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Building Inclusive Cultures with Minette Norman
51 Plays2 months ago
Minette Norman is an award-winning author, speaker, and leadership consultant who previously spent decades leading global technical teams in the Silicon Valley software industry.
Her most recent position before starting her consultancy was as Vice President of Engineering Practice at Autodesk. Responsible for influencing more than 3,500 engineers around the globe, she focused on state-of-the-art engineering practices while nurturing a collaborative and inclusive culture.
As the author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader and the co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook, Minette is committed to helping leaders unleash the full potential of the people in their organizations.
Named in 2017 as one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times and as “Business Role Model of the Year” in the 2018 Women in IT/Silicon Valley Awards, Minette is a recognized leader with a unique perspective.
REFERENCES
- minettenorman.com
- Minette's LinkedIn
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
- Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
ABOUT EMPATHY IN TECH
Empathy in Tech’s mission is to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry to help humanity solve our most pressing and complex problems. We do this by focusing on three key areas:
- Technical Empathy - Close the empathy skills gap in the tech industry by leading a scientific revolution that embraces new research.
- Ethical Empathy - Ensure empathy is used for social good through ethical, equitable, and responsible choices.
- Actionable Empathy - Build a thriving community that makes effective empathy training accessible, affordable, and widely available.
Learn more at empathyintech.com
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Transcript
The Human Element in Tech Evolution
00:00:01
Speaker
who is creating all this amazing technology? It's human beings and human beings have emotions whether you want to acknowledge it or not. They are suffering in the workplace and in their personal lives and empathy needs to be there in every moment of every day so that human beings can create the technology and evolve the technology that's going to solve the world's massive challenging problems that we have today.
Introducing 'Empathy in Tech' Podcast
00:00:28
Speaker
Welcome to Empathy in Tech, where we explore the deeply technical side of empathy. And the critical need for empathy in technology. I'm your host, Andre Goulet.
00:00:38
Speaker
And I'm Ray Myers.
Meet Manette Norman: Champion of Inclusive Leadership
00:00:40
Speaker
Today on the podcast, we have Manette Norman. Manette is an award-winning author, speaker, and leadership consultant who previously spent decades leading global technical teams in the Silicon Valley software industry. Manette knows that when groups embrace diversity in all its forms, breakthroughs emerge and innovation accelerates. Her most recent position before starting her consultancy was as vice president of engineering practice at Autodesk.
00:01:04
Speaker
Responsible for influencing more than 3,500 engineers around the globe, she focused on state-of-the-art engineering practices while nurturing a collaborative and inclusive culture. As the author of the Boldly Inclusive Leader and the co-author of the Psychological Safety Playbook, Manette is committed to helping leaders unleash the full potential of the people in their organizations.
00:01:29
Speaker
Named in 2017 as one of the most influential women in Bay Area business by the San Francisco Business Times and as Business Role Model of the Year in the 2018 Women in IT Silicon Valley Awards, Manette is a recognized leader with a unique perspective. Thank you so much for being here, Manette. Thank you for inviting
Why Empathy is Essential in Leadership
00:01:49
Speaker
me. I'm really happy to have this conversation with both of you.
00:01:53
Speaker
So to kick things off, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What got you interested in using empathy as a technology leader? Well, it was really when I was leading a very, very large team globally. And it was, you know, you described my my role as VP of engineering practice. I was in charge of trying to modernize how we developed software at the company where I worked. We were going from this 30 year old desktop software company to being a cloud software company. We were trying to reimagine everything from a technology and tech stack perspective. And where empathy came in here is I was noticing that there were so many people who were really anxious about these changes. It was you know that whole idea of like moving my cheese. like Everything was going to change. And people were
00:02:39
Speaker
they were digging in like people were digging into this is how we've done it before. And you know, this is really hard. And then at the same time, what I noticed is that some people were dominating the conversations and some people were not being heard and didn't have a voice. And honestly, I often felt like I was that person who didn't have a voice. And I was struggling to work with some of the people that I had as my peers. And I just realized like,
00:03:04
Speaker
this is This is where we all need more empathy, myself included. I need to see everyone here as a fellow human being who is struggling, who has fears and doubts and challenges, and how might we all work together in a better way to create the software we need to, to create the world-changing solutions for our customers, and to just be like better human beings. and so that's how like i that the the My first little entree into empathy was,
00:03:32
Speaker
We had an internal tech conference at the company where I worked. and I was the executive sponsor, so I got a keynote spot every year. The first year, my keynote was all about collaboration. and then After like a year of working on collaboration, I realized we have a huge empathy gap here. and so I gave a keynote on empathy in front of a thousand engineers. and I did a lot of reading and research And I was terrified to even say the word empathy in front of this highly technical team because I thought, are they just are they going to boo me off the stage? Are they going to tune out the minute I open my mouth? And what I found, which we can talk about, is that no, they didn't
Impact of Inclusivity in Tech Innovation
00:04:10
Speaker
boo me off the stage. And there was so much appetite to talk about empathy and to be more empathetic because honestly, so many people are suffering at work.
00:04:18
Speaker
This is why I was so excited to have you on the show because we have similar experiences where I started keynoting about empathy. and Originally, when I wanted to have empathy to lead my software company, the consultant that we had hired said, you will be laughed out of the industry if you use these two terms in the same sentence. But I found the same thing. There's like this huge appetite to learn more and to want to know in a detailed way, how do I actually execute this?
00:04:44
Speaker
So part of your work, like a big part of your work focuses on inclusive leadership. So can you help us connect the dots a little bit about how empathy and inclusive leadership are related to each other?
00:04:57
Speaker
Yes, I'm happy to to try to connect those dots. and I really see that it's a piece of the puzzle. like I think inclusive leadership is a huge topic and that's why I wrote a whole book on it. and Empathy, for example, is a chapter in my book because I think it is not everything. I don't think empathy solves everything in terms of inclusion, but I think it's a big piece. and you know One of the things that I think is so important for everyone who's in any kind of a leadership position, especially to understand, is that we are biased towards people like us, right? Even if we try to create these diverse workplaces, we have this natural affinity bias. And so we also then empathize more naturally
00:05:37
Speaker
with the people who are like us. And i you know we've seen this play out so much in in tech, in the workplace, but you know we listen to the people who agree with us or who who just parrot what we say. And in some ways, we either ignore or punish the ones who are different. And so where empathy comes in,
00:05:53
Speaker
to inclusive leadership is that we have to get out of our little bubbles of listening to and liking and resonating with the people like us and actively seek out the people who are less like us, who disagree with us, who see the world differently, who think differently, and we need to actually you know, not necessarily draw on our innate, I know you talked about this, at Andrea, the innate empathy that we may have. We may not have that innate empathy for the people who are not like us, but we can practice empathy. We can actually exercise empathy and say, I want to understand this person, even if I don't agree with them, I want to listen to them.
00:06:33
Speaker
And then I want to really see like what am I missing because I see the world through my lens that this person brings that I don't have. And I think that is the basis of inclusive leadership is like literally hearing all the voices and respecting all the voices and then figuring out how do we synthesize a diversity of thought, a diversity of ways of seeing things and coming up with honestly the breakthrough that not one of us could come up with alone, but we can come to because we have this really diverse way of seeing the world. And that only comes I think from actually opening our minds and our hearts to divergent perspectives. Yeah.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like one of the most exciting things in empathy science in the past 15 years is that empathy is a skill. Yes. More than it is an innate like there are aspects of things that are innate, but similar to every a lot of other character traits of, you know, human population. There's a lot of diversity in how empathy is kind of presents itself, how it's expressed. But the big thing is that it's a skill that you can develop and it can be applied in so many domains. And so for folks who are really technical and like to nerd out, it's like that's so empowering because there was this idea that if you weren't born with it, oh well, but that's not the case. I'm curious, you know, to get to the heart of the matter, like why does this matter? Like if a tech company has an inclusive culture, so what? Right. Because I know that's kind of, it can be a little skeptical these days. So why should companies focus on building inclusive cultures by using empathy?
00:08:12
Speaker
There is this whole notion of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, so and inclusion as a piece of this. And in right now, when we're recording this in July of 2024, there's somewhat of a backlash and skepticism about do we want to continue to invest in this? And yet there is so much data that shows when we have more diverse workforces,
00:08:32
Speaker
and inclusive culture, so not just the diversity of the workforce, but an inclusive culture where everyone can fully participate, then we have better financial performance, we have better innovation, we solve very gnarly business problems, and we have higher employee engagement and retention.
00:08:50
Speaker
So, for any skeptics on this matter, there's data to say that you will be more successful across all fronts of business and innovation and science ah if you do have a more inclusive culture. It's not enough to just hire a diverse workforce because we know what happens. We have probably all experienced it. Like, you're the only, you're the only woman, you're the only black person, you're the only LGBTQ person, whatever it is that you feel only.
00:09:15
Speaker
you're in this team suddenly and you don't really feel like you can be yourself or you can speak up and offer a divergent perspective because there's this homogeneity and there's this need to conform. So the inclusive culture instead embraces the differences and really invites the differences instead of demanding conformity and demanding groupthink. And so we have to cultivate inclusivity in a diverse workforce and we will then see business results. And so I think that you know I often try not to have to come into a situation where I have to convince the skeptics, but sometimes you do. And and I think that that's part of it, a part of being in business. And one other thing I will say that goes back to your former point about the science behind empathy that really has dispelled a lot of myths. And one of the ways I approach it when I'm dealing with a highly technical audience is I love the neuroscience research that has been done on both empathy and inclusion. And I often bring this into the work that I do because if I'm talking to a room full of engineers or scientists, I want to make sure I'm speaking language they understand and talk about like, you know, our brain, we used to think that our brains could not change after adolescence. And now we know that through practice we can
00:10:29
Speaker
create new neural pathways, and that includes empathy. So
Empathy Trends in Post-Pandemic Tech
00:10:32
Speaker
that's one of them. And the other research I think is really important for the workplaces we're dealing with today is around inclusion. And and neuroscientists from UCLA did work on what happens when we are excluded from groups.
00:10:46
Speaker
And they showed that our brains light up with pain in exactly the same way that they register physical pain. So when you bring this to the workplace and you think, think of all the people who are not feeling part of this group, not feeling appreciated, not feeling included. They are sitting at work every day in pain. And don't we want to eliminate or alleviate the pain that our colleagues and our staff members are experiencing? And maybe that's a way to bring empathy in.
00:11:14
Speaker
One of the great lessons from my career, at least, is that when people are in pain, stopping it is almost always a good idea. oh So what are some trends you're seeing in the tech industry in regards to empathy, inclusion in corporate culture?
00:11:31
Speaker
Hmm. Well, I you don't know if I am best positioned to see trends. I mean, I see the clients that I work with. And so that's not all tech clients. I work with other other kinds of industries too. But um honestly, I'm seeing a couple of things. I am seeing that the companies that decided they were interested in culture building Some of them started honestly with a big wake-up call during the pandemic and with the George Floyd murder. Those are the companies that like, oh, maybe now we have to pay attention to DEI and hire a chief diversity officer. Those companies are pulling back from this work and saying, now we just care about financial performance again. Those are not the people that are actually the people I want to work with because I don't think they believe in building an empathetic and inclusive culture.
00:12:18
Speaker
But what I'm seeing in the companies that believed in this work before, they have evolved and they have they so they went through obviously ah dealing with everyone being home, working from home during the pandemic and now navigating this return to work. And what I'm seeing is a mix of things where some companies have demanded that people come back to to physical work. And you know i have I have a nephew who's in a company where they were all virtual throughout the pandemic and now they have to go to work three days a week and badge in and their badges are being, their badge swipes are being counted. And this is ah honestly such a negative trend because what we've seen and you know, Andre, I know you've seen the latest state of workplace empathy report and flexibility is what people are demanding now. And the companies that are not doing that, their employees are checking out, they're suffering. They don't want to be part of this organization. We've also seen in tech, there's been so many layoffs.
00:13:15
Speaker
And so as people are struggling to find new jobs, they're staying in their companies, but they're not engaged because they feel like I'm not trusted. I'm being micromanaged. And so I'm just kind of put in the minimum. Whereas the companies that have said they've really learned from the experience of the pandemic and they've said, look, our employees are productive wherever they work in the world.
00:13:37
Speaker
And we are going to give them that flexibility and treat them with respect as human beings. They are having thriving workplaces wherever their employees are. Their employees are fully engaged and committed. And I think Why shouldn't more companies learn that lesson as opposed to now we're going to micromanage and demand that people are in three days a week and that we're going to be surveilling what they're doing and their productivity? I think you know companies have taken away different lessons and the ones that have, I think, really embraced flexibility, humanity, empathy for their workforce are going to be the ones that really thrive in the long run.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think sometimes when I was first becoming a leader, I noticed myself becoming a little bit more micromanager-ish when I felt like I didn't have control or I didn't have information.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so like I'm always curious about the people who are instituting these. I think sometimes it's that they don't have the communication infrastructure to get the correct information flowing throughout the organization. So then the leaders are in this almost like information vacuum and feeling like the only way that I can get the information from you that I need is if you were physically in the office. But there are so many other ways to do that. But that's often something that's overlooked. And I think an important aspect of empathy is that, yeah, you need to think about your remote workplace. At Cordy Bites, we were remote since 2010. So we were a very early adopter. And I did a couple of courses on remote working as well before the pandemic.
00:15:18
Speaker
And the biggest thing I think is using empathy to think about the workplace experience of being online. and using the same intention. like If you were to set up a physical office, you would think about the way the furniture would go and you would think about where the coffee would be and you would think about the reception and like putting that same level of intention into a remote team. That I think sometimes is the difference between, like oh, I can't do this and like everybody has to be on site because it's this
00:15:49
Speaker
feeling of grasping because you do have to let go of control a little bit. um A lie it requires a lot of trust. um But yeah, I've noticed too that just in conversations over the past several years since we've been more remote, like there's much more of an integration between especially families and I was on a call today and it was like, yeah, let's just have a quick call at three thirty. And it's like, oh, I'm picking up my kids and, you know, and someone's like, oh, you know, I got to go because, you know, I've got, you know, something and it just feels a lot more integrated and like a recognition that we're not just our workplace personas and we're not just our roles.
00:16:31
Speaker
I think that's really important, obviously, that people understand that youre your work life and your home life, there's just not a clear so split and that organizations need to understand that. And that's a really that's very important to people that they have time for families and things like that. And honestly, you know i so way pre-pandemic, I was leading very global teams. And so I think people who have led international teams for many years have learned a lot of these lessons before people who hadn't done that.
Asynchronous Work and Global Teams
00:17:01
Speaker
Because first of all, you don't know what your people are doing because they're in Asia or they're in Europe and you're in North America. You cannot be a micromanager there. And second of all, I think one of the things that you learn doing that work is the power of asynchronous work.
00:17:15
Speaker
you know And there was this whole notion of when we have people across three geos that we have follow the sun coverage because someone is always awake and working. The power of that is amazing because you go to sleep with a problem and someone around the world has solved it when you wake up. And so I think that Even if you're not working that globally, you you can start to understand the power of what we do asynchronously versus what we do together. you know And if we come together, let's be deliberate about why are we coming together, like if we're going to come together in an office or if we're going to come together in a virtual meeting.
00:17:49
Speaker
What are we doing together that we can't do asynchronously and to be much more deliberate about that? I actually think that's very um very empathetic behavior because people like to work differently. They have different language processing, knowledge processing. And so some people want to work on paper. Some people want to work in quiet alone. um They want to work out problems. They want to put ideas on a whiteboard, whatever it is.
00:18:12
Speaker
And then when you come together, how can we come together so that we're maximizing our time together, not wasting people's time, not putting people through painful, you know, conversations that don't need to happen in a, in a conference room or a virtual meeting. So I think that we can, we can be much more mindful of like, how do we use people's time so that when we are together, we're, we're taking advantage of the power of connection, right? As opposed to, we could do all this in a shared Docker on a whiteboard asynchronously. Yeah.
00:18:43
Speaker
What do you think prevents people from embracing empathy and inclusion as part of their leadership style? like If there's all these benefits, like what's the thing that gets in the way? I'll tell you a couple of things, but the number one thing that I hear, and and it's so consistent, and it's consistent across industries, and it's consistent across cultures and geographies, and that is, I don't have time.
00:19:07
Speaker
So there's this myth that this is something I do on top of everything else that I do, right? If I'm going to be empathetic, it's going to take away from my day job. Or if I'm going to be an inclusive leader, I need to learn a whole new set of skills and I don't have time for that. And so this is where I like to try to ah bust this myth that it's an add-on and instead to say like,
00:19:28
Speaker
This can be just integrated into everything you do every day and it doesn't need to take any more time. And I think as long as we think of empathy and inclusion and culture building and you know great leadership as something extra.
00:19:42
Speaker
We won't do it. We won't invest
Tools for Fostering Empathy and Inclusion
00:19:44
Speaker
in it. And instead, if we think of like every single conversation, every meeting, every interaction, I am going to be mindfully empathetic. I'm going to practice my empathy skills. I'm going to listen differently. I'm going to manage how I react.
00:19:59
Speaker
I'm going to leverage the power of this diverse group of people. I'm going to hear all the voices. you know These are basic things. We can actually put tools in place for them, for your technical audience. Like, let's have a way of how do we run our meetings and let's just have you know a set of rules of engagement to make sure it's safe and inclusive and we cover everything we need to. That's the number one thing I hear is like, I don't have time for this. But the second one is, um and we've heard this certainly from the studies we've both read, and that is,
00:20:26
Speaker
If I am empathetic, it's going to make me we seem weaker. It's like, I need to project this image of being a strong, perfect leader, and this is going to make me look weaker soft. And so that's the other one that I want to have refute. But those are the two things that I think get in the way, main things.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think you mentioned something too to explore just a little bit more deeply, which is the misconception that inclusion means no boundaries or no accountability or no structure. And so would you talk a little bit about that? Because you mentioned like having meeting notes and like a way like protocols. And yes, most people might not think, oh, that's inclusive. Like, so can you dive into that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. um I think there is this notion of one of the things that it kind of goes back to time as like, oh, if we hear all the voices, it's going to take forever. We're just going to be talking and talking and talking. Right. Is that inclusion? No, I don't know. I don't think so. I think what we really need to do is make sure we have a way to hear all of that. Maybe that is in a document. Maybe that's by putting out all of our post-its on a whiteboard, something like that. But no, that there are boundaries and rules of engagement. And I think
00:21:32
Speaker
that's I think that's really important. It's not like we're leaving everything open-ended and we don't make decisions and nothing bad ever happens. I think we are basically saying we want to ensure that everyone can fully participate in this organization. That does not mean it's a democracy. It does not mean everything is consensus-driven. But we we have to be really clear, like how will we make decisions? And if we want to hear from everybody,
00:21:55
Speaker
Maybe there's a time box around that, right? We're going to have a period in which we're going to hear the different perspectives and maybe poke holes in our thesis. And then we're going to move forward. And I am ultimately the decision maker or this committee is ultimately the decision maker. But to be really transparent about how we're doing things, I think that's really important.
00:22:14
Speaker
So you mentioned that there's these tools that you can use. And, you know, you gave as an example, meeting notes is kind of an underappreciated way of where there's more than one way to participate in something. what What other specific advice would you give to people? What kind of tools are available for people who might not think of themselves as leaders? Maybe they're an individual contributor, not a manager or an executive, for instance.
00:22:40
Speaker
One of the things that I guess if we're thinking about like actual technical tools, um one of the things that I would just definitely say is that everyone, whether you're a leader or whether you're an individual contributor is to remember this one thing. Not everyone thinks the way you do. And so you may think you're being crystal clear by putting something in an email or a Slack channel and people may, you know, some people are very verbal and they need to hear it. Some people need some time to process on their own.
00:23:08
Speaker
So to give people different ways of communicating. So maybe you have to communicate in multiple ways to make sure that you are reaching everybody. So if you voice something in a meeting, don't assume everyone heard what you said or heard the same thing you said. Follow up with an email or a document that you share and give people time to comment on it because people will not necessarily speak up in a meeting, but they might be very happy to write a comment in a shared document that you share on your Wiki or whatever.
00:23:38
Speaker
And so, and the same thing is like, you think people might brainstorm in a meeting? Well, maybe they don't because they need more processing time. So put up a mirror board or a mural board or a jam board and say, here are all the ideas we collected. We have three days in which we can still collect more feedback. Put all of your sticky notes on that whiteboard and then we're going to have a process to review them. So I don't think you have to be a manager to be able to do that. I think anyone can understand that we process differently and we all need to maybe different time, like sometimes we need time to process in advance of a discussion and then you may need time to digest and then that brilliant idea comes to you an hour after the meeting. Is there a way for you to still contribute that? So I think those are the kinds of things that we need to be more mindful of because not everyone's brain worked the same way.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah.
Leadership as a Relational System
00:24:27
Speaker
While I've been doing the research for my book, I've been thinking about leadership a little bit and kind of what does it mean to be a leader? Because like there are a lot of people who kind of feel powerless of just, well, I have to do what my manager says. and But I think To me, i I've stumbled on this idea of that I've been forming around like leadership really is looking at relationships as a system. And as soon as you start doing that, you are a leader, and it has nothing to do with your role. So a system has elements, and then it has interactions between those elements, and they interact for a purpose. Danella Meadows talks about that in her book, Thinking in Systems.
00:25:10
Speaker
So if you start thinking about yourself and another person and how you will interact to achieve a shared goal, which is empathy, great you are automatically thinking about yourself and ah you are a leader because you are considering the system. And systems can be one person to one person.
00:25:30
Speaker
or you can manage a global team, right? And so the size of the system might change, but you are always interacting with people to achieve a goal. So I think similar to what you were saying, like anybody can be a leader. Anybody is a leader, but it's that kind of mindset shift where you stop thinking about just yourself in isolation and you start thinking more about the context and how your words and the things that you communicate are going to be perceived. And I think that's very similar along the same lines of what you're saying, where not everybody thinks the same way. So paying attention to what might they think and then thinking about how you might change it and like doing that consideration, which is empathy, right, is so critical. um So what if someone wants to take a step towards being a more inclusive leader right now?
00:26:27
Speaker
Like, listening to this podcast, they're like, okay, I'm going to be a bold and inclusive leader right now. What do you recommend as the one action that they start implementing immediately? The one action that will probably move the needle the most is to become the world's best listener.
00:26:49
Speaker
Because you know especially you're a leader, you think you have to be out there with all the answers and you have to be the one delivering all the all the great strategy. Instead, start listening to the people around you, the people you don't spend time with all the time. Listen to diverse perspectives, the people you don't even like, the people that push your buttons. I always say that those people that you don't like and who push your buttons, first of all, they're your empathy teachers. And second of all, they're going to make you so much a better leader and they're going to expand your mind because they're going to think very differently than you. And they're going to make you think of things from a totally different perspective. But you have to listen without
00:27:29
Speaker
advocating for your own perspective. You have to truly listen and you have to manage how defensive you get because you will get defensive when someone challenges you. And so you have to just like take that pause, take a breath, not respond right away, but truly try to listen to understand that's going to make you a better human being, a better leader, and, you know, a better colleague as well.
00:27:53
Speaker
who Yeah, and the research that I've done, it's very similar. It's the reappraisal, which is the pausing and taking a beat before you respond. and that like There's so many personal benefits to just doing that, and that's what I recommend. like My talk is like, if you get one thing, this is what I recommend. And the other thing was that in researching all the new neuroscience was just how important regulation is to empathy. i like That came out of left field for me because it's not something we think of. We think of it as this like, oh, it's an emotional like right away. But it's like, no, you've got to calm yourself down. You've got to give yourself the energy and the presence to be able to
00:28:36
Speaker
actually empathize because it is work. And so your suggestion of just listening and calming yourself so that you can listen, I think that's just absolutely important too.
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, that regulation piece is honestly, it's very hard, right? Because first of all, we're always moving very quickly. And we often, especially if you're a leader, you think I have to have a quick response. i That's how I'm going to seem smart and in command. And so this the quick response is often that instinctive response, which is going to be fight, flight, freeze, right? If you're challenged and you're going to lash out at someone or you're going to say something you regret. And so the self-regulation to go,
00:29:13
Speaker
I'm triggered right now. I take that pause. I take that sip of water. I calm myself. And then I come back in a curious way. Like, I want to learn more
The Role of Self-Regulation in Empathy
00:29:23
Speaker
about this. That is honestly, when I work with teams, that's one of the hardest things for people is that self-regulation. And it's yet the most, I think, game-changing thing that we can all do. It really is. I think sometimes people think it feels indulgent of Oh yeah, right. Because there is that sense of urgency of just like, I can't stop. like I don't have time time to take five seconds to breathe. like hey I can feel that sometimes, but yeah, just that idea of like it's not indulgent, it's necessary. Right. And I will tell you that the time you will spend repairing the damage if you didn't take that pause is going to be much longer. Yeah.
Conclusion: The Empathy Imperative
00:29:58
Speaker
All right. Oh, my gosh. We could talk for hours. so And um I love this. I feel like we're just getting started. But we have one final question that we ask all of our guests. So to you, what do you think is the most important thing that should happen at the intersection of empathy and technology?
00:30:15
Speaker
I think the the single most important thing is that we take away the stigma that empathy is somehow something soft and that it's not even related to technology and instead make this strong connection that who is creating all this amazing technology? It's human beings and human beings have emotions whether you want to acknowledge it or not. They are suffering in the workplace and in their personal lives.
00:30:41
Speaker
And empathy needs to be there in every moment of every day so that human beings can create the technology and evolve the technology that's going to solve the world's massive challenging problems that we have today. And so there's nothing soft about it. And it's totally necessary. And we need it in tech as we need it everywhere. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about your work?
00:31:08
Speaker
Well, my website's in easy first place, MinetteNorman.com, and I'm also happy to connect on LinkedIn. Oh my gosh, Minette, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your insights on how to be a boldly inclusive leader. And thanks to everyone who listened. Oh my gosh, like we're just getting started with this podcast and the more I do it, I'm just... beyond excited to continue to have these conversations. Empathy in tech, in case you don't know, is on a mission to accelerate the responsible adoption of empathy in the tech industry. And we do that in four ways. First, by closing the empathy skills gap, by treating empathy as a technical skill, teaching technical empathy through accessible, affordable, and actionable training, building community and breaking down harmful stereotypes and tropes, and promoting technical empathy for ethics, equity, and social justice. So if those sound like things that you're interested in, if you want to help with our mission, then head over to empathyandtech.com, subscribe to this podcast, and keep the conversation going. We've got our community on Discord, so you can join. We like to have conversations about the new episodes that are coming out, and we would love to have you as part of our community of compassionate technologists.
00:32:21
Speaker
So thank you so much, Manette. Ray, are always great. I'm so excited for keeping this going. And thanks for listening, everyone. And we'll see you in the next episode.