Mimi Nicklin is Softening the CEO edge

Hello everybody and welcome again to Back to the FUTURE, the podcast that talks to the innovators of today who are making tomorrow happen. And making tomorrow happen with me this week is author, leadership consultant and empathy activist Mimi Nicklin. Mimi, very welcome. Thank you so much, Martin. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. I was trying to sound a bit empathic there, but we're going to talk more about that later because really your book is called Softling the Edge, which I think is a really great name for all things empathic. But just before we actually get into the content of the book, can you tell me what you mean when you're talking about empathy? Absolutely, I can. So fundamentally, empathy is about perspective taking. There are many forms of empathy. There are many ways you can define it, but at its simplest, at its core, we are talking about perspective taking, being able to understand how somebody else sees or experiences the world right now, why they're speaking the way they are at work, why they're doing what they're doing, why they're performing or not. It's about putting yourself in their position and being able to understand how they see things. So in some ways, people see it as a soft tool or a soft skill, but as you've described it, it sounds to me like quite a crucial, strategic, key one that everybody, certainly now post-Covid, and looking at how we're much more hybrid and flexible in the office. It sounds like a skill that everybody should have. But my question is, why do you feel organizations are undervaluing it as a core tool rather than as a kind of nice to have? So it's a great question, and I think the answer lays partly in your question or your statement there, where you talked about soft versus hard. Many CEOs, many leadership teams believe this is a soft skill. Many of them believe it's an emotion, which it's not. And let me unpack that a little bit. So firstly, empathy is not soft at all. It's hard to find, hard to master and hard to maintain, which is probably in answer to your question why people aren't doing enough of it. Right? Empathy takes time. Empathy is based on curiosity. It's based on listening. To listen, you have to put in effort. You have to listen. It takes time. It takes focus. It takes attention. And for many CEOs and leadership teams, they don't prioritize that. So that would be the first thing. The second thing, and you also touched on it, Martin, is that this assumption that empathy is emotional in some way. Empathy is a skill set. It is built into your prefrontal cortex in your brain. You were born with this. We were all born with this in equal measure, and it's an evolutionary skill set. This skill set enables us as human beings to exist on the planet. Without it, we cannot survive. And that sounds terribly dramatic, but it's true. We are not meant to be alone. We are pro-social creatures. So that sets the context for partly what it is and why it's so important, but why I think many people are avoiding it, which is that it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes consistency. And until we overcome those two barriers, one, which is the misunderstanding of what it is, two, how you approach it, and probably three, which is the power of it to change organizations, particularly in the world you described. Well, until that happens, I'll keep doing my job again. Right. You see, as you were describing it, I'm beginning to see a picture of quite a systematic way we should be approaching it, and quite, you know, to your point, it is skills-based rather than intuition-based. But when I spoke to people about interviewing you today, a lot of them just said, as I guess you know the question, or the response said, well, is it possible to teach people empathy? But you believe it is. So one of the things that we need to be more cognizant of when we are even thinking about setting out on the journey, how do I start becoming more empathic? So again, I mean, I want to be really clear for your listeners as well. This is not just because I'm passionate about it, that it means it's true. It absolutely is a learnable skill, and it is proven by neuroscience in various universities around the world. Because it is built into the brain, because it is so fundamental to being human, you can learn it, you can practice it, you can teach it, right? In terms of those first steps to doing that, as I touched on earlier, at the very core of what this is, is listening. So if you want today, Martin, to become more empathic, you do it as a job every day, you just have to listen a little bit more. Because fundamentally, how are you ever going to understand if you don't first hear people, right? That is the road to understanding. What we know about empathy is that when empathy goes up, the isms, so racism, ageism, ableism, sexism, anyism, go down. When empathy is high, the isms are low. You are able to overcome gaps, to overcome segregation, separation, misunderstanding. So the first step to lean into that, to be more empathic, to gather that data set so that you can understand more people in your workplace, is to listen to them. Well, I mean, I guess it is a top one, because if you think about, I remember speaking to Susan Cain, who did the great book on quiet, and she said that there is a big issue, particularly in America, because she's an American looking at the notion of introversion and extroversion. And she said, everybody by nature pushes towards extroversion, because it's collegiate, and it's involvement, and it shows that you are social. And she is, as an introvert, was the opposite. But she said, the other problem was, as an extrovert, you meant to talk a lot. And she liked to listen. And she felt that the skill of listening was not just undervalued, it was seen as a pathological problem, that she was quiet and listening. And that it did occur to me that sometimes, with listening, there is a requirement to be quiet, I guess. And quietness is something that seems, for a lot of people, uncomfortable, or in a place where we're meant to be talking and self broadcasting. It's a skill that perhaps we don't value enough. Or even the notion, the visible sign of somebody listening, is about being quiet. And we think, maybe I should need to speak, because they're not saying anything. So that's also the problem. It's how the perceiver, as well as the deliverer, can perhaps misread these things in different ways. You know, it's very interesting, Martin, because in all the years of doing this work, in all the podcasts that I do, no one's actually ever asked me that, which is that, do I believe there's a barrier to listening, which is, I guess, connected to ego, which is connected to introversion versus extroversion. So it's a fascinating question. I think that the answer is that it's in how you listen, right? Because I, of course, listen for a living, I guess. You know, whether I'm on my podcast or I'm running my branding business, I got off a call just before meeting with you where, for an hour, I listened to a new client about what he needs help with. And I would bet all the money in the world that he hasn't come away from that call saying, well, she was a bit quiet, right? He didn't. For sure. You know, he, I believe, it's an assumption, but I believe he felt heard. He probably came away from that call saying, gosh, what a relief. I think that woman really listened to me today. I feel confident she's going to know what I want, right? Which is fundamentally what we're doing when we're talking about, you know, organizational empathy and empathy in the workplace, listening so that people feel heard, so that people feel able to communicate. What you want to do is reduce self-censorship, right? So so often, if you don't feel someone is listening to you, you stop talking, you can't really be bothered, right? Whether that's your wife, your husband, your brother, your sister, your boss, okay? If they're not really listening, you can't be bothered to tell them, right? Particularly if that's sustained over time, right? And you see that at work, you see that in relationships. Listening is a skill set. And if you actively listen, it's certainly not my experience, Martin, that anyone has assumed that I am, I don't know, weaker or softer or disengaged or less strong at my job, because I'm good at listening. I think, and I believe that listening is a superpower. But of course, it has to be active. You can't kind of like gaze out the window and say, sorry, yeah, I was listening. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's a tough one. And what there is, I guess, I was thinking about it is in your book, you mentioned that as a study by the University of Michigan, I think it was in 2010, analyzing data, 14,000 college students over 30 years. So quite a long stretch. And they found that kids in 2010 were 40% lower in empathy levels than their counterparts year before. Now, I'm sure people are listening going, they're making the connection because if I look at that date, I see that was what I call the talking years, everybody was self broadcasting, everybody was on social media, everybody out doing their own thing. And you're, and this is showing us a potentially at this period, empathy is in decline. Do you think there is a relationship with social media, or is it just coincidental that the opportunity to self broadcast coincides with the opportunity to be less empathic and not listening? I think there's certainly a correlation, but I don't think it's the cause. So I think we definitely do have an empathy deficit. Firstly, that's without debate. In fact, the first person to coin that was President Obama in 2006. He stood up and he addressed an audience and he said, I know we should be speaking today about the federal deficit, but I think we need to talk about our empathy deficit. So he was the first, but there have been many since many political leaders, Jacinda Ardern, business leaders, people like Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. We have an empathy deficit, we have too little understanding in our world. So that's not really up for debate. Is social media part of deepening that disconnect? Potentially. But what I always say to people is I don't believe we can blame the platform. Social media, let's choose one of them, I don't know, Instagram. It is a platform that human beings built and human beings use you can't blame the plan. You can't sweepingly blame social media. And people do it all the time, right? It is the people on our planet that are more disconnected than ever, regardless of the platform. And I think the other thing that I want to say, and it's not that I'm a huge social media advocate, however, at some of my loneliest times in the last three years, you know, riding a book and building a podcast and all these things, you know, in the pandemic on an island, Sri Lanka for some of this time in the middle of a, you know, political collapse. In times that have been extremely hard as a business leader, social media has actually enabled me to spread and connect my empathy to others, right? Because it is a communication medium. And understanding as we've touched on is based on curiosity is based on insight, being able to understand other people. So there are many factors, Martin, you know, urbanization, a number of people living alone in some of our top cities in the world up to 42% people live alone. And as I said in the intro, we're not meant to be alone. So it's a very, it's a very sort of complex social reality as to why we are so disconnected today. I mean, it's a tough one because I, you know, working on a book, which is normally about connecting, one of the things I noticed is that we are asking people to be back in offices, you know, this kind of so-called twat days as in Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and it's hybrid. So some are in somewhere out, but we're not teaching them skills or skills, for example, you know, how to be curious, how to be empathic, how to develop collaborative kind of structures, how to understand the difference between being present and presenteeism. So all of those things are to me like empathy skills. And it did occur to me that maybe, or actually, let me ask you as a question, if we are entering this kind of new paradigm, how do we ensure that people are equipped? Because really what you're talking about, I guess, is new ways of teaching to get rid of this empathy deficit. So what are the skills that you think we should now be deploying in the workplace or among CEOs that are tangible and can be used to move us forward? Yeah, I think that the majority of these skills sit in social intelligence. And many of your listeners may be very familiar with emotional intelligence, because it's been having its heyday for probably 20 years. Social intelligence is different. And the difference is that we're emotional intelligence is about understanding yourself. So if I have a high EQ, I understand myself, how I'm good in a room, how I engage with others, it's about self understanding, emotional intelligence, understanding my emotions, right? Social intelligence, so SQ, often you hear it called, is about understanding and improving your ability to socialize. And that contains some of the skills you touched on as well just then, collaboration, communication, creativity, presenting, empathy, I think I said communication, but being able to create environments where we can communicate as people where you can be understood and understand, right? And then use that data in whichever way is appropriate, that could be innovation, right? So it without empathy, there can be no innovation, right? It could be presenting on a stage, which of course is what I do most of the time, understanding audiences, you know, and people say to me all the time, Martin, how is it that you imbue empathy when you talk about empathy? Like, why do I feel like you empathize with me when there's a thousand people in your audience? These are the skills that are us, our generation, haven't been taught, and it's starting to shift. And suddenly you speak to headhunters today, and they'll tell you that three in five of the top five skills that headhunters are looking for in CEOs are fundamentally social intelligence skills, right? Empathy, communication, you need to be able to motivate and inspire your people. That is fundamentally what a CEO does. And yet nobody has taught him or her that for the last two decades of their career. So if they've picked it up, wonderful. If they happen to work in an environment or an organization that has valued that for a long time, you know, they're lucky. But as you touched on earlier, many organizations aren't teaching or imbuing this, and it has to come from the top down. You know, when middle managers ask me, can I change this from my position? I have to be honest and say probably not, right? Change has to start at the top. I mean, it's interesting, you should say this, because I do a lot of kind of conferences and meetings with CEOs. And I still feel, given that you've had this conversation and, you know, that you've written a book about it and talk about it, I still feel that when you speak to some business leaders, they see empathy as a weakness. They see it as a skill, which if they reflect it or demonstrate it, it's fundamentally showing an achilles heel, which somebody else will rush in and take advantage of. So I'm just wondering where you think that has come from? Because I don't think it's just generational. If I speak to CEOs in their 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s, I'm hearing the same thing. So I don't think it's to do with a particular generation. But I'm just wondering, from your own hunches and instincts about it, what do you think or where its origins are, and how can we self-correct that now moving forward? I think it comes all the way back from kind of the '80s and the '90s, when the CEOs today were going into the workplace for the first time. And when you look back on those years, they were years of high productivity, right, churn. Everybody was making money. Everyone was making products. There was so much money and so much power and so much wealth, and we had yet to face many of the things that we faced in the last 30 years. At that point, there was no interest in connectivity in the workplace. And if you quit, you'd be replaced. But nobody quit anyway, because there was a very kind of... Fear of losing, yeah. Reality, exactly, right? There was different social structures, society had different expectations on you. There was far more interest in job for a lifetime. All of these types of things were different. So those CEOs grew up in a world that was extremely different. And that is why today, a lot of my work is in what we call intergenerational understanding in the workplace. And that's because, and you know, these CEOs you're talking about. So for the first time in history, particularly in the East versus the West, but in the West as well, we have often four generations in one workplace, right? So we'll have the chair, normally man, to be honest, but chairperson, maybe in their 70s, sometimes in their 80s. Then you'll have the CEO, perhaps in his early 60s or late 50s. You'll have kind of middle management, middle to senior management, maybe in their 30s, sort of 35 to 45. And then at the bottom, you can have 18-year-olds coming in, right? But the difference today is those four generations could not be further apart. So that CEO at the top, and I hear it all the time, Martin, says, "Well, what, this new generation, they're so lazy. Why don't they do, why do, why are they so lazy? And why don't they just call me, Mimi? They want to send me a WhatsApp. I don't want to use WhatsApp. Or worse, they want to be on Instagram." Right? And what I have to explain to them is you don't understand that psychologically and societally, but psychologically, the engagement that you had at work when you were 18, perhaps over a cigarette outside, standing in the courtyard of your building back in the 80s, that psychological safety, that engagement, that friendship is now happening on a social platform. Right? They're exactly the same as you are. We're all human. They're just communicating in a different way. But in those days that they grew up in, nobody cared about understanding everybody else, because the person at the top was the boss and that was it. But the world has changed. Cool. With you, because I thought one of the other points you brought out on the book is empathy is a great tool, and it's a great positioning, and it's a great diplomatic skill, not in terms of giving in, which I think is what I was trying to get to, but in terms of, if you want to use the term winning, to talk about winning and advantage, that it really helps you to do that. So I was just wondering, with the generational issues, because usually, to your point, we have four generations in the workplace. Are they seeing empathy differently, or are they seeing it as the same thing, but they're just not using the same language and not listening in the same way? How do you think it works? I think they do see it differently. I think because of the barrier or the challenge that you brought out yourself, you said, I'm paraphrasing, but I go to lots of conferences, and I meet lots of CEOs, and you are able to reflect on the fact that many of them don't believe that they need to listen to that, that they need to understand them. There is still that belief that I'm the boss, I'm in charge, and you will listen to me. That's where they came from. You will listen to me, do what I say. For sure, there is still that opinion at the top. When you talk to the young ones coming in at the bottom, in honest terms, many of them, they look at us, all of us, and think we were in the world. They're not far wrong. They grew up when the Twin Towers were being blown up. That was the beginning. Let's be honest, pretty much every year ever since, whether it's climate change, or it's health pandemics, or it's racial, or whatever it is. Gender, sexual, yeah. That youth, they look at us, and they think, well, why should we listen to you? You guys are the ones that got us here. Of course, the problem. But with that, they have a mindset that says we have no choice but to fix. They believe in fixing, and unlike the millennials who are extremely individualistic, these new generations are very socially focused. When you read research about them, they rate very highly on, I want to help my community. When they take jobs, they want jobs with purpose. They want to change the planet. They want to work with other people to create shifts to make a better world. They understand empathy innately. The other thing that's really interesting, and probably not for today, but just for an interesting fact, is they grew up in a world of gaming, on a game. They are very familiar with pretending to be or stepping into a character that is not actually them. They have grown up in a world where they used to characterizing other people. They know how to pretend to be someone else, and in many of those video games, they can almost feel what it feels like when they go into Fortnite and they spend years in the game. They can feel their characters. They really can. To answer your question, do we feel differently about it generationally from the top to the bottom? Absolutely, because of the worlds that we've grown up in. Right. How then do we make it work? Because if that's the case, I'm almost now seeing the Democrats and the Republicans. I'm seeing culture wars. I'm seeing race, gender, and I'm seeing opposition and no overlap. I always think that is due to a lack of empathy, because if you can walk in the footsteps of anybody and understand them, then that would help us find the common ground. But it sounds to me that you maybe suggested that we can't do that, or can we? And if we can, what's the effort required to get those conversations up and running? We absolutely can. You know, Martin, that's why I do the work that I do. We absolutely can, but we just have to start listening to each other. One of the biggest barriers to listening is fear, and a challenge is, especially at the top, because senior leaders have a huge amount of responsibility on their shoulders every day. There's a lot of fear, and that has gone up incrementally since 2020, because we didn't know what we were doing. Nobody did. No CEO, however, they could be the best CEO in the world. We didn't know how to handle a global health pandemic that went on for two years. So when there is fear and lots of it in the world, whether that's socio, it's war, Russia, all of these things going on, it does make it harder for us to listen to others, because we are walking around in a constant state of fear, whether you know it or not, whether that is personal, emotional, social, corporate, whatever. And because of that fear and that discomfort in society, it can be very hard to admit that you don't agree with people that are unlike you. So one of the things I find quite interesting, and not many people seem to be picking up on it, is that there's a constant slew of communication on LinkedIn and out there about, come and meet with the like-minded. Come join the like-minded at the Cannes Lion Festival, which was going to be fantastic. Yeah, terrible. I hate the term. I know what you're going to say. It is so infuriating. I did a paper last year about, you know, memberships and community and guilds, and everybody I quoted said, "Oh, yes, you know, it's like-minded ideas for like-minded people." I thought, well, what a way to ruin a world, to have everybody dull, boring and inconsequential in the same room talking, dull, boring and inconsequential things. Yeah, and even if they were not dull and boring, even if they were the most exciting, interesting ideas in the world, why only talk to them with people that have the same really exciting ideas? So, you know, we absolutely can fill the empathy gaps. We just have to start listening, and we have to be comfortable with the fact that we don't understand. So if I go back to that example of the older chairman and the young employee, and, you know, him, they tend to be meant. Him saying to me, "I don't understand why the minute he has a break or this person has a break, they go on to Instagram. They're lazy, they're this, they're that, they're all these other things, right?" And I have to say, you have to sit with that employee, okay, just one of them. You may have a thousand persons, sit with one, and truly listen to how that person feels when they're on Instagram or Snapchat or wherever they are, okay? And what you will find, sir, is that you fully understand why they're doing it, okay? You may not understand the latest craze or the soundtrack or the clothes or their lifestyle choice or the language that they're using on that platform. But if you understand the reason that she or he is on there, you'll entirely understand because we're all human. But taking that time, taking that leap to really listen and go beyond the bits that I don't understand, again, they're scared, right? Because they don't know what they're talking about, these young kids. They don't understand their wardrobe choices or their linguistic choices. But I do think, I just want to say, Martin, that the youth are not outside of this effort, right? They also have to empathize. They have to empathize up. And this is a discussion I'm having more and more with students and graduates, right? Which is, guys, I know you think you're right. And I know you think it should be different, but you have to realize that these guys at the top, they don't understand that yet. You have to empathize with them. You have to communicate with them in a way that they can understand because they are the path to your whatever, success, investment, venture capitalism, whatever it is. So all of us have to empathize. This is not about just the top empathizing down. This is about down, up sideways, horizontally. Well, it sounds like the, you know, to your point, that thing about listening, reciprocity, curiosity, collaboration, you know, all of those things that make up empathy. Our skills, I think, are coming into conversational discourse now. We're beginning to talk about them. And I think it's great that your book actually laid out how to, because I think that it's a bit like when I hear CEOs talking about, you know, agile resilience, you know, the notion of the authentic brand. And I go, that's when you're using a term, and then you have to investigate what it means and how to do it. And one of the things I wanted to just, I'm aware we're kind of coming to the end of the show, but I just wanted to go back into your personal journey because you've mentioned Kuala Lumpur, you've mentioned Sri Lanka. I know that you've been living in Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cape Town, Dubai. So you probably have a lot of experience. And at this point in the show, I always say to people, if you had to go back and advise, because it is called back to the future. And I use my DeLorean to shoot back to the past. And I go, Martin, this is what you should have done at this point. Are there things that now that you know what you know, and you went back to advise your younger self, would it be about understanding empathy better, or would it be something completely different? Because maybe you were empathic then, and you felt I should know something else. It's just a little thing. Because I always think it unlocks how we potentially then informed the rest of our life choices as we move forward again. It's a really interesting question. And it is one I have been asked before. And I always find it really hard to answer. And I'll tell you why, because I really believe, at least for me, that everything happened in its right time. And I do think I was sort of born empathizing, right? I was just, you know, I didn't know that then. But I was always good at listening. I was always what I thought was very intuitive. If I look back on my career, I was, I don't know, lucky or grateful that I was promoted frequently and very early. So I was in a very senior position, very young in years. And people would always ask me, how, how did you do that? But how did you get to Managing Director at 29? And I would say intuition, right? I just intuitively made the right decisions. Later, when I started writing my book, I discovered that it probably wasn't intuition at all. It was empathy. It was the ability to understand multiple people at any given time. And fundamentally, that's what leadership is, right? It's about, it's not about what you do. It's about how you create spaces and motivation and inspiration so that others can do so that others can be their best and come together and work as a team. So I wouldn't necessarily go back and tell my younger self to do something differently then. But I do think it would have been nice to hear that it was going to get easier, right? Because I think being a woman in the years when I was becoming more senior, and to be honest, it's not really about gender, but it was very challenging to believe I would ever be given the space to speak. You know, freely in the way I do now. And I don't blame anybody or anyone or anything other than myself. I just think that you have to be patient, right? And that patience is similar to listening, something that we don't teach. The world is so fast. Social media is so fast. Everybody wants to launch their page, business idea or innovation today and be as big as, you know, I don't know, Oprah Winfrey tomorrow, right? We are not very patient. I would go back and tell myself it's going to get better. Just be patient. It's not your time yet. You're too young. Maybe you're doing great, but you're still 27, right? Give it time. And to be honest, Martin, I have to remind myself of that now as well, right? You have to go through experience and time and parts of life in order to get to the next one. And I think, you know, I used to work, I still do, but I used to work round the clock. I didn't take a vacation for 10 years. And I think probably I could have just slowed down a bit. And I probably still would have got to where I am now. Of course. But then that's the great thing of success, isn't it? That it's at somebody once said, actually, it's my sister. She said, you know, if you ever want a job done, either do it yourself or ask a woman. She said, otherwise, it's always going to be left. And she said, you know, women have a terribly brilliant way of getting multiple things done. And she said, you know, personally, and I took, I always took that advice on, you know, as a kind of a gay man growing up. She said, look, give yourself time, patience, kindness was another thing. We forget about kindness. So don't think empathy and kindness go hand in hand. And I, you know, it was one of those things when I said to somebody recently, I was about to interview you on your book. And he said, oh, gosh, you know, kindness is a thing that I discovered when I was reading about empathy. So really, again, thank you for joining us for sharing your thoughts with us. And also, I think, sharing the insights, because I suspect those insights were gathered over the many lives and the different jobs and different places you've lived in. I just wanted to kind of one final thing. If you had to jump forward in this fictitious time machine and look at what the world is, let's say it's five years on, what would you hope it would be in terms of leadership and skills and those C-sweets that you feel now perhaps are on a journey. But now, you've managed to train them, teach them, unlock these things. What are you hoping they will be like? I would hope, Martin, that the world is less lonely. I think it's unlikely in five years, maybe in 20. Right. But if I could wish upon a star with my work, but also the work of countless tens of thousands of other people in similar or supplementary spaces, is that we could create a little bit less loneliness, because loneliness is killing us, literally. Loneliness is very dangerous to our health and it's getting faster. That lack of understanding those gaps are getting bigger. So I would really hope that we've begun to recognise, truly recognise in five years how important it is as people that we reconnect as human beings and understand the fact that we're all far more alike than we are different. Well, Mimi, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us today. Your book is called Softling the Edge. It's published by the DreamWork Collective, which is at the DreamWork Collective website, I guess, www.thedreamworkcollective.com, is it .com? I think it is .com, but it's also on Amazon. Amazon, it is. And in fact, when I do my blog with it, it will be there. But really, thank you for speaking with us. My name is Martin Raymond. You've been listening to Ellison Global's Back to the Future. So until next time, keep looking, keep listening, keep learning, and of course, keep asking what's new and what's next. Thank you. Thank you so much. [BLANK_AUDIO]