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25 - How Your Empathy is Hurting your Business
Description
What I want to talk about today is empathy. Specifically, I want to talk about how your empathy may be hurting your business. Possibly in ways you’ve never considered before. There are ways you may be getting in your own way through empathy. Now I’m not saying that empathy is a bad trait or in any way wrong, that’s not it. I am saying there is a time and place for empathy and to ensure empathy doesn’t lead to business decisions in ways that are detrimental to your growth.
I’ve had experience, personal experience, in letting my empathy get in my way and my business suffered for it. There are three main ways that I see in which empathy can undermine your efforts for your business. One way is making scalability and how you’re going to transition to having employees more difficult. The second way is in struggling to hold others accountable and not making excuses for people. And the third way is to prevent you from charging what you’re worth. There is a lot to examine in these three issues. How do you identify if they’re problems for you? What do you do to fix them if they are?
I want to talk about how you can still lead with empathy and support as important parts of your business. But if you are allowing empathy to get in the way of, say, transitioning clients to your new capable team members, or if you’re so desperate to be liked as a leader that you can’t clarify and enforce the expectations of a job, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. How can you keep empathy in mind without giving it control? How can you continue to offer top-tier service to clients without doing it all yourself? That’s what I’m going to explain in this episode.
Key Moments
02:15 When empathy gets in the way of scaling your business and transitioning your clients
12:58 How empathy can prevent you from holding others accountable
16:39 Why do we need to charge what we’re worth and not let empathy hold us back?
- Ask yourself if certain clients would be better served by new team members in some areas
- Have you been clear in communicating expectations and productivity needs?
- Does what you charge allow you to appreciate your team well financially?
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Contact Kari Lotzien | Be the Anchor:
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Transcript:
Kari Lotzien: [00:00:01] Welcome to Be the Anchor, the podcast. I'm your host, business and leadership coach Kari Lotzien. When the seas of life get stormy, and they always will, it is not up to us to captain anyone else's ship or to try to calm the waters of the ocean. It's up to us to set our own destination for what we really want, and to learn how to navigate those waves of life together while finding that place of security and stability with others. I call this being an anchor.
Kari Lotzien: [00:00:38] Hello, my friends. I'm so glad you're here. Today I want to talk to you about how empathy might be hurting your business, and specifically, how empathy may be hurting your ability to scale or grow your business. This topic is coming from a place of real vulnerability because as I took my business, I was an occupational therapist for 22 years who grew a private rehab practice and eventually went on to sell that same business that I was so proud of. Now, in these last few years, as I've come into business and leadership coaching, and I've had the opportunity to work with so many entrepreneurs in ser