1003: How to Be Both Empathetic and Effective as a Leader with Maria Ross

Pete Mockaitis
Maria, welcome.

Maria Ross
Thanks for having me, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too, to hear about some of your wisdom about empathy in professional contexts. So, I’d love to start by hearing, if there’s a particularly surprising or shocking discovery you’ve made about empathy in professional context since you’ve been researching this stuff for years and years and years.

Maria Ross
Yeah, so many. I mean, there’s so much data and research out there that shows that being an empathetic leader and colleague boosts engagement, performance, innovation, results in better customer loyalty, better customer lifetime value. I think what was most surprising to me in the early days was discovering that, for some companies, there’s a link between their empathetic culture and their stock price being favorable.

So, we all know, personally, that when we’re dealing with people that are empathetic or dealing with brands that are empathetic, we do feel seen, heard, and valued, and that actually translates to bottom line results. So, it’s been a fun mission to go on, to show people that empathy is a strategic advantage and by no means is it a weakness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s beautiful to hear you say that because, I don’t know, I’ve just been on this YouTube kick in which I’ve been hearing about the playbook of big tobacco and big pharma and big food and big chemicals, and it seems like, “Okay, someone says there’s a safety problem and you just deny, deny, deny and infiltrate research and all that.”

That kind of seems like the opposite of empathetic leadership, is that, like, we’re not trying to understand, “Oh, shoot, we might be causing harms,” but rather, it’s like, “No, no, no, no, you’re all wrong, and it’s not what’s up.” But I’m thinking even in these contexts, we think an empathetic culture would be a more lucrative one.

Maria Ross
Yeah, actually. And it’s funny because, yes, of course, we can all find examples of companies and leaders who are the opposite, the antithesis of empathy, and yet they are succeeding. But I think my message is all about you can be both empathetic and high-performing. You can be empathetic and achieve amazing results. You can be empathetic and hold people accountable, and that they’re not either/or. I think the examples you’re citing are the examples of companies gone awry, and organizations that are harming people rather than helping people.

But from a sustainability perspective in the long run, employees are looking for cultures. It’s sort of table stakes for them, “Will I be seen, heard, and valued in this culture?” But also, brands are now needing to appeal to generations of people that actually want to know what’s going on under the covers. They want to know what’s going on under the hood. And so, they actually do care about how you’re treating your employees, how you’re treating the planet, how you’re treating your community.

And we saw in the pandemic, through several studies that were done through an organization called DoSomething.org, that especially Generation Z buyers and younger Millennials were actually making purchase decisions based on how well companies were, I guess, responding to the needs of their employees and their communities.

I know when I was 17, I didn’t really care, but these generations do care and they vote with their wallets in terms of who they will support and who they won’t. And so, when we look at long-term viability and long-term sustainability, some of those outdated tactics may work for a while, but eventually those organizations are going to die out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s coming to mind here is I’m thinking about some friends who worked at a medical devices company, and there are some stories in which the leadership of such companies say, “Hey, take a look at someone. They’re going to come on stage for our annual meeting and we’re going to see how we saved their life and meet their spouse and their children.” You’re like, “Wow, look at what we do with our work.”

And then other leaders are just, like, all about EBITDA and cash flow projections and growth and da, da, da. And so, they’re doing the same thing, they’re making medical devices, and yet the presentation in the big meetings has a very different flavor, “Look how this enriches people” versus “Look how this enriches shareholders.” Well, the folks that I know left the company that is all about the shareholder enrichment view. So, I think that is very resonant in terms of engaging that stuff is powerful.

Maria Ross
Absolutely. And there’s a host of research, it’s sort of tangential to the work that I do around how purpose-driven organizations drive more innovation and drive higher retention and higher engagement from their employees for exactly the reason that you cited. It doesn’t get us excited to do our best work for a company that we know is just making a few people at the top much richer.

So, what is our actual purpose? What is our actual mission? Why are we here dealing with the slog of everyday work life if not for something that motivates us and inspires us to be our best selves? And that’s not just something fluffy. That’s about, “Do you want your team operating at maximum cognitive ability? Do you want them coming up with new ideas and being innovative? Or do you want the people that do that to go work for your competitor?”

That’s really the choice that a company is making if they choose to just focus solely on the money-making aspect, because that might be very inspirational for those that are benefiting from that at the top, but it’s not beneficial or enough of a motivation for the people that are within the organization. And as an example, recently a study came out that comes out every year. It’s in its ninth year. It’s called the State of Workplace Empathy Report. It’s done by an organization called Business Solver. And you can go check it out. It’s free.

But one of the things that they consistently find over and over again is that when employees are asked, “How does your company show empathy to you?” They actually cite some benefits as empathetic. And the top benefit that they cite is not higher work compensation. That’s like 13th on the list. The top ones are flexibility and also employee assistance programs. So, getting the support they need and also having workplace flexibility is more important to many of our best workers. Now that’s not to say we underpay everybody, but it is to say that that carrot of money only takes you so far.

Pete Mockaitis
And just to be clear, employee assistance, is that money or is that something else?

Maria Ross
Employee assistance programs are like mental health benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Maria Ross
“Do I have somewhere to go within the organization to get help that I need?” Assistance for new parents, assistance for bereavement, “What are those employee-assistance programs that you have in place to support me as a whole person and not just a body at a desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so empathy is great. Your book is called The Empathy Dilemma. It doesn’t sound like a dilemma, Maria. That just sounds like a great thing to go do a lot of. Where’s the dilemma?

Maria Ross
It does. So, the first book on the topic was called The Empathy Edge, and that was really the business case of the ROI of empathy for your organization, for your team, for your brand. And what I was hearing from people over the last five years, because that came out in 2019, right before the pandemic lockdown, I was hearing from people, “Great, we’re sold. We are converts, right? But here is where trying to be a people-centered leader gets really hard. Here’s where it gets challenging for me.”

And especially in the environment we’re in right now, we’ve got this group of managers and leaders in the middle who are being squeezed by the expectations of the business and the demands of their people, and they’re trying to be human-centered leaders, but they are burning out. They are experiencing a lot of poor performance. They’re seeing quality slip, and they’re wondering what they’re doing wrong.

And so, The Empathy Dilemma is really about helping people balance the needs of the business with the needs of their people by presenting five foundational pillars that will help them be both empathetic and effective at the same time without burning out, which is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell a story to illustrate that picture? What is me having so much empathy that I burn out and become ineffective look like in practice?

Maria Ross
One senior director I remember speaking to was talking about the fact that she had an underperformer on her team, and she had bent over backwards during the pandemic to provide flexibility and support to her team, and all of that resulted in good things that we don’t want to go back on.

We are talking about mental health more at work, we’re understanding that, again, people don’t park their humanity at the door when they come to work, and things going on in our culture, in our society, in the world, impact our ability to populate an accurate spreadsheet at work. We don’t forget those things. And so, all of those conversations were good, but what was happening for this particular senior director is that she had one employee who was constantly taking mental health days, and constantly citing, “This crosses my boundaries. This does this. This does that.”

And her response as a leader was, “What am I doing wrong? I need to support this person better.” And her idea of support was not having difficult conversations with her, not wanting to confront her, wanting to take on the work for her. And what she finally realized was that, in the name of empathy, she was actually not doing empathy. She was people-pleasing, she was caving in, and she wasn’t having confident and tough conversations head-on. And what that was doing was that that was not empathetic to the rest of the team who had to pick up the weight of this person constantly failing in their role.

So, when she finally was able to have a direct conversation with this person, and say, “Look, these are the expectations we’re holding you to, and you’re not meeting them. So, tell us what’s going on for you. Is this something where you need to be in a different role? Do we need to build different skills?” And in that situation, that employee was actually not responsive to her at all, to the point that they ended up parting ways because that person could not succeed at work. And nobody wants to come to work and fail every day.

So, what happened with this leader was she thought she was being empathetic the whole time, and what she was, was something else, and that’s what I talk about in the book, about the differences between empathy is not people-pleasing, it’s not caving into unreasonable demands, and it’s not even agreeing with someone. So, you can still make a difficult business decision, but it’s how you do it.

How do you communicate? How do you show up? How do you build a culture of trust so, when something like this happens, you’re able to have a really difficult conversation with someone, and say, “I’m not going to put it off. I’m not going to put it off because it might hurt their feelings. I’m going to have the conversation I need to have because I need to protect the rest of the team, and I’m here to do a job. I’m here to deliver something to my organization.” Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can do that and still make tough decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, do you have any guiding principles, or maxims, mantras, distinguishing guiding lights to help us as we’re making these distinctions or, I don’t know if it’s a tightrope, or if it’s a two-by-two matrix, or how you conceptualize this so that we’re playing the game just right and not falling into the zone of being a jerk versus a people-pleaser, but we’re being empathetic and effective at the same time?

Maria Ross
I think the biggest thing people need to understand is that empathy is anything but weak. Because for you to be able to take on another person’s perspective or point of view without defensiveness or fear, that actually requires a very strong person. And so, empathy for others actually begins with working on yourself. So, are you self-aware enough? That’s actually pillar one, self-awareness.

Are you self-aware enough to know how you show up in an interaction and in a conversation? Do you know what your strengths are? Do you know where your weaknesses are? Do you know what your emotional triggers are? That’s a hard one for people. I spoke to a CEO this past year who, very successful business, finally did some sort of personal development and some self-assessment, and realized that one of her biggest triggers was actually not being believed.

And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone accuses you of something, and you immediately start searching through your sent mail of like, “No, no, I know I didn’t say that,” or, “I know I said that,” or, “I know I have proof of this.” That was setting her off with people that really were just communicating that they didn’t understand something or that they had a misperception of something. She would sort of go off the deep end.

She realized this about herself and she realized that in those moments she wasn’t showing up as her best leader self. She was showing up very defensive and very much from a place of fear, to even hear what the other person was saying. So that’s what we mean by understanding our triggers. And so, when we work on ourselves first, we can show up in the conversation with more grace, with more patience.

It’s kind of like, you know, I have a 10-year-old, and I am the worst mother in the world when I’m hungry and tired, when I don’t have my own well full, when I don’t have my own battery charged. And so, in order to be empathetic with someone and stand strong, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that you are re-energizing yourself, helping yourself think in different ways. That’s why the second pillar is actually self-care.

So, self-awareness and self-care can help you create the foundation you need to have a more empathetic exchange with someone without blowing your top.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, yes. And we had, boy, one of the early episodes, we talked to Jim Tamm, and he kept coming back to managing your defensiveness is just transformational in terms of having effective conversations and working through this. And some of those parts boil down to self-awareness and self-care.

I would like to chat about the five pillars, and maybe, since we’ve already introduced self-awareness and self-care, could you give us perhaps a top do and don’t, associated with each pillar based on what you are seeing most frequently and what seems to be the most effective or disruptive?

Maria Ross
I love it because there’s a lot of strategies and then actionable tactics that people can try in the book. And I do want to just offer this, you don’t have to do all of them all at once. And they’re not meant to be linear, but if you do start with self-awareness, you can uncover “What are my weaker pillars of the five?” And you can mix and match and experiment with a few of the tactics within each of those pillars to see how you can shore up your empathy and show up as a more confident leader who can also make room for compassion at the same time.

So, self-awareness, the biggest tip is, take a self-assessment. There are a bazillion of them out there. There’s Enneagram. There’s Myers-Briggs. There’s DISC. Whatever could work for you, put your ego aside. Ego kills empathy. Put your ego aside and say, “I know that there’s got to be things that I could work on,” and help pinpoint what some of those things are. And that also can include seeking feedback from others and being okay enough with accepting some negative or constructive feedback.

With self-care, it’s making sure that you make time and hold it sacred for what charges you up, what lights you up. Self-care doesn’t have to be passive. It doesn’t have to be massages and manis and pedis. It could be, for some people, it’s rock climbing. For some people, it’s being in a play or doing improv. For some people, it’s knitting or running or whatever it is, training for a marathon. So, make sure that you’re making time for the things outside of work that light you up.

The things where you’re in flow, the things where you’re thinking about the present, because the more mindful you are, the more you can actually be present for someone in a conversation and read their cues, read their body language, hear their tone of voice, see what they’re doing in terms of, like, they’re fidgeting or their gestures. You can only do that if you are charged up. So that’s self-care.

The third one is clarity. We cannot hold people accountable to an expectation that we’ve never set. And too often, we, as leaders – I’m guilty of all of this too, by the way – we, as leaders, think we’re being clear about something, or we’re making assumptions that everyone in our organization or our team knows what professionalism means, or has the same definition of it, or understands what we mean by effective communication, or what we mean by hierarchy, or whatever the term may be.

Spelling out those things when you work with a team is really important to make sure that you’re coming back to shared goals. So, do we have like a document that goes beyond like the pretty bullet points of our values on the office wall? Do we have something that says, “This is how we communicate. This is how we run meetings. This is how we honor each other’s time. These are the expectations of our culture”? And make sure that that’s documented and it’s clear. Because if it’s not clear, you can’t hold people accountable to it.

The fourth one is decisiveness. And this is a good one, and you might be able to relate to this, and so will your listeners. But many of us, in the name of empathy, we understand that multiple points of view hold value. We understand that we make better business decisions. There’s a whole host of research around that, around diversity and inclusion, and belonging in terms of what makes a really good business decision. When we have diverse voices at the table, we can uncover opportunities we’ve never seen, we can avoid risks we might have missed.

The challenge is when you try to be an empathetic “leader,” you think that making a decision means making everyone happy, and that’s not what it means. There’s no such decision that will get unanimous consensus. I guess unless it’s, “Hey, you all get a million dollar bonus this quarter.” But what it’s about is being able to swiftly synthesize multiple points of view, make a decision, and then be able to communicate that decision back to your team in a transparent way, “Here’s why we made this decision. Here’s why, Pete, we weren’t able to implement your idea, but please keep those ideas coming because they’re useful.”

And being able to communicate in a way where people can say, “Okay, I disagree, but at least I commit.” Disagree but commit, “Can I at least get on board with the decision because I understand how it was made?” And the fact that you made it, that you didn’t just let it fester because it was uncomfortable or hard, or because you were waiting for the right sign from above to tell you it was the right decision, that leaves people in limbo. That stresses them out. That makes them anxious. They want to know what the plan is going forward. And so, being able to be a decisive leader is actually empathetic.

And then, finally, this one you might really enjoy, the fifth pillar is joy. The fifth pillar is creating levity, creating comfort, creating an environment where people can relax and be themselves is an important part of building an empathetic culture. Because when you do that, you build trust, you build psychological safety, and brain science shows us that when we are under stress or we’re being punished for something, our executive functions shut down. They’re not working because we’re in survival mode. So, no one’s going to learn, no one’s going to grow if they’re in an environment of fear and anxiety and heaviness all the time.

So even if the work is not always fun, we can create an environment where we can have levity, where we can laugh at ourselves, where we can have awards for the best failure of the week, where we can have fun Slack channels that say, like, “This is the curated lunch channel, and show us what you had for lunch for our remote team.”

There are so many ideas and so many leaders that I spoke to for the book that shared some really interesting ideas with me, but the possibilities are endless. And you can solicit those ideas from your team. You don’t have to just, as the leader, come up with all the ideas for how to make work more fun. There is research out there as well, again, tangential to my work, that shows that if you have a friend at work, you’re more engaged, the quality of your output is better. And in environments where it matters, safety goes up.

So, do you have a friend at work? Not all your workmates need to be your best friends, but do you have a friend or a best friend at work? That actually goes a long way to creating an environment where people actually want to show up and do the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I feel like I’ve got a good sense of some top do’s and don’ts for self-awareness and self-care. Could we hear a couple of your faves on the last three: the clarity, the decisiveness, the joy?

Maria Ross
Clarity, I actually offered up, which is to create a document for your team of, like, a memorandum of understanding, is what one company called it that I interviewed for the book, but sort of a code of, not a code of conduct, but sort of a rules of engagement for your team. Document that, “What will we put up with? What don’t we put up with? What are we asking of people?”

It could be something like, “We do not have to check our emails on the weekends, but if there’s an emergency, the leader is allowed to text someone.” It could be, “On Fridays, we don’t have meetings.” It could be, “In meetings, don’t get upset if we challenge your idea. That’s part of our culture is to be additive and to always try to up-level everyone’s ideas. It doesn’t mean you’re being attacked. It means we’re adding to it.” So, things like that, whatever is true of your culture, there’s really no one example, but being able to document that.

We often talk about like the unsaid rules of our team or our culture. Don’t make them unsaid. Write them down. Make sure everyone understands them. Decisiveness, one tactic I came across that I really liked, was putting a limit on your decisions. Meaning, if you know you have trouble making decisions, put a decision date on your calendar as a task, and say, “I will make this decision by next Friday,” and let everyone on your team know, “Hey, I’m making this decision by next Friday, so weigh in before that because I’m going to be making the call on Friday.”

That actually gives you a forcing mechanism that now people are expecting you to make a decision, and they know they better get their input to you before then or it’s not going to be factored into the decision. And then for joy, I gave you some examples of companies that are using some really creative Slack channels, or doing really great team-building exercises that are not forced team building, forced fun for people. But can they tie their team building back to either a skill they’re trying to build or to their mission?

Can they do a community event that supports their mission? Can they do something that also is inclusive of everyone in the organization? So, when you’re planning, the default is, “Let’s do a Friday happy hour.” That’s not really that kind or empathetic to those in your organization who might be recovering alcoholics. It might not be kind to someone who’s got to go pick up their kid at daycare at 4:00 o’clock. So, are you doing a mix of activities or modalities for injecting joy into the workday so that it accommodates people with different needs?

Pete Mockaitis
Could I hear about a particularly brilliant team-building thing that’s not happy hours or forced fun?

Maria Ross
So, I interviewed a woman named Teri Schmidt. She runs a company called Stronger to Serve, and I interviewed her for my podcast, The Empathy Edge, because she had such a unique take on team building. They have created seven experiences that you can choose from, or you can work with them to customize your own, where they’re tying the activity into a company’s purpose or mission.

And what they’re doing is, the first half of it is actually a skill building, a professional development exercise. So, let’s say, one of her packages, it is helping folks deliver difficult performance reviews or deliver difficult information. So, at the beginning, they worked on delivering how they could up-level their ability to deliver tough information in a nurturing and compassionate way and in a confident way so it didn’t leave people confused.

And then the second half, and it’s escaping me what it was, they did some sort of a service project around that that helped them use the skills they had just learned at the beginning in the project they were doing, and they were doing a service project as a team. And her research shows that when you engage in service, in acts of service together, it actually bonds you as a team.

So, I thought that was a really clever way of trying to, like, feed, I hate to say kill birds with one stone anymore, so I say feed birds with one scone. Not only does it check off professional development, it checks off team-building, and it checks off acts of service related to your mission or your purpose. So, it kind of ticks all the boxes for people and creates a memorable experience that they can bond around, but that actually has meaning to their day-to-day work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. I dig a lot of these, and what I’m thinking the most about now is with clarity, it’s astounding how one word can mean completely different things to different people. And I remember I was chatting with a buddy of mine, and he said that he was thinking about his culture of his company. He was disappointed that someone quit and they gave two weeks’ notice.

And he said, “I understand that this is a norm in organizations and employment, but in our organization, we’re all about setting each other up for success, and this really didn’t do that because it put some folks in a tight spot. You try to replace and backfill and reshuffle things.” And he felt like that was a bit of a failure in terms of communicating the culture, is that apparently this message didn’t apply because they didn’t even, like, apologize or acknowledge, like, “I know.” It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, hey, I’m moving on, so, okay.”

And so, he sort of took that on himself, like, “Well, we really got to be clear about what do we really mean about setting each other up for success.” And I think that’s, in many ways, what makes cultures fun and interesting and distinctive from organization to organization. It’s like, “Hey, this is a normal practice in many places, and here it’s not acceptable, and this is why, and what’s behind it, and what setting each other up for success means in our vernacular.”

Maria Ross
Right, “And what does it mean here?” That is such a great example, Pete, because that’s a thing about assumptions. And that’s also an assumption based on generational. That’s an assumption based on maybe what group you’re from. So that is such a great example of the fact that when we make these assumptions about these unsaid rules, we set ourselves up for failure.

And there’s a great book I’m going to recommend, not mine, that’s called Unlocking Generational CODES. It’s by a generational expert named Ana Liotta, who you should have on the show, and it’s one of the clearest breakdowns of the differences in the generations, not because one’s right and one’s wrong, that we’re all formed by generational operating systems.

We’re all informed by our generational operating systems that usually stem from, within the generation, something, some seminal event that happened around we’re 10 or 11 years old. It actually shapes the way that we view things. And so, it went all the way from what she called a traditionalist, which were like way older, like my parents’ generation, like ‘30s, ‘20s, ‘30s born, down to what she called Nexters, because she actually wrote the book before the term Gen X or Gen Z came out. And also, she gave, like, tips on how to get around those communication snafus that you have. But what I loved about it was it talked about for each generation, within their operating code, what were the differences around how they view information, for example, how they view communication, how they view professionalism.

So, one example is some of the older generations look at information as something to be hoarded. It’s an aspect of power. It’s “The more information I have, the more important I am.” It’s not right or wrong. It’s just what was part of their DNA, part of their generational DNA.

If you look at Millennials and Gen Z, they see information as a catalyst, “The more people that have information, the more innovative we can be, the more we can problem-solve, the more we can get creative.” So, you can imagine someone with that perspective trying to talk to someone with the other perspective about making decisions or transparency or, “Why didn’t you tell us that was happening?”

All of those things that cause all of these barriers to us being able to connect and, more importantly, perform, it comes down to clarifying what do we mean by these things, and understanding that people will have different definitions of their own based on where they come from, based on their own experiences, based on their ages, based on their sexual orientation, based on so many factors that it behooves us, within a culture of a team, to say, “These are our rules for operating together, and we don’t want to make any assumptions.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to get your take, Maria, for folks who are all in on empathy, and so much so that maybe they even struggle with non-empathy, people-pleasing behaviors, and that’s just in them, any pro tips on how to shake that off and be empathetic and more effective in those times in which it’s you got to call someone out, to hold folks accountable, to point out mistakes or development opportunities and difficult things?

Maria Ross
As you go through the self-awareness phase and understand your behaviors and your actions and your triggers and your strengths and your challenges, you can then determine, “What are the other pillars that I need to shore up in order to be in a position where I can have these conversations without giving away the farm, without taking on extra work because I feel sorry for someone?”

Once those foundations are shored up for yourself, you have a bigger likelihood of success of having an empathetic interaction with someone that still gets the job done, that still holds them accountable. I spoke to one leader for the book, who is a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and I had worked for her at one time. And her ability to get to know her people was by design.

She would keep, you know, this sounds kind of creepy, she would keep files on people, like family’s names, kids’ birthdays, interests, all that kind of stuff so she could have more meaningful interactions with her team, so she could get to know them outside of work, and understand, “For this person, this is how I need to motivate them. For this other person, this is how I need to motivate them.” And she was a master at actually managing up as well, being empathetic to her managers and her bosses, because empathy flows both ways.

And when I spoke to her about this dilemma that a lot of folks are experiencing, especially around leaders who say, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much work to do, and now you want me to be a therapist?” she was very candid and said, “I am very clear that my role is to generate revenue and drive growth. My role is not to be a therapist.”

“I can still get to know someone personally so that I can motivate them and inspire them and have fun with them, and be clear with them in a way that they can understand because I know them. But I’m very clear that my primary goal is this. And I’m not here, I was not hired to help you figure out your boundaries with your mother-in-law. That’s for someone getting paid $300 an hour who is an actual therapist.”

So, what I loved about that is that we conflate these things that actually make it harder for us to lead with empathy because we don’t have to be someone’s therapist. It’s not the same thing as getting to know someone on a personal level. And so, I think that that’s one of the biggest tips I could give is make sure that you understand the difference between where your role and your goal ends, and some other modality or some other intervention is required.

And for this particular leader, she was very good about understanding that “If the conversation gets to that point, then I need to direct that person to the resources or the employee assistance programs that the company provides. That there’s a line between what I’m able to do as I’ve gotten to know this person and motivate them and have fun at work, to what this person might really need.”

And I think if we’re more aware that there is a line, that we don’t sort of bleed into the people that we are managing, I think that’s a better way for us to more strongly set our boundaries. And I really like sharing that story because it’s about clarity of boundaries, but it’s also about clarity of role and clarity of goals, and why she is there in that company, what she’s there to do, and what she’s not there to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Maria, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Maria Ross
No, I think we covered it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Maria Ross
A favorite quote of mine is from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, basically, I don’t remember the lead into this, but it’s how it’s so hard to please everybody because you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. So do what you think is right. That has actually been a really big driving force for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Maria Ross
Drive by Daniel Pink, and it’s about understanding the secret factors that motivate us. So, I just think that whole field of motivation is fascinating and his books a great read. It’s called Drive.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you?

Maria Ross
I think it might be the closing tag to my podcast, which is something I came up with when I was writing The Empathy Edge. It’s that “Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Maria Ross
They can visit my main hub at Red-Slice.com. They can find all the socials there. I’m on Instagram @redslicemaria. And my podcast is at TheEmpathyEdge.com, or on your favorite podcast player.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Maria Ross
Yes. Do not fall into the false narrative that empathy is weak. Bring it into your career, bring it into your work, bring it into your life. And if you practice it at work, it may just spill over into your personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maria, this is fun. I wish you much good empathetic moments.

Maria Ross
Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.