The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce

by Heather E McGowan, Chris Shipley

Empower and Inspire Human Potential In the decade before the Covid-19 pandemic, change was coming so quickly and across so many vectors that most business leaders – so busy tackling one new challenge after another - missed the trendlines that would collide in the early months of 2020 and forever change their workforce and how they lead it for generations to come. In The Empathy Leading the Empowered Workforce, Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley team up again to deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in a sequel to their successful book The Adaptation Advantage . Leaders today must acknowledge and respond to the fundamental shifts that lay the foundation for effective From managing people to enabling success, from viewing peers as competitors to seeing them as collaborators, from applying extrinsic pressure on workers to unlocking intrinsic motivation, and from driving productivity with unquestioned authority to inspiring value creation by leading with empathy.  In this book, you will learn about the five interlocking trends that brought us the empowered The Great Resignation, the Great Refusal, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Retirement, and the Great Relocation collectively delivered the Great Reset. These trends, building for a decade prior to the pandemic, saw employees leading jobs; restructuring where and how they work, accelerating retirement, and reordering the role of work in their lives. The Empathy Advantage  offers advice on how to lead a complex, diverse, and multi-generational workforce to out-perform your competition. This book will inspire you   Whether you are a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, The Empathy Leading the Empowered Workforce speaks to those who are ready to embrace a more influential and engaging form of leadership, and will earn a place in the libraries of anyone with responsibility for recruiting, engaging, leading and retaining the next generation of workers. 

240 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2023

Reviews

[Alena Xuan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let me summarize this book for you:
- work whenever you want
- be diverse
- money doesn’t matter

Why does this book even exist/was written in a time when the economy is so bad people are paying double for the same groceries they bought just two years ago?

Useless, DO NOT recommend, and there are actually citations to Wikipedia pages.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Heather and Chris’s take in The Empathy Advantage on leading a newly empowered workforce in the post-COVID world. The traditional leadership model felt long overdue for a shift, and this book captures that evolution perfectly. Today’s most successful leaders are those who lead with empathy, listen deeply, and foster trust and collaboration. We are firmly in the new human value era—and this book is a must-read for anyone looking to thrive in it. If you want to elevate your leadership game, start here.

[Sierra Edgil · Rating 1 out of 5]

A quote that jumped out at me the most was, “No matter what your industry, sector, role, or function, your workforce is empowered. And exhausted.” Given the narrow view of the workforce discussed throughout the book, it seems a little silly to make such a bold statement. Many of us continued to work the same, disempowering jobs throughout the pandemic and our exhaustion has led us to be grateful for the benefits that McGowen claims are no longer enough. This book would have been better and more beneficial if the author had focused more on how managers can be empathetic rather than discussing how a small, privileged portion of the workforce has changed due to the pandemic.

The workforce this book focuses on is primarily office workers, with people in different industries rarely mentioned. According to Pew Research, 60% of American workers held jobs that could not be performed remotely just before the pandemic. Education is the largest gap between workers that could work remotely and those that could not. And the ability (aka $$$) to relocate was certainly not available to the vast majority of the workforce when businesses were reducing hours, staff, or just closing entirely. For this book to discuss so much about the pandemic, including vaccine distribution, it's strange that it would ignore those that did not have the privilege of working remotely at the time. I am only a couple of months into working in an office, so maybe I am just not the target audience of this book because my work environment did not change much between 2020-2024. I have nearly a decade in management experience, so I thought this would be good to have in my back pocket but it ended up being a waste of time to read. I think if you can recognize how tone-deaf this book is, doing so will help increase your empathy for employees more than reading the entire thing.

[HumeraValor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be mandatory for all senior leadership that manages direct reports. I read this as part of my department’s book club and to see the reaction of my Gen-X and Boomer managers and directors was so shocking. The principals of empathy and compassion shouldn’t have to written into a book for senior leadership to take it seriously but sadly that’s the trend Im seeing. Asking for work life balance post Covid shouldn’t be asking for a lot. The book even highlights employees who use all their vacation time and have work life balance are high performers.
I had a manager at Georgia Pacific that made me (salary employee) work M-F 7:30-5:30 bc of that I called in sick often and spent most of my work day reading BuzzFeed. In my eyes I had all day to get my work done since I had no choice to be there till 5:30. If I had been allowed to work whatever hours I wanted I would have been a happier and more productive employee.
It’s embarrassing that in 2024 we still have to teach empathy as a leadership tool.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bummer. This book was highly recommended at a conference I went to. For one thing, it over discusses the pandemics effect on the workplace. It also raves about the ability to work from home and the blending of work and home life into a co-existence of flexible work hours (late and time, in between work and kids bedtimes, etc) but the lack of work boundaries has home lives crumbling and the expectation you will be available whenever needed by your company.
I wish it highlighted more in the negative impacts of increased remote work, such as increased cyber security attacks and data breaches as we increase use of public wi-fin and insecure home networks.
I also work in healthcare, where remote or virtual work is not an option in bedside care. There was no empathy connection driven for how empathy impacts my work. The empathy definition for the book was “the flexibility given to workers to change hours and location” but really that means “the ability to demand more, for longer, and blurring personal space and desires.

[Matt Poepsel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley have created a highly practical field guide for our new world of work. I enjoyed how they outlined the various forces responsible for the tectonic shifts in our workplaces. Each chapter features a tidy set of Key Takeaways for ease of reference. I really enjoyed the informative sidebars throughout as these provided compelling charts and diagrams that further illustrated specific topics.

The material is incredibly well-researched, and I appreciate that rigorous foundation. The authors go on to provide a roadmap of solutions that can transform organizations. Most importantly, they do this without losing focus on what really drives our businesses—individuals. Trust, compassion, and empathy are exactly what we need, and McGowan and Shipley have shown us how to cultivate these qualities.

I consume quite a few leadership and management books, and this one is destined for my top shelf for quick reference.

[Caroline Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for a group project in my Management class. Overall, I think this book had a lot of good ideas. There were definitely passages where I would stop and think about how this applied to me and my workplace. I think the content is especially relevant given how many organizations are implementing or changing their return to office policies. That all being said, I felt like many of these arguments made sense only in an ideal world. I think there is room for more middle ground than the authors let on. I also feel like the meaningful content could be summarized in a short essay or article. Some sections seemed redundant. For a class book, I definitely enjoyed it more than most textbooks.

[Alireza Hejazi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all about the importance of empathy in leadership. The authors believe that empathy is a crucial aspect of leadership that can transform organizations and enhance employee engagement. They argue that empathetic leadership puts people first by understanding the needs of workers beyond just a paycheck. This type of leadership creates a high-performance working environment that nurtures and supports the workforce, empowers distributed decision-making, and champions collaborative learning, all centered on the physical and mental well-being of the human beings who show up to work every day. This book may be of leaders and managers’ interest who care about their employees.

[Derek Barber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book that explores the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the workplace and what leaders can do to adapt their leadership strategies to succeed in these new realities. Lots of very actionable and practical advice throughout but the main takeaway is that people need to feel that they are part of something bigger and that they genuinely believe that what they do matters. A thoughtful and timely work for anyone looking to create strong, empathetic and resilient teams in these challenging times.

[Ryan Gottfredson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not a bad book, but it is mistitled. I was hoping to read a book about empathy, but this is ultimately a book about being people-centric, which are related but different topics. For having "empathy" in the title, I was shocked how few times "empathy" was mentioned, and it surely wasn't written about with any depth.