In this episode of Below the Fold, host Ibrahim sits down once again with empathy advocate and author Mimi Nicklin to explore the practical power of empathy in business. Building on part one, this episode dives deeper into why empathy is essential—not just for personal connection, but for sustained performance, loyalty, and creative excellence in the workplace.
Inside this episode:
• What listening-led leadership really means—and how it transforms morale and motivation
• The science behind why being seen and heard boosts team performance
• How psychological safety and empathy drive innovation and prevent burnout
• Real-world inspiration: How Microsoft became a model for empathetic leadership
• Can AI scale empathy? A surprising take on tech and emotional intelligence
This conversation is a must-listen for leaders, creatives, and professionals who want to create more human, connected, and high-performing workplaces.
📩 If this episode resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone building a better workplace.
00:00 – Introduction & welcome back to Mimi
01:00 – Why motivation fuels creative excellence
03:00 – What listening-led leadership looks like in action
05:30 – The cost of disengagement and the case for empathy
07:00 – Empathy's ROI: Profit, productivity, and retention
10:00 – Microsoft as a case study for empathetic culture
11:45 – Practical ways to build emotional connection at work
13:30 – Will AI kill or scale empathy?
15:30 – Understanding the stress response in creative teams
18:00 – How empathy builds resilient, tenacious teams
20:00 – Finding joy, purpose, and sustainable energy as a leader
[00:00:00] Hi, Mimi. Hello. Welcome back to Below the Fold. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much. For those that are just listening in, ~uh, ~I just recorded a really interesting episode with Mimi on empathy and marketing. So this is the second part of the, uh, of this, uh, episode, uh, on empathy, uh, for those that are just listening in that haven't listened to the first part, Mimi, do you mind reintroducing yourself real quick?
Yes. So my name is Mimi Nicklin and I specialize in the role of empathy in our world. So the role of human connection and belonging and understanding. And today we're going to talk about how that, how that has a role in the creative industries and in leadership. Fantastic. I'm very excited about this one.
Let's start with the first part, the first segment, which is around, um, motivation. and morale or listening led leadership, right? Yes. Why is motivation the foundation of creative excellence? And how does listening led [00:01:00] leadership improve motivation, loyalty and creative potential? I think, I mean, I come from the creative industries, right?
I've been in this industry my whole career, fundamentally, any level of leadership. And you know, Ibrahim, when you
Leadership
has many definitions, right? If you googled it, you'd probably find, I don't know, a million right versions. But for me, it's very simple to lead. People have to follow that's the definition is in the word, right?
To lead people have to be following. If no one's following, you can't lead. And what we know is that people lead. Those who have a relationship with them People follow people that they have respect for that. They like that. They feel value them that listen to them So my work is around really why empathy creates engagement in our workplaces And what we know is that when organizations have higher levels of empathy we see 23 percent higher levels of profit We see 48 percent higher levels of engagement.
We see 17 percent higher efficiencies so People do [00:02:00] better when you listen to them. So that's why I really focus on this idea of listening led leadership. Because as far as I'm concerned, you cannot lead if you don't listen. How do you know how to lead anyone if you don't know how they want to be led, right?
How do you motivate anyone? How do you drive morale in your creative team, your agency, your marketing department? We are fundamentally creative beings. This is marketing. It's about storytelling, right? Whether it's in the product and the pricing or it's all the way through to the engagement and the experience.
This is a story we're creating narratives. And to create those narratives, you have to know how to bring your team with you. We touched in the first episode around safety and psychological safety. We know that creative teams are more effective when they feel safe in their environments. We know that motivation goes up.
Morale goes up. People stay in their jobs longer. So in the end, if you really want loyalty in that team, if you want that engagement, You [00:03:00] have to be able to listen to people because people follow the people who listen, right? And it's about I guess creating that emotional connection, right? Absolutely. Do you need to be emotionally available to create that emotional connection?
Well What's the play here? Yeah, I mean look I think it's a complicated answer really because empathy itself is not about emotion Empathy is the skill set of being able to take the perspective of someone else. So It's a data set. Actually, it's human data and you'll see it in use, for example, by the FBI in the U.
S. Army in the most tough, hard edged environments in our world, hostage negotiation, that type of thing, which is fundamentally built. on the skill of empathy. Right. And empathy is a skill set. It's a skill set. Right, yeah. So, empathy itself has nothing to do with emotion. It's not about being nice, it's not connected to sympathy, it is a skill set.
Yeah. But to your question, do you have to be emotionally open to understand the emotions of others? I'm not [00:04:00] sure you have to be emotionally open, but you have to be emotionally intentional. Mm hmm. If I want to sense how you're feeling, if we assume you're in my team for a moment, and I'm talking to you today about a project that we're working on, if I want to know how you're feeling, where your energy is, whether you seem passionate, motivated, engaged, disengaged, right?
Because only 31 percent of the global workforce today is engaged in the work. Right. So 70 percent of us basically, it's ridiculous. And it's the lowest it's been in 10 years. So 70 percent of the global workforce. It's actively disengaged and the cost of that is 8. 8 trillion dollars. Wow. So it costs the UAE for an hour, which is probably how long we'll be together today.
It costs them over 10 million dollars an hour in perceived or predicted losses due to disengagement. Right. Missed opportunities. Missed opportunity. Because people are turning up. They're doing their jobs and they're going [00:05:00] home. You can't fire them. They're coming at nine. They're going at five. They're following their job description But that's all they're doing You're not seeing creativity, innovation, engagement, experimentation.
So to your question, do you need to be emotionally open? No, but if you want to understand the temperature check, the motivation of your team, I think you have to intentionally do so. You're not just going to magically know. And that's a skill set, right? It is. It's something that you can develop. It's not something that, you know, you were born with, right?
Yeah, these are all skill sets. I mean, the The empathy itself is built into your brain. It's built into your prefrontal cortex. So you were born, everyone was born with the ability to empathize because it's a pro social survival skill, which means that we're talking about literally the human race surviving, right?
But using it is a skill that gets better as you practice it. So actually the last three words of my first book, I'll practice creates permanence because the more you do something, um, The more, the better you get at it, right? The more [00:06:00] naturally it comes to you. So yes, it's something you can teach your teams.
And that's what I do most days is teach people how to listen in their teams. Fantastic. So, so don't be afraid, you know, to take a step and try to learn to, you know, to, to acquire the skillset and, and, you know, get after this, this huge amount of money that's missed, I suppose, every hour. Imagine if we can have it, that could be our 10 million.
Right. Any company should have it. Well, imagine what you could do with your podcast for 10 million. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, there you go. You're welcome. You're welcome. It's ready, it's out there.
it's out
Um,
fantastic. Let's jump onto the second one. Yep. So, higher sustained performance. Which I think is, is, is somehow in line with what we've just covered.
Yep. Um, you know, why Why are empathetic organizations are 20 to 20 percent more profitable. You just said that, I guess it does, uh, [00:07:00] allow the workforce or teams to be more productive to, you know, find new opportunities to explore new territories. Right. And how does feeling valued, I suppose, and connected lead to higher and sustained performance.
So I guess people would feel more appreciated they get they feel maybe a little bit more content absolutely right and when you feel content it's the same same thing with sports right yeah if you train you at the end of the day you feel content and when you feel content again you do produce more you can yeah you can grow right yeah i mean everyone everybody needs
to be seen in her.
It
is an innate need of the human being.
So if two babies are born equally sick, the one who receives empathy will outlive the other one. So as humans, we, we literally survive longer when we feel valued and seen and heard. And actually the data shows that if you left the studio today. And nobody looked at [00:08:00] you. Nobody saw you, spoke to you, acknowledged you.
That within 90 seconds, your neurological system would shift. You would start to think, did I, did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong with me? Does nobody like me? And in that happening, you would see adrenaline and cortisol, hormones basically, enter your system. Your entire nervous body will change.
So in the workplace, yes, if you want people to feel at the best, to be valued, to turn up, to add value, they need to know that they're seen and heard because that is an innate need for human beings. And so many teams today get it wrong. You know how much burnout we're seeing or people talking about toxicity or people, particularly young people in our industry, just resigning with nowhere to go.
I can't tell you how many young women actually. We'll say, Oh, Mimi, I resigned from my, my agency or my position and I say, okay, great. Where are you going? And they say, Oh, we, I don't know. I just didn't want to work there [00:09:00] anymore. Yeah. No plan. They're just off into the sunset. You know? Yeah. So we're losing our talent.
Um, yeah. And there's a, yeah, there's a massive opportunity to send that around. Yeah. And I mean, some people do want to take a break, I suppose, a long break, no strings attached, but it goes to show how much, how rough and rigid the environment is, you know, for them to drive them to think, to think, to say, or to, or to pursue, you know, I guess a long break.
Especially if it's early in their career. And of course there's life choices, right? Want to take time off and that's perfect But if you're feeling that after a year or two or three years of your career, you need it, you know physically emotionally That you quite literally can't sustain that that pressure that Lack of belonging that loneliness and and 52 percent of us are lonely and you know Ibrahim that today
330
million people
330 million people don't have a single friend
just
People just lonely, alone, isolated.
[00:10:00] And of course that doesn't, that impacts negatively in all areas of their life, including their work. Of course. Um, well, these are definitely, I guess, the, the, the companies for which these people work for have definitely failed. But do we have an example of companies that maybe have? Thrive due to empathetic leadership.
Can you think of any company? Yeah, I mean, there's there's many. Um, you know, for as many companies that aren't getting it right, there are many that are. And of course, that's why I get to do the work I do, you know, now. This conversation around empathetic leadership, around psychological safety in the workplace is everywhere.
Can you think of a company? Sorry. I would probably say Microsoft. Yeah, that has a culture, right? Yes, Microsoft does it brilliantly. Their CEO is Satya Nadella. Constantly rated as one of the best CEOs in the world. He wrote a book actually, Ibrahim, it's a really good book, it's called Hit Refresh. About Microsoft and, and the way he's run it, and he talks about empathy 52 times in [00:11:00] the book.
They're one of the only brands out there that has a constant score of 98 or 99 percent on glassdoor. com, which is the American employee satisfaction website, right? Um, not just in their people, leadership and their motivation and their programs. But in their innovation, in their approach to creativity, in their approach to business practice.
So yeah, I would, I often talk about them. They're a, they're a brilliant business for really proving the value of empathy at work. Right. Can you think of maybe a couple of practical strategies, I guess, that leaders could use to create a culture of empathy? Empathy or value connection.
Like the
the core to all empathy, as we touched on just now, is listening, the ability to listen.
And to listen, you have to appreciate that this is an active skill set, right? Not a passive one. You can hear, we're hearing stuff all the time. If I smash the glass, the cup, you'll hear it, right? It doesn't mean you're necessarily listening. So. The first step really for all really connected leadership, this listening leadership is [00:12:00] to master listening.
And I'll, I'll give you three easy tips, right? For your audience, for people to take away. The first would be around eye contact and just body language, right? Being open, looking people in the eye. We're terrible at it. Technology doesn't help, right? Open shoulders, slightly leaning in to conversations, nodding.
Gosh, I need to fix my posture. There we go, fix your posture. Get it open, right? Yeah. Nodding, smiling. You were doing it brilliantly. But smiling is a hugely undervalued tool in creating connection. People think that they shouldn't smile at work. I don't know why. Yeah. So the first one is around eye contact and body language.
The second I would say is around using questions really effectively. You can't understand people if you don't. Ask, how will you know, how will you know why your client has changed the budget or changed the brief or chosen another partner if you don't ask, right? So the ability to ask people, how did you get to that?
Help me understand that more. Can you tell me more about [00:13:00] that? Right? Open ended questions, curiosity that allows you to really show that you're listening and that you're interested. And of course, so that you can empathize more. Right. Do you think?
with
With all that you said. Yes. Automation. Oh, I knew it was going to come up.
Yeah, because you're saying stop, stop and take a step back and ask, right? And automation is doing the exact opposite. Well, uh, look, I think it's, I think there's two parts to it. One is automation and the other is probably AI, which is part of automation. The automation itself. The actual processes, the automation of the processes.
No, because I think when you talk about automation, you are normally talking about a process and the process itself doesn't need empathy, right? The people running the process need empathy, whether a machine is making that process more efficient or not. It doesn't actually change the role of the humans around that process.
You know, whether the process was a paper one or a digital one,
When it
it comes to AI. My opinion is very much that a I can and will [00:14:00] and should scale empathy. You know, people say the difference between a I and humans is that we can empathize and they can't. It's not true. Machines can empathize and arguably they will do it better than we will more consistently and more often.
So When people say to me, but Mimi, well, I lose my job to AI. I always say to them, no, you will lose your job to the person using AI. Yeah. Right. We have to embrace it. Will it kill our empathy? No, it will scale our empathy. Yeah, because it's a skill set, right? It's another skill set the machine can learn.
And yeah. It's different, right? In person, humans, we have different senses, we have different abilities to sit around a table, to smile, all these things that the bot won't have necessarily, at least not for now. But, as we know, as I talk about all the time, we have an empathy deficit, right? We have lost nearly 50 percent of our empathy over three decades.
Because humans are flawed. We're tired, we get sick, we get stressed, we have burnout, we're busy. Okay? [00:15:00] High stress, low time. Enemies of empathy. Right. A machine won't have any of those things. Yeah. The machine doesn't stop communicating because it's tired. It won't be less good at empathizing because it's got a migraine.
Yeah. It won't take sick leave or a vacation, right? Right. So, I don't agree with the people that say that AI doesn't have emotional intelligence or won't. I think it probably has more than us, more consistently, and we should use it because the world needs more empathy now than ever. That's very insightful.
Um,
Thank you for that. Let's jump into the third one, which is resilient teams. And I guess the discussion points here are why is psychological safety often missing in the creative industry? Why is it so critical? How does empathy foster resilience, tenacity and creativity? And maybe the last point is the role of empathetic leadership.
in addressing the attrition crisis, right? And this, all of this goes back to resilient teams, [00:16:00] right? Building resilient teams. Yeah. Building resilience. I mean, as, as human beings to really understand resilience, you have to understand something called the fight or flight response, which anyone who's ever done any yoga, uh, might know a bit, but the, the masterclass in like 60 seconds is that when we were cave men and women, we were living in the jungle and a tiger came out of the jungle.
We had two options only. To survive we could fight it or flight it run away Because of that the way that we evolved you're like smiling when you're like, yes, Mimi But in order to survive the tiger bear with me We evolved to do something with our brain that was, we would move the energy, the blood away from the parts of the body that you need to think.
You don't need to create a strategy when there's a tiger coming for you, right? So the brain would move your energy, your blood to your limbs, to run your arms, to fight heart, to pump faster lungs. So you can breathe. What that means is the parts of your brain responsible for thinking strategy, resilience, engagement.
[00:17:00] They literally starved of blood because I'm trying to survive. Even though humans have evolved amazingly over hundreds of thousands of years. We still don't know how to decipher between Types of stress. So when we go into an agency environment or a marketing team environment, which is very high pressure, very high on disconnection.
We don't feel we belong. We don't know where we valued. We don't have high safety. We're worried about being embarrassed or chastised or criticized. Our response in the brain is the same as it was when we saw the tiger, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the brain doesn't know that the fear of a tiger is different than the fear of a toxic boss.
So what happens is the same response, right? All those hormones come, you will experience it with things like butterflies, nausea, headaches, agitation,
agitation.
and then of course you can't think properly because there's literally no blood. [00:18:00] In that part of your brain. So when people are in that very stressed state Their resilience decreases because the body is actively trying to keep you alive And we're not meant to live in that state ibrahim those hormones the adrenaline the cortisol They're meant to come into your body fight off the imminent threat and then they dissipate But in today's working environment for many people They're living under that state of stress, right?
when you think of Resilient teams are the term resilient. Yeah. Empathy isn't the first word that comes to mind. Yeah. How is it related?
Maybe not,
not, but the reality is if you don't have understanding of your team, the dynamics, the people within it, you can't create resilience. You can't create any level of sustainable culture without understanding the people in it.
Because in the end, creativity, leadership is a people game. Right. So to create resilience, you have to understand the people and the [00:19:00] environment. You need to understand the prerequisite to do it. You do, right? You need to understand those people. So it's the same with children or with anything. If you want children to thrive, you need to understand them, this classroom, this teacher.
So it's very, it's a very human reality. There can be no level of sustained resilience without human connection because we are created as prosocial species. Right. Um, and would there be anything else besides empathy right to create resilient teams? Or is empathy the only factor? No, I think there's many factors.
I mean, I think resilience is connected to joy, right? The happier you are in the role, the more resilient you are. I think resilience is connected to health. It's connected to how much you sleep, how strong your body is, your levels of immunity. Um, I think there's many things that makes up resilience.
Fundamentally, I see, and I'm definitely not a doctor, but in my experience and the work that I do, the happier the organization is. The more the [00:20:00] resilient, the people are, and I see that with myself, you know, people ask me all the time you asked me today, how do you do this? Right? How do you just go from this to this, to this?
And you still loving it and you're still smiling and where Mimi, where does this energy come from? Right? Which is fundamentally resilience. Yeah. It comes from passion, right? I could do this all. I do do this right all day, all night, get on the plane, do it again, got another plane, do it again because I love it.
Right. So I think that, yes, beyond all of the things we've spoken about, finding joy, finding your purpose and then living within it, that flow state of purpose, it's probably the biggest driver of, I don't know, consistent resilience for us as, as leaders and as people. Amazing, and that Mimi brings us to the end of part two.
Oh no, we're done. Yeah. We're done. We're done. But um, you know, I'll be excited to have you back again on the show, so let's look, I look forward to that. Yeah, well thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.
There we [00:21:00] go.
you go. Amazing Mimi. It's a wrap. It's a wrap. You didn't need more than that.
Good job. It was awesome. Well done. Thank you. You're welcome. See, nice and short. Short, sweet, to the point. Yeah. Really good. Thank you very much for having me. You were happy with it? Oh, I'm very happy with it. Good. Hello.
Ready? Did
you listen to our every word or were you on Instagram? He's like, no I wasn't. Is it Instagram?
I hope you were on Instagram. Happy.
you take a photo for us?
[00:22:00] [00:23:00] Yes.