July 01, 2025

S35 Ep5: Jimmie Lee - Leading with Vision and Empathy: The North Star Approach

30 minutes

Today, Steve speaks with Jimmie Lee, a leadership expert with decades of experience as a senior leader at companies like Boeing, Meta, and Microsoft. He explains that one of the most important things a business leader can do in times of crisis, is to keep focus on the big picture and the long term goals. Jimmie and Steve also discuss how to manage a team in a post-covid workplace and building supply chain resilience — and why empathy matters more than ever.

Key Takeaways:

Empathy for your team members is more important than ever for a thriving business.

Relationship-building must begin before the crisis happens.

Geopolitical instability is causing a shift from risk management to resilience.

Tune in to hear more about:

If empathy can be taught (12:50)

How to build trust in a business environment that’s more virtual than ever (15:47)

Why many businesses are struggling because of today’s volatile geopolitical landscape (21:33)

Standout Quotes:

“There's a lot of tools that I would typically lean on or go to, but the number one is honestly just empathetic connection. It is really just connecting with the leaders and help them understand that they're not alone. I think a lot of times as a leader, you get too stuck in the problems that you start trying to solve, that you focus more trying to solve them in the business, and you go deeper instead of staying up at the leadership level and start working on the business itself.” - Jimmie Lee

“Now you have trust to work off of. If you didn't have that trust and that mistake happened, it's an uphill climb to get to a point of good with that person now. I don't know that we're equipping our employees, that we're actually giving our teams that visibility, that knowledge, that training. […] Are we as companies, are we as leaders investing in our training budget in that kind of way to target those areas?” - Jimmie Lee

“I think the geopolitical landscape is potentially gonna shift the visibility and the approach and the strategy from small, medium- sized businesses and middle market to have more attention on that supply chain because. When it comes to geopolitical instability, when it comes to geo-economic macro and the micro instability, resilience is key. Resilience is the lifeblood. Resilience is your ability to last, to withstand the fluctuations, but if you don't have enough visibility and awareness of all the different components that are impacted, you can't navigate those waters.” - Jimmie Lee

Read the transcript of this episode

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