Most leaders are promoted because they’re excellent at strategy, operations, or delivering results. But very few are ever taught how to lead people or give feedback. And that’s where things fall apart.
Rebecca Dhrimaj is on a mission to redefine what leadership looks like in the C-suite and beyond. As a Chief Empathy Officer of The Empathy Collective, Rebecca empowers leaders to coach teams and give honest feedback through change, one conversation at a time.
Rebecca shares how she “stumbled into” her business model through lived experience and hard-earned insight. She walks us through a powerful case study of her work with a large customer excellence team, where leadership training directly mapped to measurable improvements in employee engagement and change readiness scores. This isn’t theory—it’s tangible impact.
We also talk about why leaders often rise because of their technical and business acumen, but are rarely equipped with the skills to navigate human emotion. Rebecca explains why starting with a WHY of genuine care and understanding your team’s collective strengths can transform even the most disruptive change into momentum instead of burnout.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- Rebecca’s Three Phases of Change Readiness Model
- Creating more effective one-on-ones that include proactive career conversations
- Why you have to do the inner work as a leader to best lift your team and organization
- How to build honest two-way feedback with your team
“You don’t necessarily have to always be on the lookout for things, but if you’re asking the right questions in your one-on-ones with your people, floodgates will open, and they will talk, and they will share.” — Rebecca Dhrimaj
Episode References:
- Rebecca’s Action Learning Coaching Guide: https://bit.ly/4rG0LPm
- The Middle Matters: A Toolkit for Middle Managers by Jeff Sigal
- Article in Change Conversations newsletter referencing Meet Your Inner Team cards
The Empathy Edge podcast:
- Rebecca Geshuri: When Good Moms Feel Bad and Why Supporting Them is a Leadership Imperative
- Jamie Greenwood: Why Empathy for Others Starts with Compassion for Yourself
About Rebecca Dhrimaj, Chief Empathy Officer, The Empathy Collective:
As Chief Empathy Officer, Rebecca’s mission is to redefine the role of the C-Suite by empowering leaders to coach people through change, one conversation at a time. After leading change management for an organizational restructuring, she noticed there was a lack of tools available to leaders dealing with the human side of change: the emotions, the fear, the resistance. She discovered that when leaders start with a WHY of caring and an intimate understanding of their team’s collective strengths, any change is possible. When she is not preparing teams for change, she laces up her running shoes and tunes into an audiobook. Fun fact: she has lived in the US, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France and always has a secret stash of Belgian chocolate.
Connect with Rebecca:
The Empathy Collective and Resilient Change Leader™ course: theempathycollective.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccadhrimaj
Podcast – Return on Empathy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/return-on-empathy/id1750060452
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the 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. Most leaders are promoted because they’re excellent at strategy, operations, or delivering results, but very few are ever taught how to lead people through the messy emotional reality of change, and that’s where things fall apart. Rebecca Dreamai is on a mission to redefine what leadership looks like in the C-suite and beyond. As a chief empathy officer of the Empathy Collective, Rebecca empowers leaders to coach teams through change, one conversation at a time. Rebecca also hosts a podcast called Return on Empathy. After leading change management during a major organizational restructuring, Rebecca noticed something alarming. There were countless tools for timelines, systems, and processes, but almost nothing for the human side of change-the fear, the resistance, the uncertainty, the quiet disengagement that tanks morale and performance. So she built what she wished she’d had. In this conversation, Rebecca shares how she stumbled into her business model through lived experience and hard-earned insight. We unpack her three phases of change readiness model and why it differs from traditional change management approaches that focus on logistics instead of psychology. And this experience is now available as an online program called Resilient Change Leader, designed to give mid-level and senior leaders a practical toolkit to measure impact, strengthen team resilience, and lead change with confidence and empathy. She walks us through a powerful case study of her work with a large customer excellence team, where leadership training directly mapped to measurable improvements in employee engagement and change readiness scores. This isn’t theory, folks. It’s tangible impact. We also talk about why leaders often rise because of their technical and business acumen, but are rarely equipped with the skills to navigate human emotion. Rebecca explains why starting with a why of genuine care and understanding your team’s collective strengths can transform even the most disruptive change into momentum instead of burnout. If change is constant, and it is, then learning how to lead through it is no longer optional. So many gems. Take a listen. Hello, Rebecca. Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast. I am so excited to have you here as a fellow empathy advocate and professional, helping organizations and leaders embrace empathy. You’ve got a really unique model around combining the work you do with change management, which is near and dear to my heart, as I mentioned earlier, my first job out of college was with a management consulting firm in the change management group. So, we’ve talked a lot on this show about the role of empathy to navigate tumultuous change, and I’m sure you’ve seen that in your work. So, welcome to the podcast.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 03:42
Thank you so much, Maria. I’m super excited to be here, especially since I’m I’m a fan of yours. I’ve read both of your books. You can probably see them sitting on my shelf right behind me.
Maria Ross 03:54
Thank you.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 03:55
So you know, it’s always good to. It feels like homecoming, right? When you you’re sitting across from someone at the table who just understands what it means to live and breathe empathy, and so very very happy to be here.
Maria Ross 04:08
I love that, and that’s the joy. I know you have a podcast too. That’s the joy of this podcast is talking to people who come at it from their own angle and the different facets of empathetic leadership and empathetic culture. So it’s always fun for me because, selfishly, I get to learn something new from every guest I have. So, Rebecca, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into this work, and sort of how you stumbled upon your business model. It’s such a great story.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 04:35
Well, thank you, Maria. I actually, unlike you, you came out of college and went straight into management consulting, I ended up in change management kind of accidentally towards the end of my corporate career. But I’ve always, I say, the common thread throughout my career. I’ve, you know, I’ve spent time in marketing, communications, strategy roles. The common thread throughout is I’ve I’ve always been interested in this in the psychology. Behind my work, how other people function. So not just the technical aspect of my work, but the human side of work. In fact, I recall a time when I was in at university and I was studying abroad in in France, and it was right around the time when the European Constitution was being built and there was a ratification process, and France and the Netherlands basically declined. They were like, “We don’t want to be a part of this. And I just I wanted to understand why, why not create a United States of Europe, and so I started researching, you know, kind of the political backdrop and what what kind of fueled that rejection of of a European constitution, and in the end, it stemmed from a lot of what we’re seeing today in in American society with with black and brown people to say it was the same in Europe as Turkish and Moroccans, and they you know they they were afraid of you know these others the others other people who don’t look like us coming in, taking our jobs. You know, just sounds like a familiar story, right?
Maria Ross 06:07
Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 06:07
So it’s that fear-driven mentality that humans take when they feel uncomfortable or they’re they see people who are different from them. So that stemmed from you know that interest stemmed from a very young age, and that kind of propelled me into marketing only because marketing seemed like the only business discipline that had any kind of human psychology commitment.
Maria Ross 06:27
Same, same. I majored in marketing in college, and I think that’s a common thread among many marketers. That was actually what got me on the empathy train. Was this idea of realizing that empathy was the superpower of marketing, being able to connect and engage with people as human beings, not as numbers, not as subscribers, not as dollar signs. But what do people really want? What do they need? How do they feel? How do they see themselves? So, just like you, I remember toying with majoring in either psychology or marketing when I was in college because I was so fascinated. Exactly the same the same path. That’s so funny.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 07:06
It is interesting though, because you know I was I was looking at the different disciplines in business school. It’s like strategy, supply chain, finance. One of that you don’t you don’t think oh humans yeah
Maria Ross 07:17
exactly exactly,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 07:19
but that’s I mean, that kind of carried me along my journey because what I started to realize, especially when I got to that pivotal moment where I was asked to lead change management for an executive team that was undergoing a major restructuring of about 3000 employees, that’s when it hit me. That’s when I saw my eyes were open to all those leaders who had gotten their MBAs, gone through business school, and studied finance or strategy or whatever it was, they learned how to technically run a business, but no one taught them how to deal with people, right? Coach people through change, or just just lead people in general, let alone through a crisis or a difficult situation, and that’s when that’s when I realized, oh, we businesses, or at least from the very beginning when we go through business school, we’re not given these tools,
Maria Ross 08:17
absolutely not that
Rebecca Dhrimaj 08:18
you talk about on your podcast, and so I think this is why our podcasts exist. Yes, because we’re trying to reacquaint humans with the humanness that exists in business, because we’ve somehow created this divide.
Maria Ross 08:34
Exactly. Well, and with AI, it’s just making more of a stark contrast of the emotional intelligence and human skills that are missing in leadership, because I always like to say that leaders who are not good at the people side of it, who have been hiding behind the tasks and the technical acumen, they’re going to have no place to hide anymore because it’s it’s the people skills that are going to be the competitive differentiator. It’s being able to bring people along in massive change, I’ve written a few articles for my Forbes column about the role of empathy in change management. So that’s why I’m really eager to have this conversation with you today. Talk about this change readiness model that you have, because I think you come at the empathy work again from a very unique angle, from more of a business strategy change management angle, how did you discover slash stumble upon figure out this three phase model? And can you talk us through it and explain why each step is so important?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 09:37
Yeah, I’m happy to do that. And in fact, this whole model was built from my experience leading change management and trying to fill the gap, the toolkit that did not exist when I was leading change management that I wished I had had as the change management lead.
Maria Ross 09:52
Yes,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 09:53
and I will say, I mean, just just to backtrack a little bit to that story of being brought onto the leadership team to drive. Change the model that that we built in our consulting firm was actually built from what I saw as learning moments or or mistakes that I made when I was leading change management. I would say that the first learning moment for me was I within a month of leading change management, I saw this incredible empathy deficit between the senior leaders and the employees who are responsible for driving the change, and what I did was I tried to fill that gap myself. So I was literally, you know, I was talking to individuals. I had my calendar was full of meetings, one-on-one meetings with people, especially change agents who had been tasked with really inspiring their team to drive the change, and so I was, as my sister, who’s a mental health counselor, as my sister says, I was literally sitting in the suck with people on a daily basis,
Maria Ross 10:51
yes,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 10:51
listening to their complaints and their concerns, and and so that was to me. I mean, that that that was too much because I was over-indexing on empathy, and I was causing my own burnout, and that led to the second mistake I made, which was because I was sitting in the suck with all the employees on a very regular basis. When I would come back to the leadership table, I wouldn’t say I villainized them, but I almost sided with the employees because I could feel the pain that they were going through, and I didn’t see the empathy coming from the leaders, and so I would challenge their decisions at the leadership table. And what I should have done was I should have put myself in their shoes a little bit more, try to understand that they were under as much pressure and fear as everyone else. In fact, I remember one of the the senior leaders in a one-on-one conversation with me, he was telling me before I was even asked to lead change management. He said, “These were his words: the CEO’s way of leading is effing savage. And you know, I didn’t want to drop the f bomb on this podcast. It’s not really my style. I don’t. You have to censor it, but those were his words. And I think what I could have done is is really thought about okay, what is it like to sit in a room with this CEO who’s literally yelling at these leaders,
Maria Ross 12:08
yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 12:09
telling them to make the you got to make the numbers. Oh, by the way, here’s your quota. Here’s the number of people you need to cut from your your team by the end of this quarter, so we can make our numbers. So if that is the mandate that you’re getting from your leader, of course you’re going to respond in a in a certain way. You don’t have the capacity to show empathy for your your people. You’re just trying to survive.
Maria Ross 12:32
Yeah.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 12:33
So anyway, so that that’s kind of that’s the journey I went through, learning from my mistakes, and then also realizing what would have been helpful, what kind of toolkit would have been helpful to give to people leaders who are responsible for driving the change and coaching their people through the change. How can we help them so that the entire responsibility doesn’t sit on the shoulders of the executives who are reporting to sometimes an empathetic CEO and sometimes not so much.
Maria Ross 13:04
Exactly, exactly. Well, I talk a lot about empathy needs to flow both ways, and I think you’re hitting on that point of really getting these two groups of people who feel like they’re at odds and in opposition with each other to understand that they’re all having human emotions about this change. Yes, is it harder sometimes to be the one that’s laid off versus the one that has to make the decision to lay people off from a survival perspective? Yes, but that’s also very emotionally and psychologically hard for leaders to do that work too. And to your point, be boxed into that whether they agree with it or not, right? And they’re the ones being tasked with implementing some of these things that they might not agree with because they’re also closer to their people than perhaps those on high who don’t interact with the direct teams. Who it’s like, yes, it’s just a balance sheet number, but to many, especially mid-level leaders, if we’re talking about VPs or directors, they’re the ones who know these people and they know their lives. And so, it’s not necessarily that you have to feel sorry for someone that’s going to lay you off, but the understanding of like this is hard for everyone, and so the empathy comes in with the decisions being made. So, how can we do it in the most humane and compassionate way possible. How can we support people? How can we be there for them? What questions do they have? What resources do they need? You know, thinking about those things ahead of time is all part of the change management process. So I love that you’re speaking about this because I think that’s often what is what happens. Is sometimes there are leaders who put other people in charge of the change efforts, and I’m not saying this happens all the time, but they think those people are better at peopling than they are. They’re sort of outsourcing the hard stuff, right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 14:58
Yeah, and
Maria Ross 14:59
not that that always. Happens, but they’re will they’re putting a really heavy load on certain individuals. Like especially, we saw this in the pandemic with a lot of HR leaders, for example, being the ones that had to be the bearers of bad news, the ones that had to implement and enforce the return to work policies, right? Return to office policies, and saying, “Well, you’re you’re a people person, you can deal with it, and I feel like what it’s doing is it’s giving certain leaders a pass to not strengthen that muscle and build their empathy and emotional intelligence skills. Which I don’t know in our current reality that that’s feasible. I think that we have to expect that of every leader that if you’re not good at this, you need to get better at
Rebecca Dhrimaj 15:45
it. Yeah, well, and I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier about leaders who are technically savvy get promoted into people leader roles,
Maria Ross 15:54
right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 15:54
But they don’t have the peopling skills. Yeah, to your point, or they’re not given the right the right training or the right coaching, so they’re just thrown into it, and because they were really good at, you know, running this machine on the manufacturing floor, now they can be a supervisor. Well, you know, two very different roles, right? Right, right.
Maria Ross 16:12
One is about motivating and recognizing and encouraging and supporting and holding people accountable, and one is about doing the work. You might be an excellent individual contributor, but it doesn’t mean you know how to lead people.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 16:27
Yeah, yeah. Well, that and that actually makes me think a lot about Jeff Jeff Siegel, who I interviewed on my podcast not too long ago. He’s the author of The Middle Matters, so he provided this whole framework for middle management because he’s he spent his most of his career in middle management and all the way up to the VP level, and and the pitfall that he saw the most with middle managers who are promoted into those roles is he kind of showed this diagram of three bubbles where as a middle manager you are the doer, you’re the leader, and you’re the influencer. Yes, and we master being a doer when we’re an individual contributor,
Maria Ross 17:02
right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 17:03
But then when we’re promoted, we kind of cling to that doer mentality rather than you know really honing our skills and leading and influencing. And I think his methodology really intersects well with what we we teach and taint change readiness is flexing that that muscle of influencing and leading.
Maria Ross 17:24
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let’s get back to your change readiness model and the three phases in the change readiness process. And where, as you talk us through those phases, where’s the role of empathy? Where’s the role of building those skills if they are lacking at the moment,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 17:41
yeah, yeah. So I mean, really, the what I wanted, what I needed when I was leading change management, what I was desperate to hand to people, meet managers during that time, was a toolkit for one-on-one communications between the leader and and the direct report. Because what was happening was we were we were creating boilerplate messaging. I was responsible for that as well, right? Yeah, they were like, “Oh, you’re you have a background in strategy, marketing, and communications. You’ll be a great change management lead. So yeah, I was I was working on the the messaging for you know for the initiative, and then working together with internal communications on that, and then it was just distributed, right? You know, all that that same messaging was used in town halls, and then in you know larger or smaller department level meetings. But there was no toolkit for those one on one coaching conversations between the the people leader and the direct report around what this change means for the team what it means for them as an individual.
Maria Ross 18:43
Yeah.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 18:43
So the three phase framework centers around that one on one contact. So it starts with the the resilient IQ diagnostic, which is a very basic eight question diagnostic. It takes five minutes to complete, but it is incredibly revealing about how well those leaders are equipped to have those one-on-one change conversations with employees, and what’s interesting because we’ve we’ve had enough we have enough data now at this point, and we’re also using this diagnostic as a foundation for the research for the book that I’m writing right now. We’ve had enough data come back where it’s very clear that the one piece that that leaders are missing over and over again with with those one on one change conversations is how is the change going to impact my career, my growth path in this company? Leaders aren’t having those proactive career conversations; they’re basically waiting until the mid-year or the end end of year review process. Like, oh, by the way, let’s talk about what you know what you’re thinking about for next steps or how you want to grow in your role. Versus literally every one-on-one or every other one-on-one, you’re having you know little you’re speckling the conversation with little nuggets. Like oh, I saw this project come across my desk, and I know you’re really talented in this area, and it’s and you’re excited about this area, and this project really would would hone your talents. You know, would you be interested in it? So basically, the the people leader always kind of having on their radar possibilities for their team members and knowing their growth trajectory and where they want to take take their career. I actually had um I interviewed someone on my podcast recently who works in manufacturing and he said the biggest challenge that he sees in his work is people get hired to work in the manufacturing facility and their biggest fear is they they’re afraid they’re going to be left to rot, so they get hired. They run the machine, and no one seems to care about what’s next. It’s like you know, eventually there’s got to be a next step. Like you’re going to get bored running that machine,
Maria Ross 20:53
right? You want to
Rebecca Dhrimaj 20:54
grow. You want to do something else. Maybe it’s becoming a supervisor. Maybe it’s working on another piece of equipment. Right. But that’s one thing that’s overlooked over and over. And think about it, Maria. Like when you’re when you’re leading change, what there is such an incredible opportunity to harness people’s talents during that change. Like, what is this change going to do for for you and your skill set? How can how can you be a change agent or you know get on one of these projects that are that’s involved with with the reorg because you’re really good at project management. I mean, there’s so many opportunities to turn the conversation into a growth conversation rather than, yeah, okay, here’s the change. This is what what it’s going to do to us.
Maria Ross 21:18
Yeah, what questions do you have?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 21:23
Yeah,
Maria Ross 21:23
and I think that that’s that is a mindset that not everybody has to be empathetic to those leaders, right? They’re not natural dot connectors. They’re not natural like you have said something that I’ve tucked away, and then I see this opportunity over here, even though you haven’t mentioned it. I’m going to connect that dot and say that could be a good opportunity for you. That is a skill that, to be fair, not a lot of people have. So, is that trainable?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 21:23
You know, absolutely. And I think some people are more innately aware of. You know, they’re
Maria Ross 21:23
yeah. I’m a dot connector. I think. I think in terms of random connections to the point that it’s kind of annoying. Of like, where are you going with that? It’s like, oh well, in my mind, the six steps lined up and made sense. But, but I know it, and I don’t say that to brag, but I know that not everybody sees the world that way.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 21:23
Yeah, no, and it’s you know, it’s it’s interesting because I I often you know at the end of my my podcast episodes I ask I ask my guests. I say, you know, is there one really small actionable thing that’s that a leader listening could take away today, so that you know this? The last 30 minutes we just talked about X, Y, Z. What can you make this easy and actionable? Like, how how can we move forward? And I think with career development and having those career conversations, it can easily become overwhelming for a leader. Like, oh, there’s one more thing I have to think about.
Maria Ross 21:23
Right,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 21:23
you know, keeping my feelers out and looking for opportunities for my people. If that doesn’t come to you naturally, all you have to do is use those one-on-one conversations to ask, “What do you want to do? How? Where do you want to grow? Like, all you have to do is ask a question, showing care, and that opens up the doors to you know conversations that are meaningful, where your employee actually thinks, oh, this this person cares about where I want to go next and how I want to develop on this team. So you don’t you don’t necessarily have to always be look on the lookout for things, but if you’re just asking the right questions in your one-on-ones with your people,
Maria Ross 23:45
yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 23:45
floodgates will open and they will talk and they will share. Yeah,
Maria Ross 23:48
and you know,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 23:50
not that hard. No,
Maria Ross 23:51
it’s not, and it’s also like it’s okay to keep information handy, right? I spoke to one leader for my last book, where she literally puts things on index cards like old school analog, or maybe digital. Like now she’s using her computer, but she keeps notes on her people, what their interests are. Maybe they mention something in a one to one, and she’ll jot it down. And it sounds scary. She’s keeping a dossier on people, but that’s not. It’s to help her number one really lock that in and remember it by writing it down for herself. But also, when opportunities cross her path, she’s able to go. Oh, I know somebody mentioned someone on my team mentioned that they were interested in this kind of opportunity. She has something to go back to. So it’s okay to cheat a little bit. It’s okay to keep notes on people and to document what they’re sharing with you, so that you can be on the lookout for those opportunities. And I think just even you know one of the things I talk about in my workshops around active listening, a trick that has worked for me is to write things down as someone’s talking, because it keeps me present, but it. Also helps me remember the information, and so you’re not expected to just be suave and bulletproof about all this and be able to keep it all in your own head. So I would just offer that to listeners as a tool that when they’re having those one-to-ones with people, you know, yes, you want to make eye contact, you want to be talking, but take some notes and keep the notes and keep a keep a running record of what people are communicating to you, even if you don’t know where it goes yet.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 25:30
Yeah, no, I love that advice. And now with AI taking notes on your behalf, 100% you can you can actually be present and pay attention and also have the note taking done for you, which is super helpful, but what I find is with the old school writing notes is whenever I’m in a meeting with someone and they’re taking notes, like actual written notes, I feel like they’re more engaged in the conversation. Maybe it’s just the optics. Yeah, it just feels like oh, this like what I’m saying must be important, or it feels right.
Maria Ross 25:57
They’re noting what you’re saying, right? Exactly, exactly. I just wanted to go back for a second to talk about, you know, the you mentioned an offhand comment earlier about, you know, the the impact on people of change, and it made me remember that, you know, I started at a management consulting firm when I was 21 years old. Like I don’t know what I knew about consulting managers, but they did a lot of training with us. And one of the earliest constructs they taught us was the seven stages of grief, because they were talking about it in terms of a change is a letting go for somebody, even if it’s positive. And so we have to understand how people respond and how they react, and why they might have all of these different emotions if you’re doing one-on-one interviews with them as a 21-year-old, as a 22-year-old, because that’s what they used to make the analysts do, right? Is to have those conversations, and I didn’t realize how forward-thinking that was at the time. This was like 1994, in terms of trying to understand that change impacts people on a psychological level. It’s not just flip a switch and everyone will follow. And I think that it’s easy to be seduced and hope that that’s how it’ll work, and that all we need to do is send one email communication and have one town hall meeting, and everyone’s on board, right? Everyone understands what’s happening.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 27:23
Check the box.
Maria Ross 27:24
Check the box. Exactly. So I love that. That’s actually the first phase of your three-phase change readiness process. Is that you need to understand where you are in terms of do you understand your people and the impact that the change may or may not have on them. Of course, it’s you know it’s things are true for whom they’re true. It’s not a blanket that everyone responds the same way to change. But I think where a lot of leaders get stuck is especially if it’s a positive change, they don’t understand why people are fearful or upset
Rebecca Dhrimaj 28:00
or
Maria Ross 28:01
like no, but this is going to make everything better. Don’t you see that?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 28:04
Right.
Maria Ross 28:05
So I love that the diagnostic is the first step. What is the second phase?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 28:11
Yeah. So once we get the results back from the diagnostic, which we’re so what we do is we ask individual contributors on the team or the in the department or the organization to respond normally to the questions, we ask people leaders to put themselves in the shoes of their direct reports. How do you think they would respond to these questions? So what we’re able to do is then extrapolate extrapolate the results so that we can see individual contributor perception of change readiness versus people leader, and there is often a gap. So, what we want to do with with the next phase is then close that gap, and then we can also see which areas need where they’re they’re excelling. So, for example, the the team we we worked with that I we were talking about this offline. The customer excellence team, they the the two areas that that were by far the areas that needed to be improved were around career conversations, surprisingly, and feedback. So the two way feedback, I think you know the feedback culture. We could do an entire podcast episode based on that,
Maria Ross 29:22
yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 29:22
because I think there’s a lot of negativity surrounding feedback. Like it’s only given in a negative context or a constructive context,
Maria Ross 29:30
right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 29:31
But not many people experience what it’s like to have consistent, constant, constructive feedback two way, so that you are giving feedback to your manager and vice versa. So the manager is
Rebecca Dhrimaj 29:43
asking for feedback. Yes, yes. So those were the two areas where they needed support in the context of change, and then the areas where they were we were they were strong was around establishing the the purpose of the change and really driving towards that purpose. How does how does it connect to our team and our the
Maria Ross 30:02
clarity? Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 30:04
So, and we what we do is we we take those responses and we we match it with the pro size ad car model, which um you might be familiar with. Um, acknowledge or awareness, desire, knowledge, Ability reinforcement, so it’s as pro size model for carrying individuals through change, and so what we did was we we looked at okay based on their responses to the diagnostic, where on the in the Adcar framework are they suffering and where are they where are they excelling, and what we uncovered was this team was excellent at setting up the change for success. So driving driving home the creating awareness for the change, the how it connects to the purpose and the vision for the team.
Maria Ross 30:54
That’s amazing, right there. By the way,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 30:57
yes. And this team just just to give you some context as well, because what we do is we have the leaders complete the Clifton Strengths Assessment, Gallup’s Clifton Strengths Assessment. This team was incredibly high in the relationship building domain.
Maria Ross 31:10
Amazing
Rebecca Dhrimaj 31:11
relationship building and executing. So I guess for a customer excellence team, it’s really not surprising. Right, right. But several of them had empathy in their top five strengths. Yeah. So okay. So we’re we’re already a strong, you know, strongly empathetic leaders, but where they were where they were falling short was sustaining the change, holding the team accountable, and driving the results. And so that was a a huge eye opener to to them because when we presented the report out. We were all on a video call, and and you could just see everyone going, nodding their heads. Yeah, yeah, that’s we need help with that. That
Maria Ross 31:50
sounds right. Yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 31:51
and the the leader of the team actually told me. She said, you know, my biggest challenge is how do I get my team out of that the um out of an emotional rut, so they they you know they tend to get very emotional around changes that happen. Getting them out of that rut and moving to execution, like moving them forward and and getting beyond that.
Maria Ross 32:12
Okay, can you share some nuggets on what works for that? Because that is a common thing I hear a lot too. Is like we’re we’re stuck in the feels,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 32:21
yeah,
Maria Ross 32:22
and we got to move forward. So, how do we? What were some of the things that worked for that group? If you can share,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 32:29
yeah, yeah, no, I think once they had that realization and they saw the results in front of them, when we moved them into into the Change Conversations workshop, they realized that they were not having effective one-on-one conversations with their teams. So, as supervisors, they were they weren’t psychologically getting past their own trauma or their own belief about the change, and then therefore, because they were stuck there, they were not having effective conversations with their team about how is this going to move us as a team forward? So they were actually the the cause of the standstill, and they realized.
Maria Ross 33:07
Okay, interesting.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 33:09
And so what what we actually discovered, I mean, in addition to being able to you know give them the school the the skills for having these coaching conversations, the work that we’ve been doing with leaders has actually led us to partner with a mental health counselor to do inner work with leaders as well.
Maria Ross 33:26
Nice,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 33:27
because what we’re realizing is that you can be an incredibly effective change leader, but you’re eventually going to hit a roadblock at some point if you have inner workings inside you, there are parts that have not been addressed that are causing those roadblocks. Yeah,
Maria Ross 33:45
if your own house is not in order, I always like to say because self awareness and self care is really those first two pillars of being both empathetic and effective, and it’s got to start at home, which seems contradictory to people that are trying to learn how to be more empathetic leaders. You know, isn’t it more about other people and not about me? It’s like, well, what do you bring to the party, right? What are you bringing to the interaction that could be helping you or could be hindering you?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 34:11
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I and I think that that’s a big, you know, kind of false notion that you know it’s all about the other person. If you haven’t fixed what’s happening inside you, there is absolutely no way you can really put yourself in the context of someone else and understand their reality before you try to then change their reality. You need to understand your own reality first. Yeah,
Maria Ross 34:35
there’s no space. You’re in self-preservation mode at that point.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 34:39
Yes, and I think that’s that’s exactly where a lot of these leaders were, and they’re not alone because we literally come up against that barrier every time we work with leaders.
Maria Ross 34:47
Wow,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 34:48
you got to do the self, the inner work, scary work where you have to hold up the mirror.
Maria Ross 34:54
Yep,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 34:54
and that’s that’s hard. That’s not yeah. It doesn’t doesn’t always feel
Maria Ross 34:58
good. Yeah, exactly. What was their response to you bringing a mental health partner in? I’m just curious.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 35:06
Yeah, so we we haven’t actually done the work with this particular team that I mentioned with the mental health counselor. We’ve we literally just partnered with her and developed the content for the material because we’ve we literally run into this every time you work with leaders. Yeah, to the point where we were like, “Polly, Polly’s her name is Polly. We need your help. Like,
Maria Ross 35:27
yeah, we
Rebecca Dhrimaj 35:28
need to because what she did. I’m actually, I can show you. She’s actually developed these really cool cards called “Meet Your Inner Team, and she actually designed them for children. And when I bought them for my own children because I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. I was like, “Oh my gosh, are the leaders we work with me this? Yeah, because what happens is you look at things that have been with you since you were a child that have been left unaddressed. So they’re these inner characters, these inner parts, and so you know. I’ll just read off of you: the caretaker, the striver, the perfectionist, the worrier, the peacekeeper. So you know, the adults have the the same you know the same inner parts that children do, right? And we’ve oftentimes we cling to them,
Maria Ross 36:17
yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 36:17
you know, without even realizing that they were there to try to you know protect us.
Maria Ross 36:21
Yeah, and from a psychology perspective, I had a guest on Rebecca Gashuri who talked about IFS, which is internal family systems, and it speaks to this aspect that we are all made up of different parts, and we can name those parts. We can name those characters within our own psyche that are either the positive or the negative voices inside our heads, and another person I interviewed on the podcast, Jamie Greenwood, who’s a women’s coach, talks. She refers to it as the “itty bitty shitty committee, which is you know what are who are those voices and name them and figure out what they need. Don’t don’t pretend they’re not there, but they are all parts of what makes you who you are, but you need to be able to function and navigate in harmony with those different parts of yourself. So I never knew it was called IFS until I interviewed Rebecca Gashuri. But I’m going to put links to both of their episodes where we talked about this because this is coming up more and more in the conversations that I’m having and in the work that I’m doing, and I love that there’s this card deck, which I also will put a link to in the show notes for listeners. Okay, so when you talk about the first phase being the diagnostic, the second phase, it sounds like it’s closing the gap.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 37:35
Yeah, so we’re we’re we’re we’re taking the the diagnostic outcomes and we’re coaching the leaders through how do you have effective change conversations with your people, one-on-one conversations, right? Understanding that you need help with two-way feedback, these areas, right? Your conversations, okay. And so we actually develop case studies together with the leader of the team before we go into the workshop, so that those case studies become the foundation of those change conversations. So they’re not just generic scenarios, yeah, like picture actually real world scenarios that they’re they’re going through right now, right? That they can use as a foundation for practicing those change conversations during the role play.
Maria Ross 38:17
Okay,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 38:18
so that’s that’s basically the the crux of the of the workshop. Now, what we’re going to do with the inner team work moving forward once the content is built is we’re going to likely infuse that in the first half of the workshop, where we get we get feedback from leaders that they want to dig into the self leadership and the self reflection piece a little bit more before moving into okay, here’s how I have one-on-one conversations with my team.
Maria Ross 38:43
Right, so which makes sense.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 38:45
Likely where we’re going to insert insert that piece.
Maria Ross 38:49
Got it. And then what about the third phase?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 38:52
The third phase is the most important phase, honestly, because what I’ve seen, especially in my time in the corporate space, is you go into a training and you come out super pumped, excited about implementing everything. Yep. And then guess what? The you know you’re fighting fires. You go back to your desk, and you know basically everything. Well, what what’s the Ebbinghaus
Maria Ross 39:13
effect? Is that two weeks later we forget 90% of what we’ve learned in a workshop? Yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 39:19
yeah. So then it’s like what you know. My boss just paid $2,000 to send me, you know, put me in this training, and now I’ve already you know forgotten about it. And you know, you might give a presentation on it to the team to you know once again check the box, right? But it’s very, very, very often not retained. That knowledge is not retained, and there’s no way for you to continue to practice and hold yourself accountable. So what we did was we inserted a final phase where post workshop we bring the leaders together virtually for 90 minute sessions once a month with an executive coach who’s also specialized in what we call action learning. So it’s it’s a it’s a specific type of peer coaching method. That I was familiar with when I was in my in my corporate career, and they take turns bringing a change challenge to the table. So as they start having these change conversations with their employees, what’s surfacing? What challenges are they are they experiencing? So they bring the challenge to to the group each month, and they rotate. You know, they take take turns presenting their challenges, and then they coach each other through those challenges. And what that does is two things. So one, they’re seeing the challenges that their peers are experiencing, right? So they’re learning from that. Two, they’re getting coached by their peers, which is helpful, so they’re you know getting coached through that challenge, and then three they are learning how to be a better coach. So you know we give them a guide and a toolkit for the type how to frame a question because you know most most leaders haven’t gone through they don’t they don’t have coaching certifications or they haven’t gone through any kind of training on how to be a coach, so they don’t know how to do peer coaching.
Maria Ross 41:08
Right.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 41:08
So we give them those tools, and it’s always a little rocky at the beginning because as they fumble through, because everyone immediately wants to give advice.
Maria Ross 41:16
Right.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 41:16
That’s not coaching. Right. So we help them be better coaches by you know they they get to practice having those those coaching conversations with their peers. Yeah, so they do that for a good four to six months after the workshop.
Maria Ross 41:30
Is there a resource you can share with listeners on on a guide like that that’s available to the public? Because I think that would be something really valuable to a lot of leaders listening is are there some tips and strategies for how to become a better coach?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 41:49
Yeah, I mean it’s it really does start with framing framing the question, and we we have a one pager I can absolutely share with you that we share with our yeah
Maria Ross 41:57
that would be great. We can put that in the show notes for folks. I think that would be wonderful. So that’s the the third phase is really sort of the action, the action learning, right? Yeah. And what are some of the? Can you share with us with some of the clients that you’ve successfully done this with? What have been the outcomes from this, both anecdotally and if there are metrics you can share.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 42:22
Yeah, no, it’s interesting, and I’ll go I’ll go back to the customer excellence team because they’re you know they’ve they’ve gone through the full cycle of the program. We were able to see how we moved the needle, and what we actually saw. So the in an i in an ideal scenario, we would then have a year after they take the diagnostic, have the team take the diagnostic again and see, you know, how their resilient IQ score was shifted. Yeah, we have not done that, so it will it’ll it will be a year in April, I think, April May.
Maria Ross 42:54
Okay,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 42:54
with the customer excellence team, but what we did see is that their employee engagement survey results. So the corporate engagement survey results increased specifically in the section around executing change management.
Maria Ross 43:11
Wow!
Rebecca Dhrimaj 43:11
Because what what we did when we ran the initial diagnostic with them was we asked for the results for that specific change management question.
Maria Ross 43:20
Uh huh.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 43:22
And then we matched it to the resilient IQ score,
Maria Ross 43:25
right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 43:25
And we interestingly, what we we were able to show was that the resilient IQ score was the windshield view of change readiness, right? We’re looking forward. How prepared are we for this change,
Maria Ross 43:40
right?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 43:40
The employee engagement survey question was how well did the leaders execute change, or how you know? So it’s the rearview mirror view, right?
Maria Ross 43:47
Right.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 43:47
So and so what we found was the diagnostic actually predicted the execution effectiveness, and so after we went through that whole process together as as a team, they got their employee engagement survey results back in. That’s amazing.
Maria Ross 44:06
Yeah,
Rebecca Dhrimaj 44:06
they moved they moved the needle on that question.
Maria Ross 44:09
Well, and I just want to connect this dot for people because I don’t think you mentioned it when you were talking about the diagnostic phase. The diagnostic is called resilient IQ.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 44:18
That’s right.
Maria Ross 44:18
Yes. Okay. Great. Yeah, that’s amazing. That I-I mean, there’s definitely a. I love the fact that you’re so focused on the measurement and the data around this. And even though we’re talking about human beings and they’re complex, and we can’t be just limited by the data, the fact that we can show that sentiment change over time is really important that these kinds of programs and these kinds of investments matter to helping our people get through change. I just, you know, as of this recording, I saw recently a article about a very large financial services company who revealed that next year they’re. Spending $16 billion for tech in their budget, and I wrote a post on LinkedIn that said, “Great! Is there anything in this budget for people readiness? Is there anything in this budget for change management? Is there anything in this budget for upskilling their leaders on emotional intelligence and empathy to get their people through this change successfully, because otherwise that’s going to be a waste of money for them. So I love, love, love the work you’re doing. So as we wrap up today, Rebecca, I know that you have a podcast, and I’d love to share the name of the podcast with listeners. I’ll also put a link in the show notes. But what is the name of your podcast? It
Rebecca Dhrimaj 45:41
is Return on Empathy.
Maria Ross 45:44
Love it, R O E.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 45:46
Yeah, going back to the measuring empathy and empathy as a strategy, and not just this you know fluffy thing.
Maria Ross 45:54
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I wrote. I did an article again for for my Forbes column around empathy as a business metric, although I will share that one thing I do share with my clients is you don’t want to measure empathy for empathy’s sake. You want to add empathy as the seasoning to then look at your other KPIs that move the business forward, and see if that is having that investment and that you know to your point, looking at the employee engagement scores, looking at change readiness as a result of adding that seasoning, adding that flavor to your your organization. Because I get asked, I’m sure you do too. How do we measure empathy? And it’s like, well, you you can measure it through sentiment. You can measure it through what are the reward structures, what are the policies? What are the what are the employee engagement surveys? But measuring it just to measure it doesn’t matter to actually driving growth in the business. So what are the other KPIs you have in your organization, and have you noticed an uptick in those because of what you’ve been doing with your leadership capability and your people capability? So I love that that we’re talking about this from a very practical angle, and the fact that this is not just fluff and it’s not just nice to have. It’s actually a business strategy and something that moves things forward. So, Rebecca, this has been so fun. We again are going to have all the links in the show notes, as well as to some of the things we referenced here today, but for anyone that’s on on the go, where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your work?
Rebecca Dhrimaj 47:28
Best place to go is our website, theempathycollective.com.
Maria Ross 47:32
Amazing, amazing! Thank you so much for this conversation. I’m so glad we connected.
Rebecca Dhrimaj 47:36
Thank you so much for having me, Maria,
Maria Ross 47:38
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. Stay well and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit theempathyedge.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.
