I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelle… - Heather McGowan
" "I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled. Empathy ultimately drives performance. It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance. Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that. What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life. And we had agency over our personal life. And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life.
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About Heather McGowan
Heather McGowan is an American writer. She is the author of the novels Schooling and Duchess of Nothing Schooling was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Detroit Free Press and The Hartford Courant. McGowan has a master in fine arts from Brown University.
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Additional quotes by Heather McGowan
I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you". And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust. That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with. This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?
Yeah, so the book is really divided into three sections. We try to make it very easy for folks to both read and skip around, because I am a short-attention-span person as well, so you should be able to read it on a cross-country flight. It's about 200 pages with about 35 graphics. First part is, meet your new workforce because it's not the one you left in 2019. Second part is, you have to rethink about how you actually organise work, because the maps and the models in the past are not only not helpful, they can actually be dangerous, like driving in the city of Boston, which I'm from, using maps before the big dig, it's just not going to get you anywhere, it's going to get you lost and frustrated. And then the third part is about rethinking your leadership entirely, because here's what we think happened.
Well first, I think we need to dispel the notion that empathy means less, and I didn't really even understand it until I started doing these book tour interviews where people said to me, "Okay, so we've got to be empathetic, we've got to be nice, we've got to make concessions for people, let them do less and expect less". And I thought, "Well, there may be days that's true". Your dad dies, you have to put your dog to sleep, there are days that we have to be human and that's true. But no, that's not what I'm talking about.
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