Cameron Herold answers a question about where empathy and employee connection fit into leadership decision-making. He recommends embedding people-impact thinking at the leadership level by hiring a head of people, running frequent skip-level meetings, and removing private offices to sit with teams and observe work—practices intended to increase empathy and inform go/no-go decisions on projects.
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Next question is from Sarah Stanley, who's an employer, brand and culture leader. She said, where does empathy and connection with your employees fit into your decision making and that of the leadership team? Does everyone have it? If not, how do you thread it into decision making if it's not everyone's skill set? Great question. One of the things that we did back at 1-800-got junk that I think was key was we hired a head of people and for us, the head of people considered the people impact of every decision and every plan that we were putting in place in the organization. So when we started to think about the people impact of our growth, the people impact of our strategy, the people impact of our marketing tactics, the people impact of what we were saying to customers, etc. Just thinking about that at the leadership team level really gave us some additional insights and some additional reasons to either green light or red light certain projects. We also built a habit of doing a lot of skip level meetings where the the CEO would skip over his direct reports or her direct reports and meet with their next team. I would go and meet over top of my VPs and meet with their next team, et cetera. So skip level meetings were a great way to be empathetic and to be engaged with the employees. We also got rid of all of our offices completely and I've coached all of my clients to get rid of offices completely, believing that if you have a complete open office environment, you're sitting with your team, you're sitting with your people, you are listening to what they're saying and what's going on, you're observing them. So what I would do is just sit at somebody's desk with my laptop for a few days in it and then I would switch and sit in PR for a couple of days. Then I'd switch and sit in marketing. And just by sitting in different parts of the business, you get to see what's happening and again, be very empathetic and very engaged with the employees.
