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Beyond Cookie-Cutter Culture: Why Your Company Core Values Deserve More Than Laminated Posters

Micah Kessel on November 22, 2025

I spent many days a year standing in a room with dozens of managers. A 2 hour community building training. A ½ day Inclusive Leadership Training. Microtraining digital empathy training taking place over two months. Over time, something has shifted in how I understand the work we’re all trying to do to make performance culture both work and feel better.

What Learning and Development Seems to Be Becoming

I open the newsletters from top Learning and Development programs. Look at conference agendas. Check what L&D training companies are selling.

The same words appear: Managing Conflict. Feedback. One-on-ones. Delegation. Performance management. Underperformance. All meant to somehow future proof your workforce.

These are the “core skills.” They matter – managers do need to know how to give feedback, how to run a one-on-one. How to care.

But my memory isn’t that short and I also see what’s missing. A few years ago, the industry talked differently. We used words like acknowledgment, curiosity, reflection, inclusion, belonging. For many, empathy training felt important and for the best, it sat at the center of leadership development as I still believe it should because empathy is not a goal, but the means to many goals as our mission and vision statements reflect.

But then the backlash came as politics shaped economy, shaped stakeholder expectations, shaped mandates to People teams. Those words – the ones about how humans show up with each other – got pushed aside. Too soft. Too risky. Too close to the third rail (for many) of DEI.

 

So we as an industry retreated to mechanical safety. How to build a performance management system. How to structure a one-on-one. How to deliver feedback using the SBI model.

But the rub is, most companies already have these systems in place, so the idea of building these systems or operationalizing them is a misnomer. Even startups have rudimentary versions they’re running naturally. So often, L&D internal initiatives or external consultants have a reinvent the wheel mindset. As I once heard Richard Sera say at a commencement keynote, ‘If it ain’t broken, break it’. But that’s the job of artists. The job of People teams, is to acknowledge the imperfections of plans, programs and people and still find a way to make it all work, fixing as we fly.

So we as an industry retreated to mechanical safety. How to build a performance management system. How to structure a one-on-one. How to deliver feedback using the SBI model.

But the rub is, most companies already have these systems in place, so the idea of building these systems or operationalizing them is a misnomer. Even startups have rudimentary versions they’re running naturally. So often, L&D internal initiatives or external consultants have a reinvent the wheel mindset. As I once heard Richard Sera say at a commencement keynote, ‘If it ain’t broken, break it’. But that’s the job of artists. The job of People teams, is to acknowledge the imperfections of plans, programs and people and still find a way to make it all work, fixing as we fly.

The More Ideal Question

So, for the sane, the question isn’t how to build these systems from scratch.

The question is: How do you infuse what actually matters – acknowledgment, curiosity, empathy, reflection, belonging – into what you’re already doing?  If you look at our own Organizations page, you’ll notice there’s a lack of buzzwords and this is in part, the reason why. Because we don’t think you should be focusing on the skill as a noun, but rather the emotional capacity to engage in whatever you’re doing successfully. 

Why don’t we do it by bringing core values alive? You already have them and you’re SUPPOSED to care about them. If a new manager on day one asks, ‘how much do we apply our core values’ and the person answering doesn’t have a completely convincing answer, what foot do you suppose that new manager is starting off on? Hint: it’s not the right one. 

Making Core Values Real

Because organizations have values that once upon a time, someone influential thought a lot about: Innovation. Integrity. Collaboration. Respect. Customer-centricity.

For most companies, these become beautiful words on a poster in the break room.

Time and again, as I train managers across healthcare and education and other industries, I see the same gap. Those values don’t live in how promotions happen. They don’t live in recognition and reward systems. They don’t live in talent reviews. They don’t live in internal communications. They don’t live in mentorship programs.

Take “respect” as a value. A lot of companies have it. For most, it’s just a concept, living on a page, living in a document, living in an HR folder.

It doesn’t have to be. Managers could be asking themselves: What does respect look like when deciding who gets promoted? How do you build it into your talent review process? What specific behaviors demonstrate respect in your internal communications?

Suddenly, respect isn’t a poster. It’s a practice woven into how work happens.

Interweaving Core Values

I’d venture to guess you don’t need a brand new promotion system. Tweaked, yes. But before you spend those legal and consulting dollars, take your existing advancement criteria and ask: How does curiosity show up in how we discuss promotion with potential candidates? Where does acknowledgment fit into a reviews discussion checklist? Bring those words together and ask: what would it look like if empathy were systemically part of the protocol in how we evaluate people?

You don’t need a new recognition program. Take your current reward systems and infuse them with your core values. If “innovation” is a value, what does that mean for what you celebrate? Do you acknowledge learning from failures?

You don’t need another mentorship revamp initiative. Ask: How do mentors and sponsors embody our values of reflection in their relationships? Not through a slide deck or a brief – through their actual behaviors that are designed into meeting processes.Not something new. Taking what you have and making it coherent with who you say you are.

The win-win of this approach trickles down to every individual contributor in obvious ways but also nuanced ones that shouldn’t be underestimated. For example, most employees hate hearing about a new system they have to learn or adapt. But if you take what you’re already doing and make it better, make it more human—you’ve already solved 90% of the battle that that new system never will. 

What This Looks Like in Program Planning

When we work with organizations, let’s not teach performance management in the abstract or primarily through frameworks. Let’s teach through the context of your specific values. If “integrity” is a core value, we explore what it means to conduct talent reviews with integrity. To build promotion systems with integrity. To create internal communications where integrity lives.

We also work with individual contributors learning to manage up and here it’s no different. Nor with early managers learning to lead. Or mid-level managers navigating complexity. Especially with senior executives shaping culture as part of their legacy. Even with customer-facing teams. EVEN with technical teams who communicate differently. Everyone can ‘get it’.

However these groups think about your core values currently, you need to meet them where they are. Sometimes that starts with a keynote (by us or someone else who ‘get’s this). Sometimes it’s a half-day workshop split across two afternoons. Sometimes it’s an asynchronous program—10 minutes every two weeks, with cohort discussions and coaching office hours. Many ways but they all need to integrate who you are with what you do.

The format matters less than the principle: That why, even though it’s not the most profitable approach, we’re not selling a prefab package. We’re thinking with you about how to take your values off the poster and weave them into your systems.

What To Do Right Now

Pull up your company values. Pick one.

Think about eg. your promotion and advancement system. Your recognition and reward programs. Your talent review process. Your mentorship structure.

Ask: If I watched these systems in action for the next month, would I be able to identify that value embedded clearly in that process: so clearly that every person involved would be able to highlight where it takes place and how they take part?

If the answer is no—or even “I’m not sure”—you’ve identified a gap. Not a gap in your values. Not a gap in your systems. A gap in the interweaving of them.

That’s the work. The real work of culture change. That’s part of your next 30 days. 

For us at Empathable, this isn’t about running the same workshop we ran last week for a different industry.

It’s about a genuine human conversation. Understanding where you are. What your people need. What your constraints are to become truly core-values driven.

In a sea of easy AI-powered solutions and cookie-cutter training programs, you deserve a caring human thinker. Someone who will sit down and think with you about how to take who you want to be aspirationally and make that real in the day-to-day experience of your managers and teams.

If you’re thinking: “Oh, thank God I can actually talk to a real person here” – then you’re having exactly the right conversation. If not, then you should be talking with someone like us.

—–

If you’d like to explore how this approach might work for your organization, let’s start with curiosity. Let’s have a real conversation about where you are and where you want to be.

Why Your Most Caring Leaders Struggle to Scale Their Empathy

Micah Kessel on May 23, 2025

Most organizations, in the face of two managers with similar competencies, will naturally promote their most empathetic—those who excel at building trust, not only understanding individual needs but also embracing different perspectives and creating psychological safety within small teams. But when teams expand, the very skills that made them successful with 10-15 people often fail them when they’re suddenly responsible for 50, 80, or hundreds of employees. According to HBR, in 2023, 70% of newly promoted managers struggle with the transition from managing individuals to managing systems. Whether organizations realize it or not, this reveals a gap in operationalizing empathy, and with never-ending restructuring for strategic and financial considerations, those who do not receive direct care from their manager often fall to the wayside, losing their sense of purpose, engagement, and ultimately performing less well.

Better companies teach managers to be better listeners and emphasize the importance of psychological safety and taking different perspectives into consideration when helping a team move forward, but they don’t show them how to build that at scale. This is why many individual contributors lose a sense of their considerations being taken seriously and therewith, lose a sense of meaning. That’s sad considering there are effective ways to show you care about a group of people without a lot of personal time and it’s exactly that that helps ever-changing teams move forward together.

As you may know by now, at Empathable, we believe leaders learn better when we go beyond teaching them concepts – but rather, through real stories from real professionals. So instead of presenting a traditional analysis and set of approaches, I’ll take you through a real story from someone who I’m calling Akira Johns to respect their privacy.  This story  illustrates how one can scale individual empathetic talents to larger teams where you don’t necessarily have direct impact.

When Everything Changes

Imagine Akira Johns, a burgeoning manager at a Fortune 1000 who thought she liked her job, staring at her computer screen this morning, processing the announcement that: ‘due to company restructuring post acquisition, her team of 15 direct reports was about to become 80 people across three departments.’

Akira had built her reputation on being a thoughtful leader—knowing each team member personally, remembering their challenges, and ensuring everyone felt heard in meetings. But 80 people? How could she make the time to maintain those meaningful connections? She’d need three of herself. How would she know when someone was struggling? How could she gather diverse perspectives when she couldn’t possibly meet with everyone regularly? How would she keep everyone engaged?

Somewhat hopefully, she saw the next message in her inbox, which was from Akira’s beloved learning and development director who pinged her to let her know that with these big changes, she’d been selected to be part of a cohort of 100 burgeoning managers would be working with Empathable, an organization that specializes in scaling the weaving of empathy into essential leadership skills—starting with a facilitated kickoff, then a light-touch deep immersion learning experience. Once every two weeks for the next six months, Akira would join cohorts with four other managers to walk in the shoes of other seasoned managers coupled with best in class expert perspectives. People who had already considered deeply how to take into account all aspects of scaling empathy, taking no more than one hour of their time per month.

But this hour wasn’t filled with random perspective and opinion sharing, but rather the sharing of personal stories that help enrich each other, much like people have learned from one another for generations through the power of storytelling.

Akira was aware in advance that she’d learn the following:

  • Perspective-gathering protocols that her direct reports could implement with their teams
  • Communication templates that maintained her values while allowing for personalization
  • Structures for different types of feedback loops that ensured diverse voices reached decision-makers
  • Recognition systems that reinforced empathetic behaviors across all levels
  • How to leverage AI to condense longer-form shares in ways that still allow everyone to feel represented and give summaries for leaders to make informed decisions
Office Connections in Nature

Why Stories Change Everything

But here’s the thing: learning those conceptually doesn’t make the impact that we want it to. Empathable was offering the opportunity to learn that through stories.

Abstract concepts about “scaling empathy” don’t stick. But experiencing the challenge through someone else’s real story? That creates the kind of visceral understanding that drives behavioral change. Through immersive scenarios, Akira didn’t just learn about perspective-gathering systems—she experienced what it felt like to be a manager who had to make decisions affecting hundreds of people without adequate input.

This is the difference between intellectual knowledge and embodied wisdom. Data and facts don’t generally change people’s viewpoints, as stories do. Being able to leverage storytelling at scale is a fundamental starting point for how to bridge the empathy gap.

The First Test: From Theory to Practice

When her first major challenge came—rolling out a strategic initiative across her newly expanded team—Akira applied what she’d learned. Instead of attempting impossible one-on-ones with 80 people, she created structured listening sessions and designed feedback systems that ensured every voice could be heard.

Most importantly, she understood how to help those she did have direct access to impart empathy to their own teams. Making managers capable of building and maintaining empathetic cultures happens through an almost train-the-trainer methodology of allowing them to get better at practicing the deeper meaning of empathy that Empathable believes in—which is the ability to acknowledge the meaningfulness of one another’s stories to be as valuable as our own and get better at being curious about each other’s experiences.

The Scaffolding Effect

The cohort-based learning that Akira received during her training is something that she learned how to scale out so that she could create sub-cohorts within the groups she was managing. Each sub-cohort gave each other the opportunity to share experiences and created structured ways that those cohorts could communicate with each other so that they wouldn’t get caught up in opinion sharing or disagreement but actually in the value of each other’s experiences.

The Transformation: When Systems Create Culture

The results surprised everyone. “I’ve never felt so heard by a senior leader I barely know,” one team member commented during an anonymous survey. When a national social justice issue later affected employees, Akira’s systematic approach created what felt like a supportive community despite the organization’s size.

Her team of 80 ended up having higher performance metrics than her original team of 15, and she maintained one of the highest retention rates she’d ever experienced over the next two years. As a testament to the authentic connections her systems fostered, she was recently asked to officiate the wedding of one of her team leads.

The Ripple Effect

What happened to Akira’s team illustrates a fundamental truth: beyond empathy being personalized, when it becomes systemized and operationalized, it scales exponentially. Instead of one leader trying to be empathetic to 80 people, Akira created conditions where 80 people could be empathetic to each other.

This is the difference between empathy as an individual skill and empathy as an organizational capability. The former breaks down under scale; the latter gets stronger with it.

Group of adults sitting around a table dressed in business attire with a background of bridges across a chasm

The Blueprint: How Organizations Can Bridge the Empathy Gap

Akira’s success wasn’t accidental—it followed a specific pattern that any organization can replicate:

  1. Start with Experience, Not Theory Effective empathy training begins with learning how to listen to and share experiences and value those experiences to be as meaningful as your own, then builds frameworks to be able to share one another’s stories in a way that is both respectful but scales out the knowledge that stories contain that concepts often do not.
  2. Focus on Systems, Not Just Skills Don’t just teach managers to be more empathetic; teach them to create empathetic systems. Current perspective-gathering protocols and feedback mechanisms often feel very mechanical and don’t get to the heart of questions that allow people to share in longer form what their actual thoughts and feelings are. Choosing from a scale of one to five can be fine for things like engagement but doesn’t really afford the opportunities that longer-form sharing provides. With AI, survey taking can now accept longer-form thoughts that allow for more informed decision-making.
  3. Create Scaffolding for Scale The goal isn’t to make every manager capable of personal empathy with hundreds of people—it’s to make every manager capable of building and maintaining empathetic cultures within their sphere of influence through structured storytelling and experience-sharing systems.
  4. Use Cohort Learning That Scales Akira’s bi-weekly sessions with other managers weren’t just about learning content; they were about processing the challenges of implementing empathetic leadership at scale. This cohort approach can be replicated within organizations, creating networks of support and accountability.

The Future of Empathetic Leadership

The challenge that once kept Akira awake at night became her greatest opportunity for growth—and a model for her organization. What she discovered is that empathy doesn’t diminish when scaled; it transforms from a personal attribute into an organizational superpower.

office workers with tree

As organizations continue to grow and become more distributed, the ability to create empathetic systems will become a core competitive advantage. The leaders who master this won’t just manage larger teams more effectively—they’ll create cultures where empathy becomes everyone’s responsibility, not just their own.

The empathy gap isn’t insurmountable. With the right approach, your most caring leaders can become your most effective culture architects. They just need to learn how to build bridges through stories and systems instead of having individual conversations across an ever-widening chasm.


At Empathable, we help organizations develop leaders who can operationalize empathy at scale through immersive, story-based learning experiences. If Akira’s journey resonates with challenges in your organization, we’d love to explore how experiential learning can help bridge your empathy gap. Feel free to schedule time to connect here.

Redefining Empathy 

Micah Kessel on February 28, 2025

(+ Learning to Train Empathy the Right Way.)

We’ve got empathy all wrong. For years, I’ve been designing research-based immersive experiences that help people see through others’ points of view, and I’ve shared these experiences with about 20,000 people. Through this work, and through my time as a design lead at an emotions research lab, I’ve discovered something profound about empathy that challenges everything we think we know about it.

When people talk about empathy, there’s this assumption that we all know what it means. But if you looked it up in the dictionary, you’d find a definition that’s scientifically impossible: “the ability to understand how another person feels.”

Most people think of empathy as something you activate in the moment of disagreement—a switch you flip when tensions rise. But real empathy doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a foundation you build slowly over time, like a bank account you need to fill before you can make a withdrawal. Think about your oldest friends—you can disagree fiercely but still want to talk the next day. That’s not because you’re naturally more empathetic with them. It’s because you’ve built up a reservoir of shared experiences that creates understanding beyond any single disagreement.

This misunderstanding of empathy reflects a broader misconception about how emotions work. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and author of “How Emotions Are Made,” puts it this way: “Your brain is not reacting to the world. It’s helping to create the world you experience.” This means your emotions are not universal—they’re constructed by your unique brain based on your unique experiences.

Here’s the truth: we’ll never understand how anybody else feels. We barely understand how we feel ourselves half the time. If I say I’m feeling happy, it’s not the same as your happiness. If someone says they’re feeling grumpy, I might say, “I understand,” but I don’t—not really. I’ve had a completely different set of life experiences that make me think about grumpiness in a different way.

As psychologist Paul Bloom notes, “Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background.” This misunderstanding creates problems. We end up thinking we understand someone else’s feelings when we’re statistically more wrong than right.

So what is empathy, then? Here’s what I’ve found:

Empathy is a verb—something you actively do. It’s the ability to acknowledge that someone else’s experiences are just as real and meaningful as your own. Not their opinions or perspectives, which might be harmful or wrong, but the life experiences that brought them to those perspectives. You don’t have to validate someone’s conclusions to acknowledge the reality of their journey.

Let me share an example from a recent session in a small town in Texas. I facilitated an experience where participants “walked in someone else’s shoes” by watching a point-of-view video. In most settings, when people watch an experience like this, the default response is to share opinions and perspectives. “I think the manager should have said X.” “I don’t agree with how they talked about heritage months.” “That kind of initiative makes me uncomfortable.” The room quickly divides into camps—those who agree with each other versus those who don’t.

This pattern of opinion-sharing might feel productive, but it actually reinforces division. It helps us identify who already agrees with us, creating insular bubbles of shared perspective. It’s precisely this mechanism that has contributed to our increasingly polarized society. We’ve optimized for opinion alignment rather than human connection.

Sometimes I’m even concerned that, subconsciously, this hunger for shared narrative is why war can be such an attractive proposition for some. Historically, war gives people a common story, a collective experience that helps them feel like part of a greater whole. It creates the togetherness that humans deeply crave. But war is perhaps the worst possible way to achieve that sense of narrative connection. It’s destructive, traumatic, and leaves lasting scars across generations—all to fulfill a need that could be met through simply sharing our stories with one another in times of peace.

That’s exactly what we practiced in our session that day. After watching the brief interaction in the break room, I guided participants away from opinions and toward personal stories.

Sharing a meal

I shared first. I talked about how my partner loves these Trinidadian snacks called doubles—fried shells filled with chickpeas that cost just two dollars each. I described how visiting these shops brings something grounding to my day: the Trinidadian women working together, chatting over loud music, making food with their hands. For a brief moment, I get to be part of Trinidadian culture, and it enriches my life.

Then one participant shared her story. She had lived in Saudi Arabia during high school when her father worked there. She described being invited to a Saudi home for what they called a “goat grab”—a meal where everyone sits on the floor with a large tablecloth. The hostess would throw pieces of food perfectly onto each person’s spot. They ate with their hands—goat meat that tasted like lamb, rice with delicious spices. She explained that despite not speaking the same language as her hosts, they could still communicate, and it became one of her most treasured cultural experiences.

Another participant shared his story about a Jamaican meal during a cruise vacation. He described how his wife was picky about food, but they both approached the unfamiliar Jamaican cooking with an open mind, not wanting to offend their hosts. He talked about trying spicy foods and unusual fruits that were outside his comfort zone, recognizing that what seemed strange to him was everyday life for the Jamaicans. “They were trying to bring you into their world,” he reflected.

Empathy makes everything better, but in high-stakes moments—with your boss, your loved ones, someone you manage—it’s absolutely game-changing. Those moments of tension or conflict aren’t when you build empathy; they’re when you need it most. If you’ve been practicing empathy, if you’ve built up that foundation of human connection through sharing and acknowledging stories, you’ll have the resources to navigate those challenging moments not just without catastrophe, but as opportunities for growth.

Think about it like this: empathy broadly improves your world and mission, but there’s also an acute value in those moments that really matter—the ones where people often just blow it. Having practiced empathy and built relationships with empathy at their core is what makes those moments less catastrophic and potentially transformative.

This understanding of empathy as an active practice—something we build through sharing and acknowledging stories—is why at Empathable, we create programs that help people walk in others’ shoes through point-of-view experiences and real-time dialogue. These programs give participants the opportunity to practice being empathetic in a supportive environment, strengthening that crucial muscle before they need it most.

The results have been remarkable. Our initial studies have shown not just that clients enjoy and benefit from Empathable, but that we’re seeing an 85% completion rate (compared to the industry average of 20%), a 42% increase in empathy scores (which correlates directly with patient satisfaction), and a 28% increase in feelings of belonging (a key indicator for retention).

But numbers only tell part of the story. The real impact happens in those everyday moments when someone chooses curiosity over judgment, story-sharing over opinion-sharing, connection over division.

So here’s my challenge: practice once this week. Share a story with someone—a friend, spouse, or colleague—and ask them, “What story in your life brought you to that viewpoint?” Be present as they share. Good work should make you feel good, and I believe this will.

Because in the end, we are all collections of millions of memories that make us who we are. And those stories deserve to have time.

If you found this article valuable, I regularly speak on this topic for organizations and would be happy to discuss how we can support your people. Feel free to schedule time to connect here.

The Human Element: Reimagining Job Descriptions in the Age of AI

Micah Kessel on January 12, 2025

Written by Jennifer Brown and Micah Wonjoon Kessel (CEO of Empathable)

Read our summary published by Work in Progress here.

In the quiet corners of boardrooms and the bustling halls of tech startups, a revolution is brewing. As artificial intelligence reshapes our professional landscape, we face a profound question: Will this technological transformation enhance our humanity, or diminish it?

At the recent Work in Progress conference, a diverse coalition of minds—investors, organizational leaders, futurists, and corporate coaches—gathered to explore this critical intersection of human potential and machine capability. Their insights reveal a surprising truth: the future of work isn’t about artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence—it’s about redefining what it means to be human in an AI-integrated world.

The Paradox of Progress

The data suggests an intriguing story. A focused study by workplace experts at the conference, examining professional evolution across three eras—before the internet, today, and an AI-integrated future—revealed a fascinating paradox. The group’s assessment showed metrics for agency and fulfillment soaring (agency rising dramatically from 43 to 84 in recent years), while psychological safety remains stubbornly challenged, plateauing at 65 in their projected AI future.

Degree of Abundance Graph
Degree of Abundance

This isn’t just about numbers from a group poll—it’s about human experience. The pre-internet workplace, described by participants as “transactional” and “dehumanizing,” is giving way to something more nuanced. Today’s professionals report greater autonomy and purpose, yet struggle with what one participant called “overwhelmed information flows.” The message is clear: technological progress alone doesn’t guarantee human flourishing.

The Great Rebalancing

Perhaps the most telling insight emerged from our discussion of time. The perception of time—that most precious and finite resource—shows a remarkable transformation. In the AI-integrated future, our experts envision workplaces that enable “more time and less work,” fostering what they call “seamless experiences” and providing space to “harvest creativity.”

This isn’t about working less—it’s about working differently. The traditional model of time management is being replaced by what one participant termed an “infinity model” of leadership, where expertise, not hierarchy, determines who leads. This shift promises to fundamentally alter how we perceive productivity and purpose in our professional lives.

The Human Advantage

As artificial intelligence masters routine tasks, the working group’s insights revealed an unexpected truth: the most “human” elements of work—creativity, emotional intelligence, ethical judgment—become increasingly valuable. The future workplace demands what we might call “full-spectrum humans”—professionals who can seamlessly integrate technological proficiency with deeply human capabilities.

This transformation demands a fundamental reimagining of leadership roles across organizations. The workplace experts outlined how various positions must evolve to meet the challenges of an AI-integrated future:

C-Suite Evolution

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

  • Champion decentralized decision-making between human and AI teams
  • Foster a culture of continual learning and adaptability
  • Lead efforts to align corporate vision with broader societal goals
  • Ensure transparent and ethical AI implementation

Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

  • Integrate purpose-driven metrics into financial planning
  • Leverage AI for optimizing resources while prioritizing human well-being
  • Analyze implications of flexible work structures and creative sabbaticals

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

  • Orchestrate seamless collaboration between human and AI systems
  • Ensure operations prioritize psychological safety and fulfillment
  • Implement systems to measure team alignment with organizational purpose

Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)

  • Prioritize emotional intelligence in leadership development
  • Develop AI-enhanced programs supporting human creativity
  • Address systemic inequities through innovative tools and policies

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

  • Integrate storytelling and human connection in AI-driven campaigns
  • Build trust through transparent AI usage
  • Align brand identity with societal values and purpose

Chief Information/Technology Officer (CIO/CTO)

  • Lead ethical AI innovation that augments rather than replaces human potential
  • Design systems supporting decentralized ownership
  • Monitor and address AI biases proactively

Beyond Traditional Roles

For Venture Capitalists

  • Evaluate startups based on human empowerment potential
  • Advocate for funding models prioritizing creativity and sustainability
  • Guide founders in building psychologically safe organizations

For Board Members

  • Ensure oversight balances societal impact with returns
  • Act as stewards of ethical AI deployment
  • Support workforce flexibility and creativity
  • Promote alignment between organizational and global challenges

For Managers

  • Guide individuals in aligning roles with personal purpose
  • Shift from directing to coaching and facilitation
  • Use AI to identify personalized development opportunities
  • Balance workload optimization with human well-being

For Individual Contributors

  • Commit to continuous learning in human-AI collaboration
  • Cultivate creativity and innovation using AI tools
  • Adapt to hybrid human-AI teamwork
  • Seek purpose-aligned opportunities
  • Champion workplace equity and inclusion

Beyond these evolving roles, experts envision novel positions emerging to meet future needs:

  • Regeneration Specialists who ensure organizations give back to their ecosystems
  • Nervous System Regulators who help manage the overwhelming pace of change
  • Chief Potential Officers who guide individuals and organizations beyond scarcity mindsets

The Ethics Imperative

Yet amidst this optimistic vision, the discussion surfaced a critical concern. As one participant pointedly asked, “Who is advocating for humans?” The data shows the “Elimination of Threats” metric remaining stubbornly flat across time periods (46, 48, 47), suggesting that technological advancement alone doesn’t address fundamental human vulnerabilities.

This leads to perhaps our most important finding: the need for what we might call “ethical infrastructure” in the AI-integrated workplace. “Just because we can do something,” one participant noted, “doesn’t mean we should. And even if we should, it doesn’t mean we should do it right now.”

A Protopian Vision Forward

What emerges from this exploration isn’t a utopian fantasy, but rather what we might call a “protopian” vision—a future of incremental yet meaningful progress, grounded in reciprocity and shared humanity. This future demands new approaches to:

  • Leadership: Embracing fluid, expertise-based authority
  • Education: Bridging technological advancement with human understanding
  • Workplace Design: Creating environments that enhance rather than diminish human potential

The transformation of work in the AI era isn’t just about adapting to new technologies—it’s about consciously shaping these technologies to enhance our humanity. As one participant concluded, “For organizations to thrive, they must evolve to play a role in the kindness and regeneration of resources, shaping a society rooted in compassion.”

The Path Ahead

The future of work stands before us not as a fixed destination, but as a journey of continuous adaptation and growth. The insights from this gathering of workplace leaders suggest that success in this new era will belong to organizations that can balance technological advancement with human flourishing, creating environments where both machines and humans can achieve their highest potential.

As we navigate this transformation, one truth becomes clear: the future of work isn’t about artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence—it’s about artificial intelligence enhancing human wisdom, creativity, and purpose. In this light, the challenge before us isn’t just to adapt to new technologies, but to use them as tools for unlocking the full spectrum of human potential.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform work—it’s whether we’ll use this transformation to create a more human workplace. The answer lies not in our machines, but in ourselves.

How Belonging and Empathy Reduce Turnover

Dillon Hill on May 30, 2022

People have been leaving their jobs in droves over the past few years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in December, and a record-breaking 10.9 million jobs were vacant at the end of 2021. This trend doesn’t seem to be leveling off anytime soon either; 43% of the global workforce is likely to consider changing jobs in the coming year, and that number is as high as 52% among Gen-Z and millennials. This “Great Resignation” has made it imperative for businesses to understand why employees are leaving and how to fix it. Unfortunately, many companies assume their employees are quitting for the wrong reasons.

Two factors come readily to mind to explain increases in job turnover: unsatisfactory wages and issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). With the economic bust brought on by the pandemic, and the fact that both women and Black professionals have been leading the charge in resignations since 2021, these assumptions are certainly not unfounded. But companies that have spent time and money ameliorating these issues have not seen as big a return on their investment as they might have expected. 

In the U.S. alone, about $8 billion per year is spent on diversity trainings, and yet there is little to no evidence that these trainings have made companies more diverse. And though the average salary increase has risen 21% from 2021 to 2022, this does not seem to influence turnover intentions much – perhaps because a huge amount of the increase in satisfaction when switching to a higher-paying job, at least 80%, is due to improvements other than wages. The failure of diversity and wage-increase initiatives shows that there is a fundamental mismatch between why companies think their employees are quitting and why they are actually quitting. 

So why are employees leaving their companies now more than ever? To answer this, it can help to empathize with these former employees, to try to understand their feelings and perspective. Walking a mile in their shoes might help us understand the forces pulling them toward other obligations in their life or pushing them away from their current company. Moreover, being more empathetic not only helps us understand why employees are resigning, but could itself help reduce employee turnover. Insights from behavioral science research suggest that cultivating empathy in the workplace – including a sense of belonging among all workers and greater emotional intelligence among managers – is vital for employee retention.

Employees Crave an Empathetic Workplace

An empathetic workplace is one of the top needs of working professionals, who are keenly aware when their company lacks empathy. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) surveyed nearly 2,500 U.S. workers to better understand how they experience empathy in the workplace – and how this impacts their employers. Critically, 97% of those surveyed believed empathy is essential for a healthy workplace culture. What’s more, employees who rated their organization low in empathy were also more than twice as likely to have actively searched for a new job in the past six months. Another survey of workers conducted by Businessolver found that 72% of employees would consider leaving their current company if it displayed less empathy, but 92% said they would be more likely to stay with their current company if it empathized with their needs more.

These findings highlight a key insight: company culture has a massive impact on employee retention. In one study that analyzed data from over 34 million U.S. workers’ online profiles, toxic corporate culture was far and away the top reason employees left their companies – over ten times more important for predicting attrition than compensation. The biggest factors contributing to toxic workplace culture all orbit around a lack of empathy: failure to promote DEI, workers feeling disrespected, and unethical behavior, to name a few.

If you are feeling dismayed by your workplace’s lack of empathy, take heart! The good news is that companies can improve their culture of empathy with some relatively minor tweaks. Research in behavioral science tells us that active trainings designed to increase empathy in business settings really do work. Even simple adjustments can help cultivate a more empathetic company culture.

Two Ways to Increase Workplace Empathy

There are many different expressions of empathy, such as perspective taking, active listening, and validating someone’s feelings. Behavioral science research reveals that two components in particular can drastically reduce turnover and are relatively easy to implement in the workplace: a sense of belonging and emotional intelligence.

#1 – Help Employees Feel Like They Belong

We all want to feel included – in our personal lives, and also at work. When employees feel that they belong, everyone benefits. Research conducted by Harvard Business Review with BetterUp found that high belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. For a 10,000-person company, this represents annual savings of more than $52 million. Unfortunately, many companies fail to make their employees feel included, resulting in greater attrition. One survey’s findings suggest that nearly half of employees in the U.S. have left a job because they didn’t feel like they belonged, and over a third have quit because they had difficulty connecting with colleagues. 

Behavioral science research reveals a similar trend. Even more so than outright harassment or bullying, social ostracism in the workplace predicted worse employee wellbeing, less employee engagement, and higher turnover rates three years later. BetterUp also conducted a behavioral experiment with over 2,000 live participants to measure the costs of exclusion. Workers were assigned to a team with two other “participants” (bots programmed to act like teammates) to play a collaborative virtual ball-toss game. Included workers had teammates that consistently threw them the ball, whereas excluded workers were rarely tossed the ball. After this, workers completed a simple task where they could earn money for their entire team. Again and again, excluded participants put less effort into the task than included participants, even though it meant sacrificing their own earnings as well. Excluding others causes them to give less effort to their teams.

So how do we help employees feel like they belong? One easy way to do this is to encourage employees to discuss common experiences and share their stories. A study of 9-1-1 dispatchers tested a six-week email intervention that did just this. Workers who participated in the intervention were sent a weekly email from a supervisor or department leader that contained two key elements: a work-related story from another dispatcher, and a prompt that encouraged workers to reflect on and anonymously share a positive professional experience their peers might relate to. The results were astounding: resignation rates were cut by half just four months after the intervention concluded. When workers had a platform to give advice, share common experiences, and reflect on how their professional experiences could support their peers, their sense of belonging grew stronger, and turnover decreased in the process.

Key Takeaway: Give employees opportunities to share common experiences with each other 

#2 – Cultivate Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Most organizations pick leaders or managers in part because they demonstrate general intelligence or competence. But a key type of intelligence often overlooked here is emotional intelligence. An emotionally intelligent person exhibits awareness, understanding, control, and expression of their emotions in interpersonal contexts. Employees at all levels can benefit from improving their emotional intelligence, but research shows that the emotional intelligence of team leaders is directly related to their workers’ likelihood of staying with their company. About 23% of employees’ engagement with their work is influenced by their sense of their direct supervisor’s emotional intelligence. This is in part because organizational leaders set the tone for the emotional culture of the entire workplace. In one study, managers with lower emotional intelligence were also more likely to cultivate a negative, unempathetic organizational culture. As a result, employees of these managers were 38% more likely to intend to resign in the next six months.

Improving managers’ emotional intelligence may seem like no small feat, but a few simple nudges can encourage leaders to be more aware, in control, and expressive of their feelings. One way to do this is to encourage managers to use more emotionally intelligent language when they communicate with their team. One study found that when supervisors used supportive, empathetic language and emphasized the unique value of each employee to contribute to their organization’s mission, this fostered a more positive organizational culture. Whether or not supervisors used this sort of language accounted for 30% of employees’ feelings of connectedness to the organization. Understanding and encouraging communications from leaders can radically improve workers’ relationship to their organization.

Another way to cultivate a more emotionally intelligent workplace is to prompt people to write about their feelings surrounding their work. Researchers in one experiment used this technique and tested whether it helped workers feel more in control and aware of their emotions. Participating employees wrote about their feelings and thoughts connected to their last workday or an especially important workday in the past for 20 minutes a day over a three-day period. The prompt encouraged workers to reflect in writing on how they could effectively perceive, use, understand, and regulate emotions in themselves and others in workplace contexts. Two weeks later, employees who participated in the intervention scored 15% higher on emotional intelligence metrics compared to employees who wrote about neutral, non-work experiences. The intervention also reduced reported experiences of workplace hostility and exclusionary behavior, showing that emotional intelligence can cultivate a culture of belonging, which, as we’ve discussed, is critical for reducing turnover.

Key Takeaway: Encourage leaders (and team members) to reflect on, write about, and communicate their work-related emotions with empathy and understanding

The Bottom Line

Creating a workplace of empathy pays off for businesses. The top 10 companies in the 2015 Global Empathy Index increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10, and generated 50% more earnings. The virtues of empathy are even more pronounced when it comes to reducing the costs associated with high turnover and low employee engagement. According to a Businessolver survey, 60% of employees in the U.S. would be willing to take slightly less pay, and 77% would be willing to work longer hours, if their employer showed empathy, but 78% would leave an employer for equal pay if the other company was empathetic.

Research in behavioral science shows that companies can make their workplace more empathetic in two key ways: promoting a greater sense of belonging among employees and higher emotional intelligence among leaders. These two components of an empathetic workplace can be improved with simple but effective practices. Giving workers the space to share and discuss common experiences can generate a greater sense of belonging and connection with their coworkers and the company. Encouraging management to use empathetic language in their team communications helps workers feel respected and valued, and prompting employees at all levels to reflect on and write about their feelings surrounding their work helps everyone be more aware and in control of how their emotions impact others in the workplace.

It may seem daunting to try to change your business’s entire culture to one of empathy. But small interventions and changes like the ones mentioned above can go a long way in service of this goal, while dropping turnover rates in the process – a nice side-effect to making your company a place where everyone feels they are included and understood.

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When Being ‘Wrong’ Makes Empathy & DEI Training Right

Dillon Hill on April 18, 2022

Here’s an interesting statistical coincidence. 

In 2021, a year with a 57% turnover rate (according to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics), 57% of people who quit their jobs did so because of their direct managers.

What’s going on with management? Considering that toxic culture is ten times more likely to predict turnover than compensation rates, (according to the MIT Sloan Review) it should be clear that a lack of empathy is contributing in no small way to the great resignation. 

After all, 97% of employees believe empathy is essential for a healthy workplace culture (Society for Human Resource Management). When there is a strong culture of empathy, this leads to:

  • A 56% increase in job performance
  • A 50% drop in turnover risk
  • A 75% reduction in sick days.

Designing empathic leadership programs is multifaceted. We at Empathable with some of the top minds in their fields to understand how to ‘experientialize’ empathy well. 

So there’s plenty to talk about when it comes to designing a pathway to empathic culture, but today I want to focus on an easy takeaway that you can begin to apply the moment you finish reading this.

DEI needs to stop giving people the impression that their perspectives are wrong. Even when they are.

I’ve led thousands of DEI, Empathy, and Belonging trainings. And I’ve tried countless times to tell team members at a company what is right and wrong, be it their approach to inclusive terminology, their understanding of implicit bias, or the way they consider their own privilege. I have told people flat out, politely and not, that they’re wrong. 

I have also many times in training tried as empathically, gently, and graciously as possible to help people see another perspective when their own perspective might unknowingly contain harmful biases towards their marginalized colleagues.

I’ve emerged on the other side of this experience with the realization that Empathy, Belonging, or DEI trainings that attempt to tell people what to think, or that they’re wrong, simply do not work. Or at least, not often enough to make it worth it. 

So I’ve stopped entirely. I do almost nothing when these harmful perspectives are shared. And I think this approach within training, can be revolutionary.

In our immersive experiential trainings, we share real moments in real people’s lives. Once in a while, a participant in a training will sincerely state, with genuine intentions, something that sounds like this:

“We all have a fair chance. Why should employees of color receive special treatment?”

“By talking about George Floyd and racism at work, aren’t we making it worse?”

“It’s hard for me to remember someone’s pronouns. It feels like that’s asking a lot.”

These are statements I still hear with new clients – and I no longer correct them.

If this seems highly contradictory to most trainers and to the idea of being an advocate, I get that. You might even be outraged by the thought that we shouldn’t correct such statements – and that outrage would be very understandable. After all, letting harmful viewpoints slide can feel like being complicit in upholding the attitudes of unjust and inequitable systems.

Our journey at Empathable has led us to an understanding of the distinction between a non-response and simply being passive. It’s entirely possible for them to be one and the same, but here’s what I do to make sure they’re not. 

I let other members of their team in the training who are different from them share their own perspectives. We’ve designed our experiences to enact this diverse perspective sharing without us having to ask, making it voluntary, which works very well. When it’s a homogenous group of people, I’ll share the perspective of other diverse people I’ve met, being explicit that I’m not implying this perspective is more valid than theirs.

Then I wait. 

Most of the time, this results in them coming to a realization themselves, on their own, in their own time. It works like a charm. 

We may be one of the only DEI, Belonging, and Empathy programs out there that doesn’t tell people they’re wrong. I’m reminded of a statement by the renowned psychologist and relationship expert Esther Perel: “You can be right, or you can be married.”

I also think about the social scientific understanding that it’s important to create space for uncertainty when encouraging greater interest in the perspectives of others, and what many think of as “empathy.” When we tell people they’re wrong, we can eliminate the opportunity for uncertainty to develop into curiosity. 

In their paper Interest Development and Its Relation to Curiosity, psychologists Suzanne Hidi and K. Ann Renninger define curiosity as “the motivation to close a knowledge gap driven by uncertainty.” They also state, “when an existing, more developed interest initiates […] curiosity, continued engagement (and information search) is likely.”

Practically speaking, we can understand through our own life experiences that people aren’t always ready to hear the things we’re saying to them, and trying to convince them of a belief that contradicts their experience will often lead them to shut down. The dangerous result is that they check out of continued learning.

Why is being told we’re wrong so harmful to learning in general?

In the theory of experiential learning, first developed by David Kolb in 1984 (Experiential Learning: Experience As The Source Of Learning And Development), Kolb argues four steps occur every time we learn something new: experiencing, reflecting on the experience, learning from the experience, and acting based on what you’ve learned. The theory also suggests that someone can enter or exit at any stage, but for meaningful learning to occur, all four stages must be experienced.

Each of the above steps can require painstaking mental awareness, which explains why major shifts can be so difficult. Simply put, it takes a lot of work to discover something new.

Being told we’re wrong can be particularly harmful in DEI work. In a paper entitled “Against comfort: Political implications of evading discomfort,” Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic states, “We are drawn to people in whose company we feel comfortable and avoid situations and people that make us uncomfortable… visceral gut feelings like discomfort are not merely private emotional experiences but in a certain sense collective and public.”

Being told we’re wrong is an uncomfortable feeling. This discomfort can be tangled up in larger social topics like race and gender, so when someone’s viewpoint is challenged, this can have a collective burden attached to it. This discomfort can at times tap into and represent a widely held cultural misunderstanding. In other words, the individual who suggests that talking about George Floyd and racism is just making the situation worse isn’t only speaking for themselves; they’re speaking for a collective discomfort they have experienced, consciously or not, prior to the moment you find them in. So in a sense, you’re not arguing with an individual’s discomfort in a particular moment –  you’re trying to take on a collective burden this person doesn’t even realize they’re carrying.

Instead, when we allow space for what they have to say, our lack of pushback allows them to feel their worldview is more connected to ours. This concept is the backbone of empathetic learning. When we let the person know that we hear what they’re saying, or even thank them for sharing, we are building a bridge between our two perspectives. This can often lead to a shift – perhaps not immediately, but later on in the experience they might mention something that they learned, something that led them to feel there was greater nuance to a topic and caused them to revisit their earlier viewpoint.

By the end of our sessions, or in follow-ups, people will come back and say things like,

“I was talking with a Black colleague after the training, and I asked her her perspective, which made me realize something I didn’t before.”

Or

“I didn’t realize how easy it can be to correct myself when I get someone’s pronouns wrong.”

You’ll notice that in those two statements, two things have happened:

  1. People are learning through their own life experiences. These experiences are necessary to assimilate the new perspectives they’ve encountered within our immersive learning program.
  2. When they self-correct, they don’t actually verbalize that they were wrong to begin with. But they’ve learned and become more empathetic.

People are much more comfortable teaching themselves than being told what to do. The book, How People Learn, put out by The Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning, describes this as the power of intrinsic motivation – a process where people are motivated to learn out of their own curiosity. The most impactful learning occurs not in didactic environments, where the  teacher imparts knowledge to the student, but where students are able to arrive at the knowledge themselves. By validating participants’ emotions and opinions, you can offer a comfortable place for them to explore diversity and reach their own conclusions. 

Of course, we’re not advocating for people not to speak up when a colleague says something unintentionally racist, sexist, or genderist. In our theory of change on shifting organizational bias, we talk about how important it is to have two people in every room speaking up. But in these moments, the person speaking up is not a trainer, but a colleague.

Allowing empathy to emerge is especially powerful when it occurs in an immersive experience. Rather than being told what is right or wrong, participants are asked to see another perspective. This observational lens allows them to more easily fill in the space between their subjective truth and that which they are experiencing. 

We once held a program at a municipality in the south. During an immersive experience around the idea of taking and holding physical space, we shared the real-life example of a white person not moving out of the way for a person of color on the sidewalk. Afterward, her companion, a Black woman, pushed her way through a couple taking up the whole sidewalk, and said,

“Watch where you’re going”

Then to her friend, whose shoes you’re walking in as a participant, she said,

“You see, it’s important to take up space. Because you do belong here.”

After the experience, a white participant spoke up immediately and said, “Well, I think that was just rude! I move out of the way for people all the time.” 

It would have been tempting here to develop some racial context around their comment to explain what they didn’t understand. Instead, we just gave space for the viewpoint to exist, free of our own contextualization. 

A week later, during a follow-up, the same person came back and said,“I still don’t know how I feel about that experience, I still think it was rude, but I do notice it’s changed the way I take up space on the sidewalk. I’m much more aware of it now.”

They came back with greater clarity on how their reality intersects with those around them because they were given room to connect the dots themselves. 

When we’re not very familiar with a topic, it will almost always take us longer to process information. Our lab director, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book, Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, tells us, “The most expensive tasks that brains do are (1) moving your body and (2) learning something new. They have a metabolic cost that may feel unpleasant. So, feeling bad doesn’t always mean that something bad happened. You might just be doing something really hard.”

A hard thing, like an inner revolution of the biased tyranny of the mind in a well-meaning colleague: well, that might take, at the very least, letting them sleep on it.