The Empathy Edge

In this episode, Maria and Kara discuss:

• Why Kara calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur.”
• How to stay close to customer needs as your business grows. 
• Kara’s new book, Undaunted, and what she hopes aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders will take from it.
• Building a profitable growth company while still maintaining integrity. 

Key Takeaways:

• Social media is a constant way to gain insight from your consumers, far better than any focus group. Stay active, stay connected, use it as a communication tool with your client. There is power in being an individual on social media.  
• When employees are happy and feel like you support them, then they become better employees and deliver a better customer experience, every time.
• Be a leader, not a follower. Just because something works for a company in Silicon Valley, doesn’t mean that it is what your employees need. Show up for them and for what they need.  

"I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I didn't say, ‘One day, I want to start a beverage company.’ For me, it was personal." —  Kara Goldin

About Kara Goldin: Kara Goldin is the Founder and CEO of Hint, Inc., best known for its award-winning Hint® water, the leading unsweetened flavored water. She has received numerous accolades, including being named EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 Northern California, one of InStyle’s 2019 Badass 50, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, WWD Beauty Inc.’s Feel Good Force, and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. The Huffington Post listed her as one of six disruptors in business, alongside Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

Previously, Kara was VP of Shopping and Ecommerce at America Online where she helped lead the growth of its shopping and e-commerce business to over $1 billion in revenue.

Kara is the author of UNDAUNTED: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters.  She is an active speaker & writer and hosts the podcast Unstoppable with Kara Goldin where she interviews founders, entrepreneurs, and other disruptors across various industries. 

Kara lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. 

Connect with Kara Goldin:  

Website: KaraGoldin.com

Book: UndauntedTheBook.com

Show: Unstoppable with Kara Goldin - karagoldin.com/podcast

Hint: DrinkHint.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/karagoldin

Twitter: twitter.com/karagoldin

Facebook: facebook.com/KaraGoldin

Instagram: instagram.com/karagoldin

YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCGdgc3KcalWbLTxommrEgYQ

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Download a free guide: The 5 Business Benefits of Empathy: http://red-slice.com/business-benefits-empathy

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Kathy discuss:

• Creating an environment of trust in the workplace and why it matters. 
• How to use improv techniques to enhance innovation and creativity.
• Using comedy and improv to create a safe space.

Key Takeaways:

• When trust goes up, humor goes up, and when humor goes up, trust goes up. It’s a virtuous cycle! 
• If we are not hitting that minimum viable culture of safety, you will never get to the good stuff - ever. 
• Trust is both a short-form improv game and a long-form improv game - you're playing for both.
• You've got to build the muscles of empathy first, and then humor becomes safer and easier and less scary for people to express. If you have a humor problem, you don't have a humor problem, you have a trust problem and an empathy problem. 

"The thing that is so important to remember is that when teams ‘Yes, and’ each other, they're going to, over time, come up with far better ideas and more ideas. It's a force multiplier." —  Kathy Klotz-Guest

About Kathy Klotz-Guest: A former Silicon Valley marketing executive and a trained improviser for over 20 years, Kathy Klotz-Guest, MA, MBA combines her business team management and comedy backgrounds to help people, teams, and brands be more human, super creative, and joyful every day. Trained at ComedySportz and at LA’s Second City, she has been featured in Forbes and The Huffington Post. Inc.com named her book, “Stop Boring Me!” a CMO must-read. Her company - Keeping it Human, Inc - provides speaking, consulting, and play-based experiential workshops to ignite collaborative creativity and storytelling results by helping teams work better together. She still performs and teaches improv and comedy.

Connect with Kathy Klotz-Guest:  

Website: KeepingItHuman.com

Book: Stop Boring Me! - amazon.com/Stop-Boring-Me-Kick-Ass-Marketing/dp/1684191092/

YouTube: youtube.com/user/kathyklotzguest

Twitter: twitter.com/kathyklotzguest

Facebook: facebook.com/KeepingItHuman

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kathyklotzguest/

Instagram: instagram.com/klotzguest/

SlideShare: slideshare.net/klotzguest

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Jay discuss:

• What an empathetic brand really means.
• Empathy as a talk trigger for word of mouth marketing.
• How your brand can show empathy digitally.
• A game-changing story of situational empathy that made Jay a brand fan for life
• Empathy in action - experiences that Jay has had that you can do in your business now, regardless of size. 

Key Takeaways:

• Everybody cares about word of mouth, everybody hears about it, but nobody talks about it. It is something that we take for granted and that is a mistake. Nobody has ever once said, “We don’t care about word of mouth”. Ever. 
• Brands are not built in good times. Brands are built in bad times. Right now is where winners and losers are going to be decided. Those who lean into empathy will win.
• Brands need to shop for the groceries, but then let the team member cook their own recipe. 
• Empathy takes time - you are not one social meme away from changing the perception of the public. Stay the course and it will succeed.

"A human treating a human like a human and reading the room successfully - ultimately, that’s all empathy is. And, usually, the problem is brands get in the way of empathy...and usually the people in the organization want to be more empathetic." —  Jay Baer

About Jay Baer: Jay Baer, CSP, CPAE has spent 25 years in digital marketing and customer experience, consulting for more than 700 companies during that period, including 34 of the FORTUNE 500. His current firm – Convince & Convert – provides word of mouth, digital marketing, and customer experience advice and counsel to some of the world’s most important brands. 

His newest book, Talk Triggers, is the complete guide to creating customers using strategic, operational differentiators that compel word of mouth. In the best companies, the customers do the marketing. Talk Triggers is the instruction manual for making businesses grow with customer conversation.

Hug Your Haters - Jay’s book on modern customer service and customer experience techniques - revolutionized the way business thinks about customer interactions and was named one of the top 3 business books of 2016 by Strategy + Business.

His second book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype, was #3 on the New York Times business best seller list, and a runaway #1 Amazon best seller. 

Jay speaks approximately 60 times per year world-wide, often with lessons about how businesspeople can use today’s shifts in technology and consumer expectations to gain or keep more customers. 

Jay’s Convince & Convert blog was named the world’s #1 content marketing blog by the Content Marketing Institute, and is visited by more than 250,000 marketers each month. Jay also hosts and produces the Social Pros podcast, which is downloaded 65,000 times monthly and was named best marketing podcast by the Content Marketing Awards. 

He also has a weekly Talk Triggers show about word of mouth, featured on YouTube, and as a podcast. 

A fixture in social media, Jay has been named a top influencer of CMOs, B2B marketers, small business owners, and digital marketers. He’s also one of the world’s top Global Gurus in customer service and customer experience. 

Convince & Convert is the fifth multi-million dollar company Jay has started from scratch. Before his move into digital marketing in 1994, he was a brand marketer and a political consultant, with major roles in state, federal, and presidential electoral campaigns. 

Befitting his roots in Arizona, Jay is a tequila collector and maintains his allegiance to the teams of his alma mater, the University of Arizona. 

Jay lives in the idyllic college town of Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and children, and travels from Indianapolis to speaking opportunities world-wide. 

Connect with Jay Baer:   

Twitter: @jaybaer

Facebook: Jay Baer

Website: JayBaer.com & ConvinceAndConvert.com

Book: Now Revolution, Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, and More!

Show: Social Pros & Standing Ovation & The Talk Triggers Show

YouTube: Jay Baer

LinkedIn: Jay Baer

Instagram: @jaybaer

References:

DoSomethingStrategic.org

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Cory discuss:

• What a compassionate culture looks like and finding the passion in compassion. 
• What a Director of Compassion is and how that benefits an organization. 
• How you can hire for empathy so that a compassionate culture can take root.

Key Takeaways:

• Empathy and compassion are innate to humans and can always be improved, even if they were conditioned out of us. It's so clear that this is our natural state, and we need to get back to it.
• Younger talent generations are demanding a compassionate culture and environment in their workplace. Top talent won’t settle for less.
• The technical stuff at any job, at the end of the day, is a commodity. People who are willing to be vulnerable and have a continuous growth mindset are really what make an organization strong with a culture of empathy. That secret sauce is the brilliance with the human heart.

"In a compassionate environment, in a compassionate workplace, you're free to show up as a whole human and then the expectation is that this is how we're going to relate to each other as human beings with all of the messiness that comes with that." —  Cory Custer

About Cory Custer: Cory leads the Mindfulness-based Emotional and Social Intelligence (MESI) program at Brighton Jones (and may very well be the world’s first Director of Compassion).  MESI is designed to help people become wiser and more compassionate through training in mindfulness, self-awareness, empathy, and compassion. Cory also leads MESI workshops for Brighton Jones clients and well as local non-profits, and he teaches a course in Compassionate Leadership at Washington State University as an adjunction faculty member.

Before joining Brighton Jones in 2015, Cory spent over 15 years in various leadership roles within the wealth management industry and then several years as an independent leadership coach and organizational development consultant. He holds an MBA in wealth management and an MA in organizational leadership. 

Cory lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
 

Connect with Cory Custer:  

LinkedIn: Cory D. Custer

Website: BrightonJones.com

More on MESI: BrightonJones.com/MESI 

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Kim discuss:

• How empathy at senior levels of leadership drives operational performance. 
• Why being curious as a key leadership success factor. 
• A three phase approach to running empathetic meetings where everyone can thrive and, yes, work can actually move forward. 

Key Takeaways:

• Clear, deliberate, constructive feedback is empathetic. Be detailed in your praise of your coworkers and employees. By giving those specifics, those actions and results can be replicated. 
• Getting curious allows you to take advantage of the unique and interesting insights and varying perspectives of your team and those around you. But without listening and being honestly interested in what someone else is saying, you will miss these insights. 
• The real key in having people shift internally, in their mindset, or in their belief system is to help them gain self-generated insight. 

"The objective is to give deliberate praise and very specific praise so people can repeat that behavior going forward. We want to be really clear, as leaders, of what we want people to do more of and what we want them to do less. That requires us to be intentional, mindful, and observant in order to really deliver that in a way that is truly trying to develop and grow an individual that, again, ends up bringing good results to the organization." —  Kim Bohr

About Kim Bohr:  Kim Bohr is a Business Growth Strategist, Operations Executive, and Speaker & Author 

Kim Bohr is COO of Waldron, Inc. and Founder of The Innovare Group, a company renowned for diagnosing and repairing organizational and leadership disconnects. In both of her roles, she works with companies and leaders to help them assess, align, and accelerate their strategic priorities that impact talent, execution, and business growth. Kim is a sought after speaker on the topics of strategy execution, leadership, and business growth. Her book, Successes, Failures & Lessons Learned, is a 12-week guided professional journal designed to be a valuable tool for companies to put into their employees’ hands to foster ownership and accountability over performance, execution, and career development goals. The outcome for the organization is greater team alignment between people+process.

Connect with Kim Bohr:  

Website: TheInnovareGroup.com

Book: Successes, Failures & Lessons Learned

LinkedIn: Kim Bohr & The Innovare Group, Inc.

Twitter: @Innovare_Group

YouTube: Kim Bohr Business & Leadership Growth Advisor

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria discusses:

• 5 benefits empathy brings to your leadership, business, and brand.
• The costs of disengagement and the benefits of engaged employees. 
• Engaging with Millennials and Gen-Z. 

Key Takeaways:

• Empathy has been shown to have a direct impact on everything from customer loyalty to innovation to profits.
• When we really understand our customers from a three-dimensional level, we can then understand the context of where our products and our services fit in.
• What gave employees the edge was that they exhibited collaboration, empathy, communication skills, and that took them farther faster.

"You have to be looking at the emotional intelligence and empathy skills of your leaders to ensure that you're getting the best work out of your employees." —  Maria Ross

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Paul discuss:

• The evolution of Paul’s leadership style and how it has changed throughout the years to where he is now.
• Leading your team through hard times in an environment where they can contribute their best work. Pauls share how he successfully led teams through three major global crises: 9/11, the 2008 recession, and the current COVID global pandemic.
• Walking the walk and talking the talk - supporting the right thing both personally and professionally. 

Key Takeaways:

• If you don’t take care of yourself first, you will not be in the right place to help lift and serve others during hard times. You have to ground yourself before you can have the capacity and space to think of things from other’s points of view. 
• Younger generations are paying more attention to what companies are saying and doing - this will continue to be impactful as more of this younger generation becomes part of the c-suite. 
• Change is happening even in larger companies, but it is harder to turn a larger ship and it takes a little longer. 

"There's no playbook...The whole world was in the same spot without a manual on how to get through what we've gone through. So I give a lot of the brands a pass if they attempted to do something that maybe fell flat." —  Paul Marobella

About Paul Marobella: Paul brings the rare combination of a proven operational growth leader with being a modern marketer. Having led organizations of all sizes from early-stage and PE-backed fast-scale-ups to large enterprises as large as $400mio in revenue/$80mio in EBIT, Paul always leads with heart/vision and focuses on balancing profits with people and purpose. He's led brand and marketing transformations for many of the world's most iconic brands including IBM, Coca-Cola, Jim Beam, Microsoft, Adidas, and many more. 

Building high-performance cultures with a priority focus on diverse and inclusive teams has been a consistent thread throughout his leadership career. Working with his team, he developed a Fast Company World Changing Idea entitled #blackatwork that shed light on the experience of black employees in advertising. He was also an inaugural signatory of the 3% Pay Equity Pledge in 2018 ensuring that pay equity in his North American organization was third-party audited and adjusted accordingly. Leading organizations through transformational inflection points with purpose and focus has resulted in hyper-growth for his teams and companies.  

Paul is also passionate about providing resources and direction for at-risk youth in the inner-cities of America, especially Chicago. He chairs and sits on multiple boards whose purpose all focus on developing a healthier community and better educational opportunities for the kids of Chicago. He is an advisory board member of the Chicago Blackhawks Foundation, Chairman of the Inner-City Education Program and board member of Off The Street Club on Chicago’s West Side.

Paul is a co-founder of the T.E.A.M Hockey Academy, a mobile hockey and life skills academy for players of color in North America, launching in 2021 with former NHL player and current NBC analyst, Anson Carter.

Paul lives in Chicago with his wife, two teenage daughters, English bulldog Lord Stanley and when not in a conference room, you can find him on the ice playing hockey. 

Connect with Paul Marobella:  

Twitter: @marobella

Instagram: @marobella

LinkedIn: Paul Marobella

Website: HavasCreative.com & InnerCityEducation.org

T.E.A.M Hockey American website coming soon!

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Jonni discuss:

• How empathy shaped the business model of Eleven 11 Solutions and the company philosophy as they continue to grow. 
• Tips and advice to stay connected even during tough situations. 
• Empathy as inspiration and success in Jonni’s professional career. 

Key Takeaways:

• You don’t appease your employees at the expense of clients, you nurture them to the benefit of clients. Those employees will deliver solid work for clients if they work in an empathetic environment that understands them and is flexible to their needs. 
• Do not confuse empathy with being a yes-person. They are not the same thing. It’s not about making sure everyone is happy, it’s more about hearing and acknowledging what others are saying. 
• It’s not about caving in - it’s about how you gather information and then what you do with that information as you make decisions. 

"You want to build trust with the people you work with, that you work for, that worked for you. And if you can build that - which mostly comes from listening, empathy, and understanding their perspective - if you have a baseline of trust, the rest will fall into place. That means, when times are tough, you'll figure it out together because you have that baseline of trust. When times are good, they will trust you to just run with it because you have that baseline of trust." —  Jonni Ressler

About Jonni Ressler: Jonni Ressler is the CEO of Eleven 11 Solutions and believes successful marketing is another form of storytelling and that relationship is everything A natural connector, Jonni has built a multimillion-dollar consulting business by matching hiring managers with top talent across the United States.  Her consultancy is ruthlessly committed to helping clients and consultants succeed with a focus on transparency, integrity, and doing the right thing every time.  She began her career working for a variety of top technical companies like Microsoft and RealNetworks in international and domestic roles across both sales and marketing. 

In the early 2000s, Jonni left the workforce for over 6 years to raise her young children and returned to marketing as a consultant, giving her a unique perspective on reentering the workforce.  As a stand out consultant, she did a little bit of everything from leading product launches, to coordinating brand strategy and sales execution, to partner management, change management, and numerous corporate website redesigns and launches in her decade of consulting for companies like SAP Concur, HPE, and Microsoft.  Jonni founded Eleven 11 Solutions with the knowledge that good people know good people, and as a result of that philosophy, her company has doubled each year since inception in 2016 as a referral-only business.  When she's not leading Eleven 11 Solutions, and actively supporting her family and their respective interests, you can find Jonni on stage or online doing Improv. 

Connect with Jonni Ressler:  

Learn more about Eleven 11 Solutions:  Eleven11Solutions.com

Connect on Instagram: @eleven.11.solutions

Connect to Elevel 11 on LinkedIn: Eleven 11 Solutions

Connect to Jonni on LinkedIn: Jonni Ressler

Hashtags: #relationshipiseverything   #goodhumans  #consulting 

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria and Steve discuss:

• Technology for a purpose, not just for technology’s sake.
• Why data tells a story and this requires empathy
• Excellent models of leadership with bottom-line success through empathy.
• Habits and tips to maintain an empathetic mindset.

Key Takeaways:

• Data is more than being cold, hard, and analytical. What you're really trying to do is get this data to tell a story and get it to provide a perspective. The stories and the insights that you get out of it are really where the magic happens.
• Being able to start from common ground and build back up is where you're able to really pull that empathy out
• It exponentially helps you be more successful when you are empathetic and compassionate and get to know people on a real level, and then you can be as ambitious and competitive as you want to be as a result.

"We need to just say ‘hi’ and get to know people and for them to feel like you're a real person as well as their leader...the empathy, that connection, leads to some of the greatest outcomes." —  Steve Hartman

About Steve Hartman: Steve Hartman is an investor and advisor, and a seasoned executive with a unique mix of extensive experience across eCommerce, marketing, analytics, and technology.  He is an inspirational leader with a long track record of success in building and inspiring strong global teams and cultures, driving transformational organizational change, and delivering outstanding business results.

Steve has a broad range of industry experience across omni-channel retail, technology, storage, and financial services.  Most recently he was the President and Chief Growth Officer of Windsor Fashions, a women’s specialty retailer with over 190 stores in the US.  Formerly, he was CMO & SVP Ecommerce at Eddie Bauer, Managing Director of Ecommerce and Marketing at Urban Outfitters, SVP of Marketing at CubeSmart, and the Senior Director of eBay Partner Network.  He has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and dual MBAs from Columbia University and Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Connect with Steve:

Steve’s LinkedIn: Steve Hartman

Steve’s Instagram: @shartman32

Keep It Local Seattle: KeepItLocalSeattle.org

Keep It Local Seattle on Instagram: @keepitlocalseattle

Connect with Maria:

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Buy The Empathy Edge on Amazon! www.bit.ly/empathyedge

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice

In this episode, Maria discusses:

• What empathy is and how it can be leveraged by brands, leaders, and teams. 
• The soft skills that allow us to create bottom-line benefits for organizations. 
• Connecting with your clients and motivating your team through empathy.

Key Takeaways:

• Empathy takes two forms - affective empathy and cognitive empathy. It is a method of perspective - of gathering information and then using that information to inform a decision or an action.
• If you've cultivated your own confidence and are secure enough in your own skills and ability, you are much more likely to be empathetic because you have room in your head to take on another person's perspective.
• Practice curiosity - Get curious about the other person or the other people. Why do they see things that way? Why do they think that's the best method for success? What are their goals? What's their intention?

"Empathy means being willing and able to see understand and, where appropriate, but not always, feel another person's perspective and, further, to use that information to act compassionately." —  Maria Ross

Connect with Maria: 

Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com

Learn more about Maria’s brand strategy work and books: Red-Slice.com

Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross

LinkedIn: Maria Ross

Instagram: @redslicemaria

Twitter: @redslice

Facebook: Red Slice