On Culture: Empathy as a source of inspiration
- Eugene Sepulveda
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Empathy as a source of inspiration. Empathy as a strategic asset. Empathy as toxic to our selfish ambitions.
It's been a long while since I've written more than a facebook posting for public consumption. I can get too much in my head and feel the need to cite all my sources when writing. Don't worry, I'll chill as I develop a regular cadence for these postings. Following last week's issue: Is empathy toxic?, a few readers wrote recommending other perspectives on empathy.
When I think about empathy I remember the old adage about walking a mile in someone else's shoes. And, this reminds me of one of my chief tenets of interpersonal communication - you can't persuade or convince someone until they feel heard and understood.
I remember a very specific example of empathy as a source of inspiration . . . over dinner in Austin with one of the Airbnb founders, he mentioned their early research showed guests weren't just looking for a place to sleep, they were looking to feel like they belonged somewhere unfamiliar. That empathic insight — imagining what it actually feels like to be a stranger in a new city — reshaped everything from how listings were photographed to how hosts were coached to welcome guests, turning a spare-room rental site into a brand built around belonging.
Observing and understanding one's needs certainly helps us in sales and negotiations.
Plenty has been written on empathy as a strategic asset. No one is cited more than Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Our friends Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle interviewed Professor Zaki in February 2024 issue of McKinsey Talks Talent. He makes the case for investing in empathic behavior—including higher productivity, a stronger workplace culture, and better organizational health.
I can't be the only one who sometimes needs to be reigned in - whether it's my ego, my competitiveness, or my ambitions. I am not arguing for maximum empathy, nor against ego, competitiveness, or ambition . . . and . . . caring about others, understanding the real implications of our actions. Perhaps empathy is toxic to my selfish ambitions, tempering those with concern for the greater good, for the costs to others.
Apologies for the one day delay of this issue. Steven & I are in Baton Rouge, Louisiana hosting 40+ relatives for the 100th birthday of our Uncle Warren Dean Huggins.
Yours in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder, Culturati
p.s. I've asked my friend Rajkumari Neogy to guest write a piece on the epigenetics of empathy. I'm hoping she'll say yes. :)
Artificial intelligence is transforming how work gets done, but it hasn't replaced the need for human judgment. If anything, it has made it more valuable. As AI delivers instant analysis and recommendations, leaders must still decide which opportunities to pursue, how to balance competing priorities, and how to lead people through uncertainty.
That raises an important question for organizations: How do we develop business judgment quickly enough to keep pace with technological change? How are MBA programs adapting to this challenge and what alternative pathways are being created to tackle this big workforce challenge?
Join us for a Culturati: LIVE conversation with Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Abilitie; Alexis Stokes, Dean of The Bill Munday School of Business at St. Edward’s University; and Kate Hogan, VP of Learning & Development at Hagerty, exploring how business education and workforce development are evolving for the age of AI. Leaders from industry and higher education will discuss what it takes to develop managers who can think strategically, collaborate across functions, and make sound business decisions in an increasingly AI-enabled world.
It’s cool to be kind: The value of empathy at work
McKinsey Talks Talent (Podcast) Jamil Zaki, interviewed by Bryan Hancock, Brooke Weddle, and Lucia Rahilly Summary: Empathy isn't one thing — it's an umbrella term for emotional empathy (catching others' feelings), cognitive empathy (understanding what someone feels and why), and compassion (caring about their wellbeing), each with different uses at work. Zaki argues empathy is a measurable performance driver, not a soft indulgence: employees who see their managers as empathic report less burnout, better morale, and greater intent to stay, and people who feel empathized with innovate more and take creative risks. He flags real limits too — unregulated emotional empathy risks burnout, while compassion protects against it — and offers concrete levers: managers should be vulnerable first to set team norms, reward collaboration over pure individual performance, and treat direct feedback as an act of empathy, not its opposite. He closes with a caution on AI: LLMs already mimic empathy convincingly, but when users learned AI-generated support responses (which they'd rated as more thoughtful than human ones) actually came from a machine, they revolted — suggesting the experience of being genuinely cared for isn't fully substitutable, even by convincing imitation. |
How Leaders Can Practice Wise Empathy
Harvard Business Review By Nick Hobson and Gregory J. Depow Summary: Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire — leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood. The authors make the case for "wise empathy": recognizing that different emotional moments call for different responses, rather than treating empathy as one uniform reflex. Sharing in employees' negative emotions can accelerate a leader's own burnout, while responding instead with compassion and support protects both leader and team; the opposite holds for positive emotions, which benefit from genuine shared celebration. The stakes are concrete — unempathetic organizations risk losing $180 billion a year in attrition costs — and the authors lay out five steps to help leaders identify and calibrate the right emotional response for each moment, strengthening relationships and engagement without leaders losing their own footing in the process. |
The Persuasive Power of Listening with Dr. Guy Itzchakov
Opinion Science (Podcast, YouTube) Guy Itzchakov, interviewed by Andy Luttrell Summary: Guy Itzchakov, an associate professor at the University of Haifa, studies "high-quality listening" — not who's good at listening, but what happens to speakers when they're genuinely listened to. His central finding: being deeply listened to gives speakers a safe opportunity to explore where they actually stand, often revealing that their views are more nuanced than the simplified positions they walked in with. In the conversation, Itzchakov lays out the specific hallmarks that distinguish high-quality listening from ordinary listening, and traces the downstream effects on speakers — including reduced defensiveness and greater openness to reconsidering their own position, since people tend to soften their views when they feel heard rather than when they're out-argued. [if blocked, google youtube] |
The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science
Summary: This handbook tackles compassion as a genuinely open scientific question — is it an emotional state, a motivation, a personality trait, or a cultivated skill? — and how it relates to empathy and altruism, gathering multiple valid conceptions rather than forcing one definition. Spanning individual, group, organizational, and cultural levels, it brings together neurobiological, developmental, evolutionary, social, clinical, and applied research (including business and education) to examine what motivates compassion, its physiological effects, its link to wellbeing, and how it can be trained. Drawing on both established scholars and emerging researchers, it stands as one of the first systematic, multidisciplinary treatments of compassion science, meant to anchor the field for future researchers and practitioners. |
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