Start With A Win - Maria Ross: The Misunderstanding About Empathy That Destroys Teams

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

In this compelling episode of Start With a Win, Adam Contos sits down with empathy strategist and bestselling author Maria Ross for a conversation that challenges outdated leadership myths and reframes what it truly means to lead in today’s world. With sharp insight, real-world perspective, and an energizing presence, Maria invites listeners into a deeper exploration of how modern leaders earn loyalty, navigate tension, and build organizations people actually want to follow. This episode doesn’t preach - it provokes, stretches assumptions, and leaves you leaning in for what comes next.Maria Ross is the founder of Red Slice, helping organizations drive growth through empathy-driven leadership, branding, and culture. For nearly 20 years, she has worked with startups, nonprofits, and enterprise brands - including Splunk, GSK, Salesforce, and LogicGate - to sharpen messaging, elevate brands, and build strong cultures, leading clients to acquisitions and IPOs.A sought-after speaker and the author of The Empathy Edge and The Empathy Dilemma, Maria also hosts The Empathy Edge podcast. Her insights have appeared on MSNBC, NPR, Forbes, and Newsweek. She lives in Northern California with her family and a lively mix of pets - and a deep love for British crime dramas and Jeopardy!00:00 Intro02:25 A two-year old gave her the idea!05:03 What is the definition – for business?08:05 What are the five pillars?11:31 Last pillar is not what you think, keep listening….14:55 Powerful, powerful quote, you may need to rewind and really listen!22:01 This is your competitive edge. 27:37 This is the misunderstanding… 28:20 And here it is!32:20 I don’t check emails until I complete this.https://www.red-slice.com/https://red-slice.com/podcast/Book:  https://red-slice.com/the-empathy-dilemma-book/https://www.instagram.com/redslicemaria/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mariajross/https://www.facebook.com/redslicehttps://www.youtube.com/user/mariajross===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

You're not going to follow someone into battle and risk your life if they're not being open with you. They're not being candid. You don't trust them. People go, oh, I can't be empathetic because I need a high performing team. No, being empathetic will get you the high performing team. It's not mutually exclusive. Welcome to Start with a Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business.

Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start with Win headquarters, it's Adam Contos with Start with a Win. I wonder if you can be a truly compassionate leader and still drive high performance and financial success. Or maybe is empathy actually the new foundational standard for success in today's market? Our guest today is an expert who says absolutely yes to both. Maria Ross, an empathy advocate, speaker and author with nearly three decades of experience showing companies how to achieve radical success through empathy. Maria has advised hundreds of companies, and her award-winning book is called The Empathy Dilemma,

How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries. Maria provides actionable strategies and the business case for why cultivating empathy drives innovation, happier stakeholders, and lucrative bottom-line results. Get ready to dive into why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Maria, welcome to start with a win. Oh, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Adam. Well, this is a fun topic because this is something that is kind of universal as far as principles

that you need in order to be a successful leader, business person, salesperson, human being for that matter. So let's dive right into this. Talk to us about empathy. You're the empathy expert here. How did you get into studying empathy, writing books about it, delivering podcasts about Take us through that journey real quick. Yeah, it's kind of a kooky journey. I started off in change management consulting in my career and then went back to my love of marketing and I was in

several marketing roles, client and agency side and then did 10 years in Silicon Valley as a marketing executive. And then I went off on my own and started my own brand strategy consultancy in about 2008. And the common thread through all that, there was some other personal things that happened and some things that were happening in the world that kind of led me to the path of really unlocking that empathy is the key to everything from effective marketing to effective relationships, to effective collaboration, to effective sales, to all of this. And I wanted to make the business case for empathy because what I was seeing in the world around 2016, the examples of leadership were not really what I would like for my son, who was two and a half at the time. So I thought

I know that there's leaders and there's brands and there's companies winning with empathy. And again, as a marketer, I'd always known that that's the superpower of marketers, is to be empathetic and really understand who's your client and not just in context of what you sell, but where does what you sell fit into their life and solve their problems and meet their needs? But also, what's the best way to meet them where they are, right? And so I always knew that that was kind of a superpower, but I'd never named it before. I ended up working with a coach who helped me name it. So I went around trying to find the data and the research and was delighted to find that there were, there was lots of data and research out there around the fact that empathy boosts engagement, performance, innovation, sales, customer loyalty, like you name it, any vector.

And so I wrote the business case for empathy in my first empathy book, The Empathy Edge. and it came out right before the pandemic. So once the pandemic lockdown hit, people started to understand what I was talking about because at first they were like, what does empathy have to do with business? Is it a self-help book? And I was like, no, it's a business book. And then when people started to get it, I started to do less brand strategy work for clients and more leadership development.

So I was doing keynotes. I was doing ERG talks. I did a TEDx. And that's when I really wanted to adapt. deeper, I started a podcast called The Empathy Edge. And then I wrote my second book that came out last year called The Empathy Dilemma, which was my first book was for the skeptics. The second book is for the converts to help them really embrace empathy while still holding people accountable. I love that. So, first of all, thank you for shining a light on this because so many people

either miss the topic or avoid the topic purposefully because it's a little bit. revealing. It's a little bit vulnerable when it comes to us diving into this and actually having some emotional intelligence as leaders. So I want to start with this. You walk into a room of business leaders and you're going to talk about empathy. Clearly we have to define that from the business perspective up front. So what is that definition? I love this because there's lots of different definitions of empathy. And when I began researching, every expert I talked to for my books defines it slightly differently, as does the dictionary. And by the way, the definition has changed over time over the centuries, the more that we've learned about the brain and psychology.

So where I land that makes the most sense to business people is that empathy is about being able to see, understand, and where appropriate feel another person's perspective. And to use that information to act with compassion. So compassion is actually empathy and action. And if you break that down, it's really about perspective taking. And what I like to tell my left brain, very analytical people, is think of it as information gathering. Think of it as trying to understand someone's context so that you can take a next right step together, which is the compassion part, right? So what happens is, like you said, there's a lot of misunderstandings of, oh, I have to be crying on the floor with my employees to be empathetic. No, we can allow for neurodivergence,

and we can allow for different personality types. You don't have to be super touchy-feely to be able to try to see someone's perspective, to get curious, to ask questions, to respond rather than react, and then maybe find a next way forward together. It also doesn't mean caving in, right? That next right step doesn't have to be me giving Adam what he wants, which is what a lot of leaders seem to think it is. It could be anything.

It could be I, we table the conversation until we're both feeling. better, right? Or I take a pause before I talk to you. Or I give you some space to vent before we move on with the conversation. Or we find a third way. You know, if we're in a like a budget conflict or a strategy conflict at work, by listening to your perspective and hopefully that person taking the queue and listening to mine, we can actually find a way forward. It could be a compromise. It could be, I go, hey, Adam, you know, I never thought of it that way. You're right. I actually, I actually do see your point of view, and maybe we can tweak that a little bit and move forward. But you are in doing all of that, you're still creating an emotional connection.

It just might not be overly touchy-feely. Interesting. Yeah, this is fascinating. And I love how you're really breaking this apart into bite-sized pieces that we can process. And in your book, The Empathy Dilemma, How Successful Leaders, and this is important, balance performance, people, and personal boundaries. So, I mean, we have those three components that all businesses are really heavily looking at, especially balancing performance in people.

But you have to put personal boundaries around that as a leader. You have some pillars in this book. Yeah. And I love these pillars because they really seem to be foundational to leadership overall. So tell us, first of all, what are these five pillars? And then let's break a few of these down. Yeah. I want to just point out, you know, what was happening, why that book even came to be was because I wrote the first book. It was received very well. I was doing all these leadership trainings. And then I had this, like I said, these group of converts that were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it. We're on board. We want to be human-centered leaders. We understand the business value of being a human-centered leader. But here's where it gets hard. And especially post-pandemic, you know, people had bent so far over backwards during the pandemic. to be there for their people, right?

To do the things, to do things right by them, to see them as whole human beings impacted by this global pandemic, right? And so they were having some trouble bouncing back. And what was happening was two things. Either they were getting walked all over because people got used to all these accommodations and all this flexibility, and they didn't know how to come back from that.

They were burned out. Or what they did was with some of the companies you might have seen in the news, they snapped back to bossism. And they were like, no, back to work, back to the way it was, back to status quo. You had your fun being treated like humans. It's time to get back to work. And I was like, there's got to be, there's a middle ground there. So I interviewed, you know, on my podcast, I've interviewed hundreds of leaders. I did tons of research. And I was trying to deconstruct the recipe for how do you probably know someone like this, Adam, like those leaders

who seem to balance empathy and performance almost effortlessly. I was like, what? What's the recipe? Can I deconstruct a recipe? And so in speaking to all of them, there were these five common threads that emerged. And that's where the pillars for the five pillars for being an effective and an empathetic leader come from. So those five pillars are self-awareness, self-care, clarity, decisiveness, and joy. And we can go through each of those and what those mean, but those are really the common threads across all of these people. And what it is is it's not linear. It's really a framework that when things start going off the rails, right, if your team is underperformforming, if you're burning out, if there's miscommunication, if there's disengagement,

if a conversation goes badly, you can look to this framework and say, which one of these were weak in that conversation or in that moment or in that initiative or for my team right now and see which ones you need to strengthen. Because when you have those all integrated and in balance, if they're all present in some form, you're going to be a high functioning team. Agreed. I mean, this is, this is fascinating because, okay, so Maria said self-awareness, self-care, and I think those two fit together very nice. Yeah, they go together. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like the two legs of the leader here. Yes. Personal. You know, and then you have the next two that seem to fit together really well, which is clarity and decisiveness.

Yep. And those are two key leadership traits to get things done. And then you have joy because why not? I mean, shouldn't we like what we're doing and the people we're doing it with for crying out loud? So let's break this down into those three chunks. But, you know, self-awareness, if you have a leader who is not self-aware, they're pretty much oblivious to what's going on around, around them.

And, I mean, they're like a walking headache for that matter. Yeah. So I love that you started with this, but give me your perspective as to why you started with self-awareness. Yeah. I love that you saw the pairings, by the way, because initially I only had four. And then I was like, something's missing. And I went back through all my interviews and all my notes. And it was this element of joy.

It was like the sprinkles on top, right? It was this. And we'll talk about joy in a second because it's probably not what people think I'm talking about. So stay tuned. But when we talk about self-awareness and self-care, exactly. they go hand in hand. Self-awareness is about understanding your strengths, your weaknesses, your perception gaps, right? Your blind spots and your emotional triggers. If you don't know how you show up in the conversation, then you can't make that conversation go in a productive way

or in a productive direction. So if you're having all this conflict with other people within your team, with your clients, with your customers, what's the common denominator there? Right? We have to be really humble. We have to put ego aside to embrace empathy. So it's this idea of the growth mindset. What else do I need to learn about myself? What do I need to improve? I always say, show me a leader who thinks they have all the answers, and I will show you a leader who's irrelevant. Because if you stop learning and growing and you think you've got it covered, you're going to miss opportunities, you're going to miss risks. You're not going to understand the value of diverse perspectives to help you see things you didn't see before.

So, you know, that self-awareness kind of bleeds into the self-care because part of self-awareness is understanding your own capacity. When do you need to recharge and when are you ready to go full throttle? And so self-care is not, you know, manis and petties and massages. Self-care is how do you recharge your mind, body, and spirit? And for some people, that is very passive. It could be yoga. It could be meditation. It could be sitting with a cup of tea without a screen like I do. I don't check my email or, I mean, we'll talk about this later, but I don't check my email or my phone before I have breakfast and before I have

a cup of tea, right? So what do you need to recharge? But for some leaders, it's training for an iron man. It's rock climbing. It's doing improv. Like that's where they sort of figure. out a way to recharge, replenish their tank and get their brain working in a different way so that they can come back refreshed, they can come back renewed. And when you have capacity, you can show empathy. If you don't have capacity, like, who's productive when they're tired and hungry? Nobody. No one. But you can't make space for someone else's point of view without defensiveness or fear if your tank is low. So it's not a luxury. It's you actually have to do that. And you have to model that for your team, too, that element of self-care.

That's fascinating because, and you talk about who's productive. I mean, here's the antithesis of that, obviously, is if you fail to do these things, you're just not, not productive. You're counterproductive in so many of these instances. Yes. Nobody wants to be around you. No. No, it's crazy.

And I'll tell you, you know, sometimes you have a bad day and you become a bull in the China shop or whatever. Go lock yourself in your office and don't. answer emails and don't zoom anybody. Yeah. Take some deep belly breaths. Engage your parasympathetic system, you know, whatever it's called and calm yourself down. Yeah, totally. I love this quote that you said, show me a leader who thinks they have all the answers and I'll show you a leader who is irrelevant. That is so powerful because, I mean, that vulnerability that we have to have as a leader

not just means that we don't know everything, but it also means that we don't know everything about ourselves. Yes, exactly. I think that's super important for us to realize because if we go through this, you know, I'm in charge, I'm the boss, I'm going to make all the decisions. And it's almost kind of this founder's syndrome. Yes. If you will. So, you know, I get to be the only one that makes decisions in this business. Bring them all to me and I'll bark an answer to you or whatever it might be. Yeah. So, um, fascinating. So self-awareness and self-care, by the way, all y'all on start with a win. You know how I am about leadership.

If you're not exercising these things, you're not leading for crying out loud. No. I want to talk about the next two. Yeah. Clarity and decisiveness. Because if there's one thing that leaders have to have is clarity.

And in order to get anything done, you've got to have decisiveness because we have to be accountable for those decisions that we make and we have to take action on them. But ultimately, you know, when you look at clarity, if people don't know what's in your head, you have no clarity as a leader for crying out loud.

If you haven't communicated it, if you haven't made it, you know, the root of clarity is clear to them, then we seem to be all traveling in different directions. And that gets nothing done. I had a employee one time. And he would come to me after different meetings

when there was a lack of clarity in some sort of a situation. And he would say, I guess we're playing that game again. I go, what's that game? he goes, guess what I'm thinking. What a good employee. Yeah, I love it.

And so I started using that. And I never wanted to walk out of a meeting with employees and have them play the game. Guess what I'm thinking. Well, and you can't hold people accountable. So this is the thing where people say, they think that empathy and accountability are either or. It's both and, right? And it's actually empathetic to be clear to someone about not just their role, but your role. Be clear about the mission. Be clear about the why behind the ask that you're asking of them.

Be clear about what the next steps are. Because the worst thing you can do for your people is to leave them in limbo. Because then they end up spinning their wheels going in a different direction. And I tell an amusing but kind of sad anecdote in the book about a former client I worked with years ago who in the name of empathy, in the name of democracy, was kicking a decision down the road, down the road, down the road, down the road. And his team confidentially shared with me, we just want him to make a decision already. We want him to be clear about where we're going because we just don't know what to do. We're paralyzed. Every time we start something, something changes because it's unclear. And this leader genuinely thought they were doing something nice for their team, this kind of why this is paired with decisiveness, by trying to find the decision that would make everyone happy. And there's no such decision.

So what you do is you adopt clarity and you say, here's the decision that needs to be made. Here's why it needs to be made. Here's the role that you play in making it. And I'm going to make this decision two Fridays from now. So please come to me with your input, with your perspective, with your, I want to hear from all of you about which direction we should go in. Come to my office. Let's go have a cup of coffee if you just want to talk one on one. but just know, I'm making this decision next Friday. That is crystal clear. And that is something

that a lot of leaders won't do, right? Because they're sort of like, I don't know, what do you think? I don't know. What do you think? And that's great. I'm not saying decisiveness is a license to be a dictator. You want to synthesize multiple points of view and you want to be clear about how that process works. Here's where the ninja move on clarity and decisiveness comes in. So you get all the feedback. You get the different perspectives. So it's like, ooh, I didn't. think of that. Oh, I didn't see that opportunity. Oh, I didn't know about that risk, right? That's what diversity does for us, right? And then you make the decision, but it doesn't end there. Then the way you communicate the decision back to your team has an opportunity to be even more

empathetic. So here's the decision we made. Here's why we made it. Thank you all so much for your feedback. We factored in this. We factored in that. And Adam, your idea about such and such, actually great. It actually sparked a conversation that we weren't going to have. But here's why we can't do that right now. And I transparently acknowledge that you contributed and that we heard you and that we considered your point of view, but here's why it's not going to work right now. How much more likely are you going to be to buy into that decision and do what I call disagree but commit to the decision? If you know how the sausage is made, right, and you know that your voice was considered and you understand the why post decision, that's empathy. Like,

this is the thing. There's so many opportunities to be empathetic that we don't think of as empathetic. It's like, I'm taking Adam's voice and perspective into consideration. I know you might be hurt or disappointed by the decision we made. And so I'm going to tell you why we made it. And I'm going to encourage you to keep giving feedback in the future because it actually helped us make a better decision. So this is what we mean. Like decisiveness is kind of an art. And the more clear and transparent you can be before you make a decision, to your point, people can't read minds, you can't hold people accountable to an expectation you haven't set. Then in the decision making process, it's not just, I'm deciding this and I close the door. I send an email. This was the decision. Thank you very much,

right? Was my voice heard? Was my idea considered? Why did they make that decision over this decision? We have to maintain that vulnerability and transparency into the communication. And to me, and, you know, if you look at the definition of empathy, that's empathetic. So there's all these opportunities to practice empathy in ways we don't even think of. Totally. This is amazing because, I mean, the reality is when you take a look at, you know, like the Gallup Q12 survey and you look at all the questions that Gallup has for the employees, they all revolve around these. different, these pillars that you've established. And they determine whether or not we have employee engagement.

Yes. And companies with high levels of employee engagement are typically like two to four times more productive than those that don't. Yes. So really what we're doing here is we're driving engagement through this clarity, through this decisiveness, through this empathetic leadership more than anything. So I mean, this is not, you know, Maria going, hey, I'm going to get touchy-feely with This is truly driving results in business.

I'm very results oriented. And that's why it's about looking at the hundreds, if not thousands of operational decisions you can make with empathy, right? Certain benefits are considered empathetic by employees. Paid leave, flexible work schedules, right? Certain perks that they get. Those are considered empathetic because it's like you understand us. You know what we need. Or someone suggested something and you implemented it, right?

Clear communication is empathetic. being decisive, yet the leaderly part is synthesizing all the points of view and then swiftly making a decision, right? So there's all these ways to operationalize empathy. And it carries over, you know, we haven't even touched on the customer experience, right? What does that look like? What are those policies? But to your point, I wanted to cite a study that I was looking through my notes. I can't find that I'm horrible at citing studies exactly how the numbers are. But this is the gist. It was a study done by Catalyst a few years ago where they, they have. had thousands of employees self-select if they worked for an empathetic leader or didn't.

And then they asked them the same questions. And the deltas between the answers were startling. So it was something like, can I be innovative at work or I can be innovative at work? 61% of the people, and that's, you know, it's 60 something, right, that were in the empathetic environment said, yes, they can be innovative at work. Guess what the number percentage was for the people that didn't have a lot? empathetic boss or an empathetic environment. How many, what percentage of them could be innovative at work?

Was it in the teens or? Yeah, 13%. Wow. So what, tell me what capital asset you would allow to run on 13%. Exactly. You know, like nothing, right? So think of all the brainpower, the innovation, the creativity, the problem solving. That's your competitive edge.

And if you're putting people in an environment where fear and anxiety are shutting down their executive skills because they're in survival mode, how does that make sense? To me, it's just startling, like, the nonsensical business case for that. It's just, we've got to get rid of command and control. And not completely, right? In crisis situations, in crunch time, yes, you need command and control. But guess what? You're only in those situations, like a very small percentage of the time. The rest of the time, you need to be building up that trust and that empathy with your team so they know when it's go time, whatever you say, they'll trust and they'll follow you and they'll do it.

But that's the foundation we forget about. We think, oh, command and control works 100% of the time. No, it doesn't. It's a dying paradigm. It's structural management and without any sort of caring for the employee's perspective. I know I'm getting on my soapbox a little bit with you. Sorry, I get really excited about this stuff. And I come from a command and control environment.

military in the 90s. Yeah. And I mean, that was a command and control environment until they figured out a lot of, you know, leadership and influence aspects in order to create higher performance. I was going to, let me just mention something on that real quick because I've interviewed several military leaders. And they talk about our misunderstanding. And you probably can speak to this of, again, in battle, in crisis, is a very small

percentage of the time. So they said, actually, most of our leadership is about building trust. building camaraderie, you know, building those things so that when the time comes, we are all rowing in the same direction. We can all go into, you know, you're not going to follow someone into battle and risk your life if they're not being open with you. They're not being candid. You don't trust them, right? And so we, it's really funny when I've talked to a lot of these military leaders, the Marines, the Navy, I've even spoken to some, you know, not military, but FBI and CIA folks. It's like it's, they're really, they're like, it's really, they're like,

it's really funny the perception from civilians that we are commanding control 100% of the time because that can't work. People won't risk their lives for you if you are like that all the time and you don't have you haven't developed something with them that they say, hey, you know, Adam's asking me to do this. I'm going to go do it. Yep. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Does that track for you? Does that, does that resonate for you? Oh, absolutely it does. I just, not long ago I gave a course for a whole bunch of law enforcement leaders. So middle management up. Yeah. And it was fascinating when you separate the command and control environment from the empathetic leadership environment. And we did a lot of that in the course. And they're like,

yeah, this is great. We need to care about each other. We need to love each other. But we have to have a high level of accountability because our standards are the highest possible. And I think if everybody has the clarity on that, they're okay with it. They just need to have the clarity on it. Right. And understand, here's our common standard. Let's all enjoy working together on that common standard with each other. Yeah. I always say empathetic leadership is not about lowering the bar. It's about supporting people to reach the bar you've set for them.

In a way that's not shame and blame. That's not what's wrong with you. It's, hey, what's going on? Tell me what's going on. Be honest. Like, where are there gaps? Do we need to upskill you? Do we need to restructure your workload?

Do we need extra support? Do we need, you know, what do we need to make you successful? Because nobody wants to come to work and fail every day. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's funny you say that because, you know, we talked about the difference between command and control and setting the bar low and people trying to get underneath it because there is this lack of empathetic following as well, as opposed to setting the bar high

and then influencing people to get over it and outperform. Yes. Yes. And that's the misunderstanding. Yeah, people go, oh, I can't be empathetic because I need a high performing team. No, being empathetic will get you the high performing team. It's not mutually exclusive. Yeah.

Crazy. I mean, this is incredible. Let's very briefly touch on the final pillar, joy. Yes. Tell me, why did you put that in there and how does that impact? It's so funny because that was like, when I had it and I was, I was sketching out the book and I was like, okay, this is the framework. I just kept feeling like something was missing. It was just an intuition.

I was like there's something like I was thinking of scenarios where you could have all four of these things and the team would still not be high performing. So I went back and I even interviewed some additional people and I was like, it's joy. And what I mean by joy is not work is fun all the time. Work cannot be fun all the time, right? There's still budget spreadsheets we have to do. But the point is, is there a level of levity and camaraderie even when the work is hard. And I've seen this, I even talk about it in the book, in environments like police stations

and ERs, right? How do you create camaraderie so people know that everyone has their back? Instead of an environment of fear and competitiveness, right? Are you creating an environment where people can lighten their load a little bit? They can joke around. They can have a fun Slack channel about what they had for lunch, right? Sometimes people mistake that for a waste of time. And it's not. It's those are the things that make your team more resilient, make your team stronger. There's a great quote I use in my workshops from the founder of the Life is Good brand. And it's, I'm going to paraphrase it here, but it's something to the effect of, you know, those teams that leave space for empathy, for caring, for the occasional nonsense are ultimately building a more resilient team. And that's what we need. Are there

those moments where you can feel like you're not trauma bonding? I don't want to say that, but, you know, are you going through it together? And are we, you know, are we not taking ourselves so seriously, right? Like I worked in Silicon Valley for a long time and I'm like, dude, you guys were selling software. We're not saving lives, right? Like, and but in a hospital, they're still able to do that in the midst of hard work. Because one leader I talked to who was a C-suite leader for some really big brands over the years, he came from a programming background, very analytical, very data-driven, to embrace empathy, learn to embrace, you know, caring about his people and creating that environment, getting to know them one on one. And he said, I do that not only because that's,

I just, it's just the right thing to do and I'm spending time with these people, but also because then when I ask them to perform when the going gets tough, kind of like I said before, they know they can trust me because we keep things, we create a sense of camaraderie, we keep things light when we can keep things light. I leave room for people to get to know each other and laugh and joke around. And if you've ever read any of the research on friendships at work, there's an amazing friendship expert named Shaston Nelson. And she wrote a book called The Business of Friendship. And the research and the data around having a friend or a best friend at work boosts engagement, performance. It reduces absenteeism. It reduces errors and mistakes. When someone

has a friend or a best friend at work. So encourage those work friendships, right? Encourage those, not the forced fun things, but, you know, make time for that nonsense. Make time at the first five to ten minutes of a meeting to talk about your weekend, to level set, see where people are. Maybe they had a crappy weekend. And now you know if they're a short fuse with you today, you know why. Exactly. This has been a fascinating conversation, Maria. Everybody, make sure you check out Maria at red slice. That's red hyphen slice.com. Maria's also got a podcast there as well as she's on all of the socials. So you can find all of her links to the socials there. Also check out Maria's books. I mean, some incredible information here. I mean, we need to talk about empathy here,

both the empathy edge and the empathy dilemma. You heard a little bit about those today. Maria, I do have a question. I ask all of our amazing guests on Start with a Win. And that's, how do you start your day with a win? Well, I mentioned earlier. I try not to check email or text. Well, texts I do, but not email or get on my computer until after I take my son to school. So after breakfast, after I've had my mug of tea.

And it just helps level set me. Like just this morning before our talk, I was at my kitchen counter without my phone, actually eating and enjoying my breakfast and having my tea. and I really advise that to get in touch with your empathy is to practice presence and to ground yourself before you go into, you know, contentious situations or tough situations or a presentation or a podcast interview, right? And I also exercise. I try to do either, I alternate between Peloton and CrossFit. And that really helps me before I get going with my workday as well. Awesome. Maria Ross, it's been an absolute pleasure having you,

start with Wynn. Thank you. Thanks for all that you do. We hope that you continue to teach empathy and help us understand that from a leadership perspective and help us grow our business with it. And we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for having me.