What if I told you that the most powerful force in business isn’t strategy, innovation, or tech: it’s love? Every great leader you admire already practices it. They might call it something else: respect, compassion, trust, purpose. Yet, underneath it all, it’s love, the energy that connects us, motivates us, and reminds us we’re human first.
Today’s guest, author, executive leadership coach, and international speaker, Dr. Moshe Engelberg, has spent nearly three decades helping organizations and leaders rethink what it means to lead with love as a strategic advantage. His work, grounded in behavioral science and wisdom traditions, shows how love drives engagement, loyalty, innovation, resilience, and how it goes hand-in-hand with empathy.
In our conversation, Moshe and I dig into what “love” really means in a business context and how you can model it without getting side-eyed in the boardroom. We talk about why culture is designed to resist change and what to do about it, the ABC model of The Amare Wave, and how to unify your team around a shared vision with more confidence, compassion, and clarity.
If the word love makes you a little uncomfortable, lean in closer. Because discomfort is usually where growth and better leadership begin.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- What love means in a business context
- How to open the door to the idea of love for leaders who may seem resistant at first.
- Holding healthy boundaries while you build a culture of trust and psychological safety.
- Small steps you can take now to create a more connected, resilient culture.
“Culture is designed not to change. That’s its purpose, is to offer stability, certainty, and predictability. So, it’s hard to change, and when we find tools that work that are usually behaviorally oriented, it can be profound for an organization.” — Moshe Engelberg
Episode References:
- Moshe’s book: The Amare Wave: Uplift Your Business by Putting Love to Work
- Red Slice Blog: Why Can’t Love Be Part of Your Business Model?
- Moshe’s Just Say No Guide and Newsletter Signup: https://amareleadership.com/#good-leaders
About Moshe Engelberg, Author, Executive Leadership Coach, International Speaker
Dr. Engelberg inspires businesses worldwide to be their best by thinking differently, acting courageously and leading with love. His innovative ideas and approaches are deeply rooted in a combination of applied behavioral science and diverse wisdom traditions, tested and refined through almost 3 decades of consulting with world-class organizations. His clients include global health and technology companies, federal and state government agencies, large and small nonprofits, foundations, and start-ups. Moshe is a teacher at heart who helps others find the deep knowledge and truth they hold within. His extensive academic credentials include a PhD from Stanford University in Communication and Master’s degrees in both Psychology and Public Health. He has published numerous research papers and designed and taught many executive education and graduate-level courses. As a speaker, Moshe consistently delights and inspires audiences with his innovative thinking, open-heart, dry wit, and practical “how-to” tips and techniques. He is also the author of the leadership book The Amare Wave: Uplift Your Business By Putting Love to Work, a weekly leadership newsletter, and over 150 articles published in INC. Magazine.
Connect with Moshe:
Amare Leadership: amareleadership.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mosheengelberg
Facebook: facebook.com/MosheEngelbergAuthor
Instagram: instagram.com/mosheengelberg
YouTube: youtube.com/@mosheengelbergauthor9276
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:04
welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. What if I told you that the most powerful force in business isn’t strategy or innovation or even technology? It’s love. I know some of you just squirmed a little in your ergonomic desk chair. Love in business, really, and not in a cold play kiss cam kind of way. Here’s the thing: every great leader you admire already practices it. They just might call it something else: respect, compassion, trust, purpose. Yet underneath it all, it’s love, the energy that connects us, motivates us, and reminds us we’re human first, not just a cog in the wheel. Today’s guest, author, executive leadership coach, international speaker, Dr. Moshe Engelberg, has spent nearly three decades helping organizations and leaders rethink what it means to lead with love, not as a fuzzy feeling, but as a strategic advantage. His work, grounded in behavioral science and wisdom traditions, shows how love drives engagement, loyalty, innovation, and resilience, and how it, of course, goes hand in hand with empathy. He’s consulted with global companies, government agencies, startups, and nonprofits, and his leadership book, The Amari Wave: Uplift Your Business by Putting Love to Work, has sparked a quiet revolution in how we define success. In our conversation, Moshe and I dig into what love really means in a business context. You may be surprised, and how you can model it without getting side-eyed in the boardroom. In fact, you’re likely using that language every day without realizing it. We talk about why culture is designed to resist change and what to do about it. The ABC model of the Amari wave, and how to unify your team around a shared vision with more confidence, compassion, and clarity. You’ll also hear how to protect your boundaries, love yourself first. Yes, even at work, and take small but mighty steps to create a more connected, resilient culture, one where people and profits thrive together. So, if the word love makes you a little uncomfortable. Lean in closer, because discomfort is usually where growth and better leadership begins. Take a listen. Moshe, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to The Empathy Edge to talk about how love can power leadership, which we often don’t think of love. When we think of business and organizations, so I’m excited to have this conversation with you.
Moshe Engelberg 03:25
Thank you. I’m really glad to be here with you.
Maria Ross 03:27
So we heard your impressive bio, but can you fill in the gaps for us a little bit about your story and how you even got to this work of coaching and speaking and writing about love as a leadership strategy?
Moshe Engelberg 03:40
Yes, well, it came as a surprise to me. It was not a planned direction. I had a management consulting firm, hybrid of management consulting, marketing strategy, business innovation that I led for about 30 years, and about 25 years in, it took a while. I realized that fundamentally business was missing love, and I say that because what I kept seeing happening is the, and I’d be working with really good organizations, Philips Healthcare, CDC, and AARP, across sectors, good people, good products and services, and the pressure, especially on the for-profit side, for hitting quarterly numbers was so extraordinarily strong that it tended to overwhelm everything else, and I remember talking to one client, he was a senior product manager, a very bright guy, and he said, “We hate our customers, and it was just striking his use of the word, and there was truth in it, he wasn’t being dramatic, that they believed in what they did, but there was so much tension,
Maria Ross 04:43
yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 04:44
that it made the work really hard. So imagine showing up to work where the people you are there to serve are people you don’t want to be around or help or support.
Maria Ross 04:54
Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 04:54
It creates a very challenging dynamic, and there that was one one. Experience that was really striking to me, and pivotal in the shift, hearing and recognizing it’s in a lot of businesses, maybe they won’t use the word hate per se, but strong language about the difficulty, and a second, a second was earlier in my career, I was finishing, I was finishing up my PhD at Stanford, and thinking, where do I want to go in terms of jobs, and one area I looked in was management consulting firms, and the language at the time at the big ones, bus and consulting, McKinsey was, we hire two kinds of people, we hire hunters and skinners.
Maria Ross 05:30
Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 05:31
hunters bring in the business, skinners do the work, and even.. and I was in my late 20s, maybe, and I thought even then that’s just bizarre, like I don’t want to be hunting anybody or skinning,
Maria Ross 05:42
skinning anyone. Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 05:43
yeah. And so, and and then I vowed to be different in my own consulting firm called Research Works. They started soon after instead. And then, after a few years, I forgot, because the milieu, the culture, the business culture we’re in, so rewards this more predatory, violent language. Let’s crush the competition. Let’s capture market share. Let’s subdue our customers, essentially. So that was a second piece, and the third piece that got me here was my own spiritual journey of many decades, and realized there’s more unity than there is difference.
Maria Ross 06:17
Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 06:17
and that love is the most powerful force we have.
Maria Ross 06:20
Wow,
Moshe Engelberg 06:22
yeah,
Maria Ross 06:22
I love this, because I started my career in management consulting for the Big Six, and it was very cutthroat. And then I spent a decade in Silicon Valley, which was all about just churning and burning through people, and we have so much data and research out there now that shows us that there’s a better way, and so now it’s, it’s really about people deciding what kind of leader they want to be, and will they have a more fulfilling life if they’re able to be a decent, loving person at work, just like they try to be, hopefully, in their personal lives, and I love what you talk about here, because even the language we use when we’re talking about winning in our market, we still want that. It’s not that we want to let go of high performance expectations or ambition. I don’t think either you or I are proposing that. So, what do you think gets in the way? Is it really just the use of the word love that kind of puts people off? I know for me, sometimes it’s empathy, right? And so I have to kind of change my language sometimes, and talk about resilience, or talk about building trust. Is it really, you know, I think you and I both understand what we mean by love, and the fact that people would hate their customers seems counterintuitive to being effective in your, in your business, and growing your business. But what do you think is the rub there for people.
Moshe Engelberg 07:42
Well, part I appreciate the question, and part of it is the language itself, the word love, and that can be triggering to a lot of people. And early on, when I was doing research for my book, The Amare Wave, I’d get a lot of these crossed arms, and like, okay, I’ve shut down. Thank
Maria Ross 07:58
you. Yeah, yeah.
Moshe Engelberg 07:59
And that’s why I named my book The Amare Wave. Amari is Latin for love, and because I didn’t want people to get stuck on love or misconstrue what I was talking about as romantic love, that’s not it at all. So I use the word Amari from one perspective to diffuse that, and still reactions come up because inevitably I move toward using the word love, so a couple things. One is a lot of people initially think, and I’m thinking of the more conventional traditional CEOs raised in the culture of Milton Friedman thinking and shareholders first, and it’s all about bottom line, and so on, and to your point, just to back up a moment, money matters, and productivity matters. One thing I really like about your book, or both your books, is that you tie empathy to strong results in ROI, so it’s not instead of it’s either hug a tree or make money, it’s not that, it’s
Maria Ross 08:58
both, and yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 08:59
yeah, and you can even make more money, and that’s a point I make. You can make more money by doing this, not less, and it means making some significant changes. So the way I open the door to the idea of love is, I’ll ask these leaders who seem to be closed off, I’ll either use sports or restaurants, I’ll say, so here I live near Denver, so I say, what about the Broncos? Oh, I love the Broncos. Every week I’m watching them, or In-N-Out Burger, or whatever it is, and people will invariably say, I love whatever it is, In and Out Burger, I love the Brian, I love the Steelers, I love the 40 Niners. So I make the point, well, those are businesses, and you’re seeing how love belongs in business. Don’t you want your customers to say that about you? And that sometimes is a wake-up, like, oh, okay,
Maria Ross 09:52
yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 09:53
love come along here. So that’s another kind of inroad, and I would recommend to listeners to consider that. Perspective, just to, as a conversation starter, find something that the other people involved in the conversation love, and make the point that look at how you’re talking about it
Maria Ross 10:10
Exactly
Moshe Engelberg 10:11
And then the two other pieces is I define love, I want to challenge myself to really operationalize it clearly and rigorously, especially because love has so many meanings and a lot of baggage, frankly. So, I define love pretty simply as energy that uplifts and connects, and my best example, and Trader Joe’s may be familiar with.
Maria Ross 10:34
Oh, yeah, yeah, I love Trader Joe’s.
Moshe Engelberg 10:36
Okay, see, you love Trader Joe’s, so do I. And when I go into Trader Joe’s, I feel uplifted a little bit. I feel happy to be there, and I feel like I belong. I feel connection is my kind of place. When I go into other more conventional supermarkets, it’s not bad, it’s more of an emotionally neutral experience. And to me, life is way too short for that, and I’d rather give my money to people in places where I feel uplifted and connected rather than when I feel kind of a neutrality,
Maria Ross 11:08
yeah, yeah, it’s all about that connection and engagement, and to the point you were, you started with about companies that hate their customers, I remember years ago working on a brand strategy project with a client who talked about their customers, so with so much disdain. I thought, this is why your marketing is not working, they can feel it. This is why you can’t message, or you don’t even want to get to know them, because so many of the assumptions this person was making about their customers was actually wrong. Yeah, and so it’s like, of course, you’re not even seeing them for who they are, or their needs, or what they care about, you know. We talked a lot about empathy and really trying to understand who they were as people for the purpose of being able to speak to them in a way that resonated, in a way that would engage them and connect them, and say, yes, I want to know more about what you do, and how you can help me. So, when we link it to customer experience, when we link it to customer loyalty, it makes sense. What about internally, you know, sort of this idea of embedding love into your business model? I’ll put a link in the show notes. I wrote a blog post about this years ago, but from your perspective, what are some ways that love gets embedded into a business model and gets exemplified and modeled?
Moshe Engelberg 12:29
Yeah, and there are several, and to build a bridge, I just want to say to not get caught up on using the word love, so, and that’s more of a marketing story. How do we position this whole thing? And I tell clients, call it grilled cheese, doesn’t matter, call it whatever you want, but do it one way or another, so and then they can have fun with, yeah, we’ll call it a hamburger or whatever it is, so one way is to not, one way to embed it in the culture is to not get, not require people to use the same labels for the construct, and to invite people to experience it. It starts with the experience rather than the thinking and the knowledge, and it’s kind of like to me, and maybe an odd analog is raising kids.
Maria Ross 13:16
It’s not odd at all.
Moshe Engelberg 13:18
Yeah,
Maria Ross 13:19
I use that all the time.
Moshe Engelberg 13:20
Yes, and all the books you want, and it’s helpful, and it’s good to have that knowledge, but there’s nothing like the experience, and then knowledge can be plugged in, but it’s really the experience that changes everything. So I tell clients to create the experiences, and again, it’s all about uplifting and connecting, and who does not want, so I flip it, flip the narrative a bit, say who does not want their employees to feel uplifted and a sense of connection, and I use a model called the ABCs of the Amari Way: A is for authenticity, B is for belonging, and C is for collaboration, and that’s a vehicle to start embedding it in the culture, so one is like Zappos famously did this early on with bring your whole self tour, that idea, that’s not going to work everywhere. If people are criticized because how their hair looks or because of an attitude they bring, it’s not going to fly. So there needs to be integrity to the words, the words and actions need to match, so one part of bring your whole self to work, another is to create a sense of belonging, and how do you do that? When I lead, I’ve been doing retreats and workshops for decades, and they’ve been good, some really good, and, and, and what I realize is there, when they hyper focus on the thing, we need to figure out this strategy or our new brand platform without a connection in advance, it doesn’t get nearly as far. So now I start retreats with things like we did one recently at a Ceramic Studio, and had the whole team work together to build something, and then sometimes they’ll destroy it afterwards, this idea of impermanence. Yes, or they’ll write all their belief, current beliefs about the organizational culture, and then we’ll burn them and start fresh. So, there’s lots of tools that get past the mind. I think that’s one of the critical ways to embed this, is get past the mind into the heart and more so into the experience.
Maria Ross 15:18
I love that. Talk a little bit about part of this idea of bringing love into your leadership approach, is also, you know, it requires us to do some inner work, because we can’t love, quote unquote, or hamburger other people if we don’t know what’s going on within us, right? That’s why self-awareness is my first pillar of the five pillars of empathetic and effective leadership. So, how do you help and coach leaders to let go of trying to control everything and to be able to love themselves enough that they feel confident in showing that kindness and in wanting to create that experience for someone else? What are some ways that you do that?
Moshe Engelberg 16:03
Yeah, I really like that. The many layers of that question, and it’s really important. And I’ve written a lot of pieces, like you, about self-awareness, and how that’s kind of a platform, and I would say I have not had one client come to me and say I want to be more self-aware, or I want to be a love-powered leader, even though that’s what I speak about in delivery. That’s not the starting point. The starting point is something more concrete. I need to get my team aligned, or we need to figure out how to grow our business, and, and so the self-awareness is a means toward that end and what I do is start small, like let invite people to highlight one small piece of when they become when they became aware of something. I’m thinking of one leader of an environmental nonprofit who became very aware and was able to express how she felt, whatever she did wasn’t enough, and she had an extraordinary track record of success, and sort of knew that, but it wasn’t coalesced, it wasn’t solid, and so the work involves getting really clear on what’s true, and one piece that makes it work is taking away the judgment, like what’s wrong with me, that I’m never enough, because that compounds it and creates a spinny cycle that doesn’t serve anybody. So, some of it is externalizing. Oh, there’s a part of me that it thinks whatever I do isn’t good enough. Let’s look at that part, and that allows a little bit of objectivity and distance that is helpful to increase more self-awareness,
Maria Ross 17:43
so I mean the difficult thing is getting people to ask that question, right? And I would assume that people aren’t coming to you unless they’ve had some level of knowing that they need something to change.
Moshe Engelberg 17:54
Yes,
Maria Ross 17:54
but what would you say to someone who’s who’s not necessarily leading in this way, and they’re like, I’m good, I know you know. How do you crack that, or even do you even bother to have that conversation with the skeptics until they’re at a certain point where they’re ready to take it further? There’s a lot of questions in there, but I just answer which ones you want.
Moshe Engelberg 18:14
Yeah, and I think you wrote a whole book directly toward the skeptics.
Maria Ross 18:18
Yes, yes,
Moshe Engelberg 18:18
for that reason I want to answer in two ways. One is the people who I believe I can serve best, and who therefore I’ve chosen to work with, are people who recognize their success and by outward measures are highly successful and have this almost unquenchable yearning to be and do more, and a phrase I’ll use is a choiceless choice. It’s such a strong feeling that I have this calling. There’s more for me to do. There’s greater ways for me to show up as a leader. I may not know what they are, I may have no idea what they are, or they may terrify me, but I can’t say no, because if I do, that crushes my soul. So, there’s this, this need to move into that, and most people I work with don’t know how. They know that that calling is there really strong, and they’re unwilling to ignore it anymore.
Maria Ross 19:19
It’s right, so some of the cracking of the nut happens before they’re even seeking out someone like you or even me, for that matter. Right, so yeah, that desire for recognizing that where you want to go is not where you are right now, and you don’t necessarily have to know what road is going to take you there, but there’s an acknowledgement, there’s a self-awareness that there’s something more I have to learn. I talk a lot about this idea of, you know, show me a leader who thinks they know everything, and I’ll show you a leader who’s irrelevant, because if you ever get to that point that you think you have all the answers, you’ve stifled your growth mindset, you’ve stifled your ability to get curious and want to learn more. Because you have all the answers yourself,
Moshe Engelberg 20:02
exactly, exactly, and where I go with leaders like that, where there’s a presentation of arrogance, is what are your, what are you most afraid of, right? What would happen if you looked inside,
Maria Ross 20:06
because that’s usually fear, right? That arrogance is usually masking a bit of fear.
Moshe Engelberg 20:19
Yeah, John, John Lennon, The Beatles summarized it decades ago. Two main forces in life: fear and love, and that’s what it boils down to. So, a lot of the work to your question earlier about culture change and self-awareness is recognizing that, acknowledging the fears, and not not bearing them, but like working through them and saying, yeah, this is scary,
Maria Ross 20:44
right? Right. And, and what a powerful model you show to your team when you can actually do that work and and make it visible and say, hey, I don’t know all the answers. Here’s what I’m working on
Moshe Engelberg 20:57
exactly. I had a conversation just just yesterday with a young leader, very successful entrepreneur, his name is Josh, and he, he and his partner sold their company. He was, he filled in as CEO temporarily, and then is now moving on, and when he had his essentially goodbye meeting with his team, I think it was about 60 or 70 people. He cried, and he heard comments. What led him to cry is the expression of appreciation, and it wasn’t this abstract. Yeah, you’re a great leader. Was I remember when you came and sat with me when, when my mother died, and you helped me go through it, or I remember when I was really scared to go on stage and give that talk, and you supported me, things like that. That’s what people remember, and it, it made him very emotional, and the feedback he got afterwards was seeing it, and he’s this big strong guy. So I think, unfortunately, it’s more true for men in our culture that expressing emotions that way and seeing a male leader cry is extraordinarily powerful as a motto, and gives permission for all kinds of healthy expressions.
Maria Ross 22:14
Absolutely, absolutely. Talk to us a little bit about going too far. You know, I talk about, you know, where empathy leans into people pleasing, but is, is there a way that leaders can protect their time and their boundaries and still lead with love? From your perspective, I want to hear from, like, from examples that you’ve, you’ve worked with leaders, maybe that was the struggle they were coming to you with, I don’t know, like it’s too much, I care too much, right? I don’t know if you ever work with teams or people like that, but what are some strategies you have for helping leaders protect their boundaries and protect their time while still being able to lead with love?
Moshe Engelberg 22:58
Yeah, well, and first off I would say that shows up a lot in in the C suite and in those below that and I write a newsletter every week, Amari Leadership Wednesday piece, and it gets on Ink magazine as well each week, and by far the most popular one, like by tenfold, was one called stop being so nice, do this instead.
Maria Ross 23:24
Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 23:25
so one mistake I see is conflating being nice, which is really code for not holding boundaries, with love, and in my opinion, in my experience, there’s nothing loving about not having boundaries. In fact, I would call that unloving, because it’s, it’s, it’s out of alignment. There’s not integrity in it. It’s not helpful to the other, but it’s like with little kids who don’t know, can I run out in the street? No one thing, no. I guess I, if there’s so, so one one piece is recognizing the tendency to conflate being nice with being loving or being a strong leader, and and the question I asked to get at that, and this is what leaders can ask themselves, is Whose need, whose needs am I meeting by being nice, and generally, so if I’m being extra nice and not respecting boundaries. I’m meeting my needs to avoid conflict or upset somebody, or whatever it is. And if I pretend it’s meeting their needs, I’m just tricking myself, and that circles back to this self-awareness. It also, it also comes back to the power of empathy, and being able to see the other person as they are, and recognize they may not like what I say when I tell the truth, and it’s in their best interests.
Maria Ross 24:48
Yeah, I’m going, I’m going back to parenting on this as well with my son about so many times when I talk about giving him screen limits or getting him to do something himself, so. He learns how to do it versus having me do it for him, and he says that he goes, “You’re not being very nice, and I say, “It’s because I love you, and I want, I want you to be able to figure this out. I want you to be healthy, and someday you’ll realize that, but maybe not today, and you have to be okay with that, right? Like, this is why I feel like I had kids later is because maybe when I was younger I wouldn’t be able to take that, I would. He doesn’t like me, right? Yeah, and
Moshe Engelberg 25:27
exactly,
Maria Ross 25:27
we have to just understand that as leaders, we’re going to be making some decisions, we’re going to be setting some boundaries, we’re going to be potentially disappointing people at times, but if we’re explaining why and we’re being transparent in the process, and it’s coming from a place of this is the right thing for our organization, and ultimately you may not see it right now, but this is the right thing for the team, and if we, if we can, you know, I feel like that’s where that trust component comes in, because if you can’t have a conversation like that with your team, you need to look at the trust level and the psychological safety, because otherwise they would know that you have their back, even if they were disgruntled about your decision, they might still be able to disagree, but still commit to it. So, how do you help them dig a little deeper to get into how you create that environment of trust and an environment of psychological safety, so that their words can be trusted and their actions can be trusted.
Moshe Engelberg 26:25
Yeah, one approach that I found really useful is to use that analogy of an elephant in the room, like what’s the.. I hear, I hear everyone is saying, like, make nice, we’re happy, and yet sales are down, or customer satisfaction is low, or employees are running away. Whatever it is, there’s indicators that something’s up. So we’re pretending, and I’ll call that out and say, so what are we not talking about? And I’ll often use a magic wand. If you had a magic wand, good way of that, what would happen? And someone will say, well, we would start talking about the problems and quit pretending everything’s okay, and so just labeling something creates openings that that can lead to a lot of really good progress.
Maria Ross 27:15
I love that
Moshe Engelberg 27:16
And when I do it, I try to do it, and I encourage people I coach to bring on some of these coaching tools into their own style is to just be curious, and you talk about curiosity a lot as well in your work. Just wonder, like I hear this going on, everything’s great, and I see the numbers here for the fact that you’re calling me in because things aren’t going so well. I wonder what that disconnect is about. What do you think? And if I can genuinely be curious, it’s really powerful. And if then the leaders can be genuinely curious with their team, there’s no accusations, there’s no judgment. It’s what’s going on here.
Maria Ross 27:55
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And try to create a space where I’m a big fan of just calling things out and saying the things out loud, not in a hurtful way, or a, you know, using candor as a weapon to attack somebody, right? And just say, well, I’m just being honest, but calling something out, if you notice tension, if you notice conflict, if you notice that everyone’s saying one thing, but the performance results are going another way, someone needs to call that out in the room collectively and say, hey, this is all of us, this is not, this is not, we’re not shaming and blaming, I’m genuinely just looking for your input as to why this is happening. Yes, right, we can go a long way creating an environment like that,
Moshe Engelberg 28:38
we can, we can. I had some conversations with Alan Mulally. He was the CEO, the turnaround CEO at Harper Boeing, and then Ford went from 12 billion in the hole to 8 billion profit within a small number of years, and he had this process, a business plan review that he would use, where leaders would gather in the room, they’d just say green, yellow, or red for how things were going. Yeah, it was a real quick, real quick go around the room
Maria Ross 29:07
yeah, nothing too complicated.
Maria Ross 29:08
Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 29:08
and I remember at Ford, everyone would say green, green, and he’d say, then why are we losing $12 billion And then finally, after a while, someone had the courage to say yellow, maybe red, and he got everyone clapping for them. They literally applauded. Thank you for telling the truth.
Maria Ross 29:27
Yeah, yeah.
Moshe Engelberg 29:29
So that’s in terms of changing culture. It took me a long time. I used to do a lot of work on culture change, and it took me a long time to recognize that culture is designed to not change. That’s its purpose, is to offer stability and certainty and predictability. So, it’s hard to change, and when we find tools that work that are usually behaviorally oriented, I think it can be profound for an organization. One of the leaders I worked with for many years. He would conflate his identity with niceness. Say, well, that’s just the kind of guy I am, like I don’t want to confront. And that’s where the work came in. That took a while. It took several years of, no, you are not you, and nice are are distinct. Nice is a pattern you had, you can keep it or not, but it’s not you, and he has evolved so much since then, and one of the mottos with him is TYP, trust your process, and this ties back to the self-awareness and kind of empathy, looking inward, empathy with self, and trusting, I don’t know what’s going to happen, like for this podcast, I didn’t know, I had some idea what we talk about, but I don’t know how it go, and I love the conversation, and stressing this comment will lead to you to say something in me, and we don’t have to over manage.
Maria Ross 30:50
Absolutely, absolutely. I’m wondering, that’s actually just sparked a different question for me, is because I see this sometimes, not often, but enough that I noticed this, especially with women leaders who are overcoming imposter syndrome, or overcoming, you know, the niceness factor. In an attempt to counteract it, they sometimes go – the pendulum sometimes swings way too far.
Moshe Engelberg 31:16
Yeah,
Maria Ross 31:17
and then they sort of put up a wall and become a different person, because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do to combat the niceness. How do you help leaders who swing that pendulum too far bring it back?
Moshe Engelberg 31:31
Yeah, I was working with the leader just in that position, female way, very strong, very capable, newer to the organization, and it’s a work in progress. Still, what I’ve seen work in the past is to your point, labeling, calling it what it is, and asking hypothetical questions. What might happen if you showed up this way? What might, and then the beliefs that go along with it, and then recognizable belief. Well, if I’m not really tough, then they’ll write me off,
Maria Ross 32:04
they’ll walk all over me, yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 32:05
yeah, yeah. And what does that trigger? Well, when I was a little girl, this and this happened, and so it typically goes way back, and then when we can can acknowledge those hurt parts of ourselves, then we can heal them, and the reality is that can happen in this culture, especially with the increase in the machismo and the tech bro,
Maria Ross 32:30
toxic masculinity. Yeah, absolutely,
Moshe Engelberg 32:32
yeah, that toxic masculinity of it can happen, and yeah, there’s just that’s part of the reality, and this can happen, and it might, that there’s no guarantees that won’t, that’s part of the acceptance and the surrender, frankly.
Maria Ross 32:46
Well, you know, because I imagine you know there’s along that spectrum, there’s still goodness and advantages there, and we don’t want people to lose their ability to connect, their ability to be empathetic, their ability to be vulnerable in their quest to be setting boundaries better in their quest to be going from niceness to results driven, or whatever it is for them, and so how do you help, or what advice would you give, I guess, to someone kind of going through that struggle now? How do they figure out the pluses to keep as they’re going through that journey of trying to be more diligent about boundary setting and more diligent about self care, for example. Yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 33:25
and give an example of a leader – I’ll call her Sarah for the moment – and she would go back and forth and mistake the toughness. Well, nobody’s challenging me, so it must be fine, so mistaking silence for
Maria Ross 33:43
acceptance.
Moshe Engelberg 33:44
Good, yeah, acceptance and goodness. So then part of it was, well, that’s your assumption, you might be right. I don’t know, I’d be surprised, but you might be. So check it out, or hire a coach, or a researcher, or something, but get data to check out your assumptions, and that, and that can be really critical. And for her, she had specific habits that went with either the toughness and the niceness. So, with the niceness went using way too many words, just elaborating and saying, like what I’m doing right now, I’m saying it this way, I’m saying it that way, instead of just letting it sit,
Maria Ross 34:22
yeah,
Moshe Engelberg 34:23
and she recognized it when she would be more concise, it had more impact, and she got more respect, and it wasn’t un nice, it was just clear, so there’s a middle ground there between that tough and nice of clear, yeah, and again it comes down to I think empathy and self awareness and resilience, and those skills are absolutely essential.
Maria Ross 34:45
Yeah, I love that. It’s just about, you know, stop making those assumptions and get the data on the impact your behavior actually is having on your team, and you know that can also be a sign of fear and a lack of psychological safety, as if everyone’s staying silent. Right, so
Moshe Engelberg 35:00
yes,
Maria Ross 35:01
I love this, and I love the work that you’re doing around helping people understand what leading with love is. I absolutely love your definition of what you mean by love, because that’s the same thing for me. It’s when we talk about embedding love, quote unquote, into your, your business model. I’m talking about, you know, listening to customers and giving mechanisms for them to provide feedback. I’m talking about policies that assume the best intentions in your customers versus the worst intentions, right? I’m talking about internal policies and rewards and recognition measures that are not just about the performance numbers but about how you treat other people, and how you show up, and what you, what energy you bring into the room, and whether that energy is uplifting people or not. And not everyone, you know, we understand, not everyone is always gifted in being able to be that charismatic person that comes into an environment, but it, it, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about not forgetting that there’s a human being in front of you, and operationalizing that in your business model, through, like I said, through policies, through practices, through rewards, through all of those things, so that you don’t come away with a, with an organization of toxic rock stars, which, yeah, may be good for your revenue for a while, but it’s not going to be sustainable.
Moshe Engelberg 36:22
No, it’s not. One of the Mario A principles is go for the long term, and in the short term, these more combative, weird, the toxic, masculine, all that stuff can work, but it is not sustainable, like you were saying in Silicon Valley, it just burns through people, and eventually people hopefully get like this isn’t healthy,
Maria Ross 36:45
right?
Moshe Engelberg 36:46
It’s just not,
Maria Ross 36:47
yeah.
Moshe Engelberg 36:48
So, there is an alternative. There is a different paradigm, and I think it’s actually the more natural paradigm, and where business started fundamentally is business exists, in my opinion, to make life better for people, and making money, hopefully a lot of it. It’s a byproduct, and a really important one. So we have the opportunity to come back to that, and with all this polarity in our world, the invitation is clearer and clearer.
Maria Ross 37:14
Love that, love that. Well, let’s leave it there. Thank you so much for your time and your insights today. Your work is fascinating, and I’m really encouraging all of my listeners to check out your website, your book, The Amari Wave: Uplift Your Business by putting love to work, love in the definition as you’ve described it for us today, and to also go to your website and sign up for your newsletter and get those Wednesday musings. I love that we will have all your links in the show notes, but for anyone that’s on the go right now, where’s one best place they can find out more about you and your work?
Moshe Engelberg 37:46
Amari Leadership, and Amari is a m a r e, amarileadership.com There’s a link, there’s the usual about page, and so on services, and there’s a link in the newsletters, and what I found was really needed, so I wrote it. Was a short book, a guide on how to say no.
Maria Ross 38:05
Oh, I love that.
Moshe Engelberg 38:07
So that, and that’s available when people sign up, and I encourage, and the more people that do that, the better. We need more
Maria Ross 38:14
absolutely
Moshe Engelberg 38:15
clarity and honesty in our world.
Maria Ross 38:18
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Moshe. We really appreciate it.
Moshe Engelberg 38:23
It was really nice being with you, and I hope this will serve your listeners really well.
Maria Ross 38:27
It will, and thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of The Empathy Edge Podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit The Empathy edge.com There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes, and free resources. Book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
