Empathy Is the Anchor

The human skill that is the glue

I have spent a lot of my career talking about heart and being human at work, and the longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that empathy is the anchor.

It is what helps hold so much of what we say we want inside our organizations: trust, belonging, courage, candor, collaboration, innovation, resilience and performance. We can build programs around all of those things, create values for them, measure them and put them on slides, but underneath almost every healthy human system is a very simple desire: I feel seen by you, and I believe that you care enough to try to understand me.

That is empathy. Not agreement. Not fixing. Not lowering the bar. Not absorbing everyone else’s emotions or taking responsibility for making everyone happy.

Empathy is the willingness to get curious about another human being’s experience before rushing to judgment, correction or solution. I often describe it as riding shotgun with someone on their journey. You are not driving the car for them, and you are not pretending you know exactly what it feels like to be them, but you are willing to sit beside them, notice the bumps in the road and let them know they are not traveling alone. You are the passenger.

That distinction matters because I think empathy has been misunderstood in business for a very long time.

We have been taught that leadership requires distance, certainty and having the answer, when so much of great leadership actually begins with paying attention. We have been rewarded for moving quickly, solving problems and staying “professional,” yet the people around us are still human beings walking into work with ambition, insecurity, joy, grief, pressure, families, histories, hopes and lives that do not disappear the moment the workday begins.

Empathy means seeing the whole person, understanding what they may be carrying, and still believing in their ability to grow, contribute and rise to what is being asked of them.

In fact, I believe empathy makes accountability stronger because when people feel seen and respected, they are far more able to hear hard feedback, admit what they do not know, ask for help and take ownership without immediately moving into self-protection.

That is where trust begins. And trust is infrastructure. It’s the SOIL that the garden needs to grow.

When there is trust, people stop spending so much energy protecting themselves and start using that energy to contribute. They say the thing that needs to be said sooner, ask the question they are worried they should already know the answer to, admit when they are struggling or stretched too thin, disagree without assuming the relationship is at risk, and offer the half-formed, slightly wild idea that might just turn into something brilliant.

Trust gives people permission to bring more of what they know, what they see and who they are into the room, and that is where so much possibility begins.

Empathy is what helps create the conditions for all of that.

Years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk gave me a job description that was both incredibly simple and incredibly expansive: touch every human and infuse the organization with empathy. That work has shaped more than a decade of my life and taught me that humanity and performance were never opposing forces.

When we allow people to feel at home enough to contribute what is actually inside them, we do not become less ambitious. We unlock more of the talent, creativity, courage and energy that were already there.

That belief eventually became the heart of my TEDx talk, “We Need to Bring More Heart to Work,” because for me, heart at work has never been about being soft or sentimental; it is about seeing the human being in front of you and choosing to care enough to understand them.

And that is why I keep coming back to empathy. Empathy is where heart becomes something we actually do, in the way we listen, the way we lead, the way we give feedback, the way we make decisions and, maybe most importantly, the way we let people know: I see you. You matter here.

It is the leader who notices that someone has gone unusually quiet and checks in rather than making an assumption. It is the manager who gives honest feedback while protecting another person’s dignity. It is the colleague who listens for another thirty seconds instead of jumping in with advice. It is the executive who remembers that there is a human consequence attached to every organizational decision.

These moments may seem small, but culture is built in small moments.

The future of work is going to ask more of us, not less. Technology will continue accelerating, AI will continue reshaping how work gets done, organizations will continue changing and people will continue being asked to adapt at extraordinary speed.

Which is exactly why becoming more human matters now.

The organizations that flourish will not simply be the ones with the best technology or the smartest strategy. They will be the ones that can keep people connected, grounded and able to trust one another while everything around them is changing.

That is why I keep coming back to empathy. Empathy is the anchor that keeps us connected while everything else moves.

If you have 18 minutes, I would love for you to watch the TEDx talk below.

But more importantly, I would love for you to think about one question afterward:

Who at work might need a little more empathy from you right now — not because they’ve asked for it, but because you’ve been paying attention?

I appreciate you!

❤️ Claude