Maria Ross is a speaker, facilitator, author, strategist, and empathy advocate who believes cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. She’s spent decades helping forward-thinking leaders, teams, and brands connect and engage through empathy to accelerate growth.
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Guest Resources
Red Slice – Achieve Radical Success Through Empathy.
The 4 Step Framework – Craft a Captivating Brand Story that Attracts Your Right-Fit Clients.
Welcome to the Empathy Edge – Listen to Maria’s podcast on empathy and how leaders and brands are succeeding with it.
The Empathy Edge – Buy Maria’s book on Amazon.
The Empathy Dilemma Book – How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries.
3 Value Bombs
1) Empathy is about trying to understand someone else’s context and use that information to communicate a certain message or to make a decision.
2) Research say that empathetic leaders enjoy more loyalty, more staff engagement, create a more inclusive environment, more innovation and gives a company a leading edge.
3) Fostering an environment of empathy and accountability will have an impact in a positive way to your business and relationships.
Sponsor
HubSpot: Making your life easier. Getting you results faster. And better connecting you to all your data, all in one place. Start making major moves with HubSpot! Visit HubSpot.com/marketers to learn more!
Show Notes
**Click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.
Today’s Audio MASTERCLASS: How to Balance Empathy and Accountability
[1:24] – Maria shares something that she believes about becoming successful that most people disagree with.
- Something that brings success is taking a step back and building your story first. Before you start anything, get your story straight and that will help you in making your business thrive.
[2:30] – Maria tells her story of how she evolved into an empathy speaker and advocate from being a successful brand strategist.
- She had to take her own medicine and go through her own rebranding process. She worked in corporate, marketing management and consulting for years before she started her own business in 2008. She had a very successful brand strategy practice when she began to notice that her clients wants their brands to be seen as empathetic or having the desire to make a connection and engage with people.
- She was also disheartened with the models of leadership that she is seeing around the world and so she made a research of brands and leaders that are winning with empathy. Her research showed there is a business case to be made for being an empathetic leader and building an empathetic culture and for creating an empathetic brand that made her write the book The Empathy Edge by using the value of compassion as an engine for success. It was successful and that took her down the path of not only doing brand story work with her clients but also doing leadership development and key notes to help people strengthen empathy and leverage it as a strategic advantage for radical success.
[5:26] – Marian talks about empathy in a business context.
- Many people think that empathy is a soft skill and has no place in business but when you look at it through the lens of being able to see, understand and feel another person’s perspective and further use that information to take an action of compassion, that’s where it applies. Its about trying to understand someone else’s context and use that information to communicate a certain message or to make a decision of empathy. An example is when a customer complains, you will take time to listen and hear them to solve the problem.
- 97% of customers say that empathy is the most important element in their customer experience with any brand even when their problems are not really solved and the reason they stay loyal and have respect with the brand.
[7:39] – Maria talks about how empathy benefit a business or brand.
- Research say that empathetic leaders enjoy more loyalty, more staff engagement, create a more inclusive environment, more innovation and gives a company a leading edge. Other benefits are increase retention and from a brand perspective Gen Z and Millennials now demands empathy from brands that they are engaging with.
[10:13] – A timeout to thank our sponsor!
- HubSpot: Making your life easier. Getting you results faster. And better connecting you to all your data, all in one place. Start making major moves with HubSpot! Visit HubSpot.com/marketers to learn more!
[14:00] – Maria talks about the 5 pillars of empathetic leadership.
- The five common traits of empathetic and effective leaders are self awareness (empathy starts with you and understanding your own strengths and weaknesses) , self care (making time for yourself and doing something that energizes you), clarity (lack of clarity will lead to confusion), decisiveness (making swift decisions and not leave your customers hanging) and joy (create a culture of joy and trust).
- There are strategies and actionable tactics that you can employ with this pillars to make a foundation for yourself and better balance empathy with accountability.
[21:31] – Maria gives her take away.
- Understand the balance of empathy and accountability. It doesn’t mean that you have to change the decision but it is making a different interaction. Fostering an environment of empathy and accountability will have an impact in a positive way to your business and relationships.
[21:49] – Call to action.
- Red Slice – Achieve Radical Success Through Empathy.
- The 4 Step Framework – Craft a Captivating Brand Story that Attracts Your Right-Fit Clients
- Welcome to the Empathy Edge – Listen to Maria’s podcast on empathy and how leaders and brands are succeeding with it.
- The Empathy Edge – Buy Maria’s book on Amazon.
- The Empathy Dilemma Book – How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries.
[22:04] – Thank you to our Sponsor!
- HubSpot: Making your life easier. Getting you results faster. And better connecting you to all your data, all in one place. Start making major moves with HubSpot! Visit HubSpot.com/marketers to learn more!
Killer Resources!
1) The Common Path to Uncommon Success: JLD’s 1st traditionally published book! Over 3000 interviews with the world’s most successful Entrepreneurs compiled into a 17-step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment!
2) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!
3) Podcasters’ Paradise: The #1 podcasting community in the world!
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