about "soft skills," this episode offers concrete experiments you can try immediately to enhance your leadership effectiveness. The research is clear: when people feel seen and understood, they engage more deeply, perform at higher levels, and remain loyal to both you and your organization. Ready to unlock this leadership superpower? Visit eliseboggs.com to discover how our executive coaching and team development programs can help you build an environment where both people and performance thrive.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the 12-Minute Leadership Podcast where, in 12 minutes or less, I'll share small things that you can put into immediate practice that will make a big difference in your leadership effectiveness. I'm your host, elise Boggs-Morales leadership professor, consultant and coach. For the last 17 years, I have helped thousands of leaders level up their influence and achieve remarkable results. If you want to trade compliance for true commitment and create your dream team, you are in the right place. Get ready for a quick hit of practical wisdom to increase your team's engagement, inspire top performance and retain your best talent. Ready to level up your influence and get better results. 12 Minutes starts now. Hi everyone, elise here, welcome to Episode 4, how you Can Lead Anyone, part 3.

Speaker 1:

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the leadership superpower you're probably ignoring. This topic is taken from Day 12 of my new book Lead Anyone. Today we're diving into something that often gets dismissed in leadership conversations, especially in high-performing, results-driven environments. It's not strategy, it's not KPIs, it's empathy. Now, before you tune out because you think empathy is too soft and will cause you to lose your authority as a leader, let me say this the most effective leaders I've worked with, coached and observed, don't just have empathy. They use it as a strategic advantage, and if you're skeptical, it's understandable. I empathize. That was how my client, tom, felt, and we're going to get to his story in just a minute.

Speaker 1:

So I want to start with a quote that sums up the heart of this episode. It's by John McNaughton, and he says that maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself, when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself. So think about that for a second, because that shift from self-focus to other awareness is where leadership really begins. People have to feel that you see them in order to be influenced by you. So we're going to unpack that a bit. We've all heard the golden rule treat others the way you want to be treated. But have you heard the platinum rule? It's this treat others the way they want to be treated. That shift in thinking is one way of explaining empathy. It says I see you, I hear you, I'm not assuming your needs are the same as mine and it's easy to not along with that idea, but living it, especially in leadership, requires being intentional about it. Let's be honest.

Speaker 1:

Many leaders avoid empathy and feelings and anything touchy feely because they think it's going to slow things down or encourage excuses for subpar performance. Excuses for subpar performance. But here's a reframe Empathy isn't a detour from results, it's a direct path to them. When people feel known, valued and understood, they are more likely to engage with you, perform and stick around. So what is empathy? It's more than feeling someone's feelings.

Speaker 1:

In a leadership context, empathy is about slowing down enough to get curious. It's asking questions instead of making assumptions. Instead of automatically pushing for more effort or automatically jumping into problem-solving mode, it's listening first and finding out what might be going on for them right now. Ironically, being curious and asking questions often gives you the valuable insights needed to ultimately solve the problem and in the process, you're strengthening the relationship with the person you're counting on to perform. Empathy means noticing the tone in someone's voice, the tension in a room or the hesitation behind a decision. It's social awareness and it's a skill that you can build. We tune into these things when we want to make a sale with a client, so it's just applying these same skills internally with your team, and when you do, you build connection, which is the purpose of empathy. You also build trust. You build loyalty All things no spreadsheet can track, but every bottom line benefits from. So how do you know if this is an area for needed growth? See, if any of these feel familiar. You find yourself judging people as too sensitive or not tough enough when they share struggles you don't relate to, or you rush into fixing someone's issue because lingering in emotion feels uncomfortable. Another one you get defensive when someone offers a different perspective, rather than getting curious about where they're coming from. If any of those hit close to home, you're not alone and the good news you can build this muscle.

Speaker 1:

Let me tell you about someone who did. Tom was a client of mine, a brilliant, hard-driving CEO at a consulting firm. He was former military super type A. He could do in a day what most people did in a week. But here's the problem his team was underperforming and Tom he was completely fed up. He wanted to retire, but he couldn't trust that his team could carry the business forward, so he brought me in.

Speaker 1:

I quickly noticed that Tom's intensity, which made him very successful, was also making him intimidating. I interviewed his leadership team and what I heard was painful Humiliation, name-calling criticism in front of peers. The team wasn't lazy. They were shut down. Tom's first response when we went over his team's feedback was defensiveness. I remember him saying if they were doing their jobs I wouldn't have to come down so hard. But deep down he wanted a different outcome. So I invited him to try something an empathy experiment. Here's what that looked like.

Speaker 1:

Instead of reacting, tom paused. He took a breath, he got curious and then he asked a question, without assumptions or accusations. The issue at hand one of his senior leaders, jesse, had stepped down from speaking at conferences. Tom assumed Jesse was being selfish or flaky, but when he asked Jesse why, he got a completely different story. Jesse felt like a failure After so much harsh feedback. He thought he was hurting the team's reputation, not helping it. Tom had no idea. In that moment something clicked. Tom saw the cost of his words and instead of removing Jesse from future events, he offered to coach him, to mentor him. That small shift changed everything. Fast forward a year. Tom's team now describes him as someone who cares deeply and, as a result, performance is up, retention is solid and, tom, he finally got to retire, handing off the business to a very capable and aligned leadership team.

Speaker 1:

So what can you do with this? Two simple things. First, a reflection Later today. Check out Brene Brown's short animated video on empathy. You can find it at brenebrowncom Just search RSA empathy video. It's a powerful visual of what empathy is and what it isn't, and it will probably make you laugh.

Speaker 1:

After watching it, think about what stood out to you, what surprised you and how do you want to lead differently. Second, try your own empathy experiment. Pick someone you've struggled to connect with at work or even at home. Pause, get calm. Then get curious. Ask a question instead of making a judgment. See what opens up. Remember empathy doesn't mean agreeing, it means understanding, and sometimes that understanding is what makes transformation possible. And, in closing, empathy isn't fluff, it's not weakness, it's strength directed towards connection and in leadership, connection is what multiplies influence. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Join me next time as we continue this series. Like what you heard on today's episode and want to go deeper, join me next time as we continue this series. Out ways that we can support your leadership goals. From executive retreats to customized training and coaching. My team of experts will help you level up your leadership and accelerate your results. Go to wwweliseboggscom for more info.