An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Leadership is fast-paced, always juggling multiple demands including family responsibilities. It might feel easier and quicker to move forward with a situation quickly; in times of crisis, for example, speed is of the essence. But leaders are often conditioned towards speed; it’s what makes them feel good, what they are used to and slowing down to pause, percolate, and plan feels different and less progressive. In this fast-paced leadership approach, there is a missed opportunity to connect and empathise with how the situation affects others.
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is increasingly recognized as a pivotal leadership trait. In an ever-evolving business landscape, leaders who exhibit genuine empathy are better equipped to connect, inspire, and drive their teams towards success. But how exactly does empathy shape leadership dynamics? How can it be harnessed to foster stronger relationships, improved decision-making, and a more inclusive work environment? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kate Thomas.
Kate Thomas is the CEO and Founder of NewlandRock.
She helps talent-savvy organisations unlock the power of leadership effectiveness to achieve growth at pace.
Focused on evidence-based assessment, executive coaching, and sustainable leadership solutions, Kate works on one-to-one and group-led immersive team coaching programmes to help leaders identify core strengths and learn new agile ways of thinking to enhance business impact.
The ethos of NewlandRock is to bring the breadth of behavioural science-based expertise to a client-centric, commercial conversation.
Kate has spent over 20 years consulting with organisations regarding talent-centric strategies, leadership effectiveness opportunities and organisational development objectives. Her career has spanned multiple geographies and sectors, spending significant time supporting global organisations undergoing transformation and growth.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about empathy, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Change can be forced upon us in the case of redundancy or, in my case, a company restructuring, which allowed me to reassess where I wanted to go with the next phase of my career in my 40s. It was a real shock; I still remember the conversation, and it was such a bolt out of the blue, but I also know that restructuring can be indiscriminate.
I’ve always been in control of changes in my career, including several international moves, so this situation was a first. Suddenly, I had no certainty around me. The unpredictability of the pandemic flooded the headlines. I was a new mother and put in a situation where my career direction was unclear.
This unplanned pause allowed me to reassess and double down on deciding what was important to me and how I could create a wider impact. I was focused on combining my business knowledge, and talent strategy expertise and harvesting my passion for developing leaders.
Reframing this time away from the pressure of my career gave me the chance to get clarity, and the clouds started to lift. It felt important to me to focus on improving ways of working within organizations.
Having gone through the upheaval of moving on from a corporate role with a globally recognised firm, which had been a huge part of my identity, I realised the work I had done to boost my resilience, learn how to increase my own mental fitness and find my own clarity for what I wanted to be known for would be of immense benefit to other senior leaders and teams going through a transition of change.
Combining my lived experience of change, living and working globally, and my twenty-two years of advising leaders on talent strategies and how to get the best performance out of themselves, their teams, and organisations, I founded NewlandRock.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
The name NewlandRock signifies a clear message that you are your own rock, and by developing your leadership effectiveness, you strengthen your ability to lead yourself and your team to new land.
When forming NewlandRock in 2020, it was essential to embed our philosophy that every person is talented, but the key to strategic success is unlocking the person, performance and potential within. This drives confidence, clarity and credibility for leaders and the organisations they serve.
The immersive programmes I deliver have received global followership and have been truly transformative. Observing the impact our approach has had on leaders feels incredibly fulfilling — all those dreams I had three years ago of offering a new way to support the development and effectiveness of leaders and help them enhance their path to success are being lived.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1 Clarity — I know what my consultancy stands for and the impact we want to have in the work that we do.
2 Courage — Our solutions aren’t your typical leadership development. We take a whole-person view, which combines leadership strategy with business strategy. The experience looks and feels different, or at least it did when we launched.
3 Communication — Our audience must know who we are, what we do and why they want to be part of our community.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
There was a time in my career when I stepped away — I took a year out, traveled the world, explored my sense of self, and said yes to a period of change. I was 30, stepping away from a successful career and doing it for myself and by myself. I knew it was a brave move, but I also knew that it was an experience that would help me grow and develop so that my career would be enhanced as a result of these broader experiences I put myself forward for. It took courage, a sense of adventure, and an ‘if not now, possibly never’ mindset.
How do you define empathy in a leadership context, and why do you believe it’s a vital trait for leaders to possess in today’s work environment?
There are three steps to this.
An empathetic leader creates an environment where people feel
1: seen
2: heard and 3: understood.
But the critical component is authenticity. Empathetic leadership isn’t about ticking those three boxes like it’s a 3 step task; it’s about a genuine interest in others. From this place, an empathetic leader can translate what they see, hear, and understand into impactful business decisions that lead people forward.
3. Today’s work environment is dynamic — fast-paced, complex, multi-generational, and ‘always on’. Employees seek an individual approach tailored to who they are and what they want and need. Social media channels and megatrends such as individualization have catalyzed this individual desire — the pandemic heightened our arousal for a more human approach to leadership. These factors have contributed to empathetic leadership becoming more critical and discussed more widely in today’s workplace.
Can you share a personal experience where showing empathy as a leader significantly impacted a situation or relationship in your organisation?
I’ve worked in highly pressured, commercial, KPI, results-driven organisations before forming NewlandRock. These environments have been politically charged and drive competition to seal deals. In this space, leaders achieved to survival, which often clouded the importance of intercompany relationships and supporting one another. I’m naturally empathetic, and as I matured, I realised that I wasn’t being true to how I wanted to be — upon reflection, this experience helped me realise why forming my consultancy and creating a relationship-first environment was essential and led me towards leading a purpose-led way of working.
How do empathetic leaders strike a balance between understanding their team’s feelings and making tough decisions that might not be universally popular?
Leaders often struggle to balance understanding team feelings with making tough decisions. An empathetic leader means making tough decisions whilst being able to see things from the perspective of others. They show a level of care and understanding for how this tough decision will impact people within the team or organization, and they will create time to discuss how the team feels about what is going on. By following this approach, the tough decision will still be made, but those involved feel less threatened and more likely to show loyalty to the leader during the process.
How would you differentiate between empathy and sympathy in leadership?
Empathy is being with you in your challenge. You’re not solving the person’s problem but making sure that person and their challenge feel seen and understood. Sympathy feels different — you can sympathise with someone’s situation but turn your back on it. It can feel lonely and isolating — as an example, others can see you look exhausted, they comment that you look exhausted and tell you to take some rest, but they aren’t with you in finding a solution; you hear things like ‘I hope it gets better for you soon’ v’s ‘let’s take a minute to understand what’s going on and how this is impacting you’.
Why is it important for leaders to distinguish between the two?
Leaders must create a supportive, trust-based environment that shows unity and inclusion. An empathetic leader is concerned about the team; they promote the importance of sharing feelings, problems, and motivations. In this space, the team work together and displays empathy for each other v’s sympathy for a tough deadline, for example, with limited support to help. Ultimately empathy leads to improved results.
What are some practical strategies or exercises that leaders can employ to cultivate and enhance their empathetic skills?
Developing empathetic skills is crucial for leaders to connect with their team members and understand their perspectives. Here are some practical strategies and exercises to enhance empathetic skills:
The term Active Listening is used a lot, but incorporating this skill is hard. This is when the leader listens by focusing entirely on what the other person is saying without interrupting or formulating responses in your mind. Reflecting on their words to ensure understanding and showing that you value their thoughts and feelings creates a stronger relationship. It takes practice!
Put Yourself in Others’ Shoes and Ask Open-Ended Questions: Encourage leaders to actively imagine themselves in the position of their team members. This could involve taking time to immerse yourself in the other’s scenario and visualising how it feels and what would be going through your mind should you be in their shoes. An effective exercise involves role-playing scenarios where each team member takes on different roles to understand varying perspectives and challenges. These exercises are enhanced further when leaders are encouraged to ask open-ended questions that prompt team members to express themselves more fully. This can lead to deeper conversations and a better understanding of their concerns and needs.
Storytelling and Sharing Experiences: Leaders connect and relate to others through storytelling. When a leader shares personal experiences that incorporate an element of vulnerability, it leads to a more open and empathetic environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their own experiences without judgement and where it’s safe for leaders and team members to be vulnerable. This fosters trust and helps everyone feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and emotions, ultimately creating a culture where empathetic leadership fuels open dialogue, increased brainstorming activities, and a passion for supporting one another.
By practising empathy, your leaders cascade emotional awareness: This is an excellent skill for a team to incorporate as a way of working with each other. By encouraging leaders to pay attention to their own emotions and recognise how they affect their interactions with others, the leader and the collective team become aware of their emotions and better understand how a team member might react.
Encourage Empathy in Decision-Making: Encourage leaders to consider the impact of their decisions on others. Leaders can demonstrate empathy in their actions by taking into account different perspectives and considering how decisions might affect various individuals or groups.
How can empathy help leaders navigate the complexities of leading diverse teams and ensure inclusivity?
Empathy is essential when leading diverse teams. Leaders must appreciate and understand individuals’ unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences within a diverse team. This understanding helps acknowledge and value differences, leading to a safe, trusted and inclusive environment where team members feel heard, respected, and understood. By doing so, this leader is also navigating the complexities of a diverse external marketplace, stakeholders, and customers — tuning in to what makes us different and using this to create a commercial advantage, which is a critical differentiator.
What’s your approach to ensuring that succession planning is a holistic process, and not just confined to the top layers of management? How do you communicate this philosophy through the organization?
We work with organisations to help them understand that every person is talented, but the key to organisational performance is driving inclusive behaviours and assessing where talent is best placed.
It starts with clarifying what success looks like within the organisation to ensure empathetic leadership features on a success profile. It is then rewarded and celebrated within the organisation through performance reviews, promotion criteria and clear organisation values connected to the norms and behaviours tolerated at the top layers.
It’s also about creating champions at lower, younger levels within the organisation who role model the importance of empathy within the workplace.
By creating this philosophy, it becomes part of the organisation’s fabric. It’s how your organisation is described at all levels within the organisation because its what people observe, experience and mirror when working.
Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Ways Empathy Will Affect Your Leadership”?
1: Collective success creates a greater output than individual success.
Leaders are typically high achievers; they are self-reliant problem solvers who have achieved responsibilities based on their own opinions, perspectives, and knowledge. This level of individual success achieves only so much and can often show up as a career staller. When leaders incorporate empathy into their leadership, they show up for and with others and create a following, leading to collective success, engagement, and discretionary effort — ultimately achieving more.
2: Improved Influencing
Influencing at a leadership level is complex. Multiple scenarios, motives and concerns play out. When a leader shifts from driving a ‘my way’ approach and invites an empathetic style, they begin to see the opportunity from multiple viewpoints, and combined with curiosity means that the leader will be exploring the opportunity to incorporate all options available to identify the best way with and through others. Leaders who successfully display empathy in an influencing context create buy-in and strong relationships.
I coached an articulate, outstanding leader with best-in-class expertise and social skills. At face value, this leader was a good influencer, but her success declined as the opportunities became more complex. Through our coaching conversations, we unpacked her approach. We found that her influencing style didn’t incorporate the whole audience but only those where a strong relationship already existed. The other audience members were seen as complicated, in the way, rather than what is it about their view that I don’t understand and haven’t given any time for?
3: Broken Relationships
We don’t have to always like each other to be empathetic towards one another, and in some leadership, dynamics shifting from personal opinion to ‘what makes them say, think, act that way’ means the broken relationship moves on from dysfunctional dynamics to one of empathising with this situation or context.
A leader I once coached found a colleague very challenging to work with. From this leader’s perspective, the colleague was causing problems intentionally. We simulated the colleague’s world to peel back their context to gain a view of what the colleague might be going through and how that context might be causing them to act in a particular way. This empathetic lens wasn’t easy for the leader, but it did help them gain a broader view and use that view to communicate. Conversations within the team shifted from — no, it can’t be done that way to, I appreciate the timeline pressure you are under; let’s talk about how I can help you.
4: Slowing down
Leadership is fast-paced, always juggling multiple demands including family responsibilities. It might feel easier and quicker to move forward with a situation quickly; in times of crisis, for example, speed is of the essence. But leaders are often conditioned towards speed; it’s what makes them feel good, what they are used to and slowing down to pause, percolate, and plan feels different and less progressive. In this fast-paced leadership approach, there is a missed opportunity to connect and empathise with how the situation affects others.
I coached a high-performing leader who was promoted to their first global position. This leader was used to operating at speed. They had a brand for being a quick, dynamic, and action-oriented decision-maker. And whilst these ways of leadership were incredibly important to their success — to be effective in a global, broader role, this leader needed to learn how to change gears — hear a range of perspectives, invite a diverse audience and not just be seen to be doing the right things but build the awareness for how this new approach would strengthen solutions. The term empathy felt soft to this leader, but when combined with increasing performance and more substantial outcomes, there was a hook to learning new empathetic leadership skills.
5: Team is Trust
“This programme has created a better work environment for us. We have evolved from a negative and angry place to be an effective team working together. I am more focused and ready to drive to the next level.”
We received this testimonial from a team member who had experienced our immersive team effectiveness programme. This team performed well, and their individual functions were in good shape. At face value, the leaders were OK, and they were individually; when they came together as a team, the cracks would start to show. In this example, the need to win, beat the market, and attract the top talent had crept into the internal dynamic of this leadership team. They were competing with the market and with each other. To move this team forward, collectively, the team needed to form as a team. We designed multiple relationship-building events, deep dives into personal stories, space to share feedback and presentations to explain priorities and goals. This multi-layered approach meant the leaders started seeing each other through a new lens and seeing each other as people, not competition. Empathising with each other’s priorities and opportunities and ultimately building a bond of togetherness cemented this team.
“There is a greater connection, different vibe, and deeper trust as a result of this programme.”
Are there potential pitfalls or challenges associated with being an empathetic leader? How can these be addressed?
While empathy is a highly valuable trait in effective leadership, there are potential pitfalls and challenges that empathetic leaders might encounter. In high-pressure or fast-paced environments, overly empathetic leaders might face challenges in making quick decisions or taking decisive actions due to their consideration of various perspectives and emotions.
To mitigate these challenges, empathetic leaders can practice self-care, establish clear boundaries, seek feedback to maintain objectivity, and continuously work on developing their decision-making skills while balancing empathy with assertiveness. Recognising and proactively addressing potential pitfalls can help empathetic leaders leverage their strengths while minimising the associated challenges.
It’s about ensuring you, as the empathetic leader, are aligned with your organisation’s overarching goals. With this alignment, you can make sense of why certain challenging decisions are being made. You can connect it with a bigger purpose and remain fulfilled in your position, knowing that the path to reach the purposeful goal can get a bit bumpy along the way.
Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?
My clients hold positions of great authority, their decisions impact social and economic outcomes, and my partnership with them means that I play a role in helping them think up and out of their day-to-day challenges to be able to see what’s possible — I’m passionate about helping my clients create clarity, remove the white noise and focus in on what matters most. I decided to develop a framework that leads to laser-focused, purposeful impact. My debut book, The Four Levers of Leadership Impact, will launch in 2024.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I wanted to contribute to this article as the topic is close to my belief system — that through empathy, love, compassion and consideration for others, a working environment can be both commercially profitable and a fulfilling environment to serve. The two are connected and create a connection for a significant sense of personal worth, irrespective of level — it’s called respect.
How can our readers further follow you online?
Linkedin — Kate Thomas
Kate Thomas Leadership on IG and Facebook
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
Kate Thomas Of NewlandRock: 5 Ways Empathy Will Affect Your Leadership was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.