Episode
Empathy Is Not Soft. It's a Damn Strategy.
with Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Empathy is the most overused word in leadership right now. Everyone says it. Almost nobody does it.
This week, Des and Ashley sit down with Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller — TEDx speaker, international bestselling author of The Empathic Leader, host of The Empathic Leader podcast, and the founder of EQ via Empathy. Two doctorates, an MBA, a master's in data analytics, and a personal story that turned losing a career into a mission.
She came armed with research, receipts, and the data point that stopped Ashley mid-sentence: there are 43 distinct types of empathy — and most leaders are only using one of them (badly).
This one isn't about feelings. It's about strategy. Get in.
What You'll Learn
- The 43 types of empathy — and why "feeling what someone feels" is only 1/43rd of it
- Why self-empathy is the foundation every leader skips (and the 35% leadership burnout rate it creates)
- Niceness vs. kindness — why one is gift wrap and the other is the real work
- Dark empathy — how psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians use cognitive empathy as a manipulation tool (and how to spot it)
- Where the hiring process is the LEAST empathic experience companies offer
- Why performance reviews are quietly robbing your team of growth
- How to handle layoffs and terminations without leaving wreckage
- Whether AI has empathy (spoiler: no, and the new term we coined for what it does have)
Episode Transcript
Full conversation — searchable and screen-reader friendly
Desiree: Today we are joined by Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller. She's a TEDx speaker, international best-selling author of The Empathic Leader, has two doctorates, an MBA, a master's in data analytics. We're talking about leadership and empathy today and how it applies to recruiting and hiring. Dr. Melissa, I want to start with the definition. When we associate empathy with recruiting and hiring — what does that actually mean?
Dr. Melissa: Really what I talk about is being able to name their outcome — another way of saying: take their perspective. As we're recruiting and hiring, we need to understand the outcome the people we're recruiting want. If we want a good fit, if we want people who are going to be loyal to us, we need to be loyal to them. It's a two-way street, it always is. Empathy is not about feelings. It's about understanding the perspective of the other person. If you actually take the time to do that, you have the opportunity to hand-pick the absolute best candidates — people who want the same thing, who are ambitious, who may be green but can be trained to be exactly who you need. Empathy is more important now in recruiting and hiring than it has ever been.
Ashley: I think in order to have empathy you have to have emotional intelligence — self-awareness, social awareness. And a lot of those ingredients are missing a la carte. To me empathy is two things: the comprehension — do you observe, recognize, understand what someone is going through — and then empathy in action. Because I've met people who can comprehend empathetically all day but whenever it comes to actually being inconvenienced for the sake of someone else, they're unwilling. They have the awareness but not the social willingness. So even if they have all the ingredients, they're still like: I'm not eating this cake.
Dr. Melissa: There are 43 different definitions of empathy. So when people say "it's about feelings" — no. That's one forty-third of this.
About the Guest
Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller holds two doctorates, an MBA, and a master's in data analytics. She is a TEDx speaker, international bestselling author of The Empathic Leader, host of The Empathic Leader podcast, and founder of EQ via Empathy. Her work centers on translating empathy from a soft concept into a rigorous, research-backed leadership strategy.
Join the T-Hive
Want more like this?
Get hiring teardowns, templates, bonus audio, and the weekly newsletter — built for people who actually work in talent.
Subscribe to the Newsletter