Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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Hello, everyone,
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and welcome to another episode of the wise decision makers show
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where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions.
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And today we'll help you make the
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wisest and most profitable decisions about emotions,
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specifically a gap in emotions between leaders
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and their followers between executives and employees.
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And this is a gap called the empathy gap.
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And it leads to a lot of poor
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decisions in multi waiting employees engaging with employees.
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Now,
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leaders often make poor decisions because of
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mental blind spots called cognitive biases.
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And the empathy gap is one of these cognitive biases.
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These cognitive biases that are over 100 of them,
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they are not conscious were not aware that we're making them.
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Otherwise, I wouldn't making them.
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They cause a lot of errors.
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These are mental blind spots that result in blood decisions
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and with the empathy gap that results specifically
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in bad decisions because of us not noticing
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the emotions involved in decision making, our emotions not employees emotions.
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So this is crucial for us to realise
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we underestimate the importance and impact of emotions,
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our own emotions again and especially our employees emotions.
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When we are in a leadership position.
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It can really harm business relationships with
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our employees and thus employee motivation.
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So you want to address it by applying to areas two types of skills.
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One is emotional intelligence understanding your own emotions
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because if you don't understand your own emotions,
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you won't realise where your emotions about other people's emotions might be.
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Steering give a straight
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and then social intelligence.
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That is the skill of understanding and
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influencing other people's emotions and relationships.
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So apply emotional intelligence to your own emotions
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and social intelligence to other people's emotions.
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So
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let's talk about the empathy, gap and employee performance.
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This is critical to understand. Leaders
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really focus on financial incentives as motivators.
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That is the fundamental basis of what leaders believe motivates employees. But
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when you look at the reality of extensive research, we see that, honestly,
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financial incentives are not that effective for employees who are actually
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learning earning enough money to support the middle class lifestyle.
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They kind of fade out pretty quickly.
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So given a financial incentive, it works in the short term, and then it fades out,
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and then you have to ratchet things up.
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It's not a good approach. It's not a good technique.
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Financial incentives are not very effective for long term motivation.
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So that is what you need to realise as a leader.
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Now,
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what you need to truly motivate employees,
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at least those who earn enough to be in a middle class lifestyle in their area
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is other incentives.
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Other types of incentives that have to do with more intrinsic
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incentives rather than extrinsic incentives. So extrinsic incentives are things
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that you give people intrinsic. Incentives are things that they feel internally
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now.
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These intrinsic incentives might have to do
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with external dynamics in their external context.
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But these intrinsic incentives are, in the end,
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something that they feel internally.
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Things like recognition. They feel recognised.
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So are they recognised for their work?
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Do they feel recognised as the critical question?
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Do they feel like they belong to a group in the workplace?
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Do they feel that there is a tribal belonging there? Is there a sense of purpose?
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Do they feel that there is a sense of purpose in their work?
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These are the kinds of intrinsic motivators that
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really drive people in the long term,
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and you don't need to write with them up.
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This is about creating an environment where recognition,
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tribal belonging and a sense of purpose, that sense of recognition,
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internal sense of tribal belonging, internal sense of purpose
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is happening for employees.
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Now
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what's going on here?
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How are these emotions intrinsically
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motivated emotions connected to performance?
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Now
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we talked about the empathy gap that's disconnect between leaders and their staff.
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So leaders underestimate these emotional drivers,
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these intrinsic emotional drivers, where there's this sense of recognition,
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the tribal belonging, purpose
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and therefore their decision making.
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We don't recognise that employees decision making is fundamentally emotional,
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and roll is as well, to be honest.
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So we are over 90% emotional, every one of us,
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no matter how cold and rational and cool we might feel we are,
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and we're only under 10% logical reason based in our decision making.
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So we need to realise that's what's happening to us that is just part of who we are.
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That's our brains, and it's okay. That's fine.
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That requires an ignition acceptance
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for us to make good decisions.
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This recognition can be especially hard for more technically minded staff,
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so I've seen a lot of problems with more technically minded
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staff where leaders think technically minded staff are just cool.
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Rational folks people, for example, like
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analysts and insurance casualty analysts,
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actuarial analysts, all those sorts of folks, a lot of insurance professionals,
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programmers and tech are typically seen as cool and rational.
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Engineers, lawyers, doctors.
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This is These are people who are seen as technical staff accountants, of course,
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technical professionals.
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And they're seen as cool, calm and rational.
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That is not the case.
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So that is why leaders have a lot of
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trouble figuring out how to motivate these technical staff.
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They figure. Okay, these are cool, calm and emotional.
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Rational people will motivate them with financial incentives and rational,
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logical claims.
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That is not what actually works. That's not what drives people.
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That's not what motivates people.
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You want to motivate technical staff
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by appealing to fundamental emotional drivers.
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That resonates strongly with technical staff, for example,
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positive reputation outside of the organisation and
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social status due to peer recognition.
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Now there's a good story about this.
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I was doing a trade I was doing
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consulting engagement for an engineering consulting firm,
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and how that started is that the engineering consulting firm was
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trying to motivate its engineers to do more selling marketing,
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actually to do more marketing to do more conference presentations, do more blogs.
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So get the word out about the skills that they provide.
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So they get more consulting projects.
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Oh, the engineers were not so interested in these topics.
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The company found they were really fascinated that they were not
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really doing this marketing that the company wanted them to do.
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And so they try to train them. They tried to provide guidance.
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They tried to say, Okay,
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how important it is for the company for engineers to do this sort of stuff.
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But the engineers, really we're not doing it.
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So they brought me in to see what's going on,
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and I talked to the engineers and I saw that they
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weren't really emotionally engaged with doing
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blocks or doing conference presentations.
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They were emotionally engaged in solving their own
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technical problems of the actual consulting projects.
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So that was a problem. And I went to the HR chief of the HR VP brought me in.
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So the chief HR officer and I told him that, Hey, you know,
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your engineers are not really emotionally engaged with doing blogs
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and doing and doing conference presentations and they char of
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chief, look at me and said Engineers have emotions
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and other people in the room laughed with a kind of laugh where they was kind of an
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embarrassed laugh where they were agreeing with the speaker
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not like they were making fun of the speaker,
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not like they were making fun of the chief and show.
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And I explained that, yes,
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engineers have emotions no matter how cool and calm and cold and
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rational they look and that those emotions are not really going to
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enable them to be engaged with marketing efforts unless
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you motivate them effective because the financial incentives that
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they were trying to use and the rational arguments
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about the benefits the company weren't cutting it.
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So I examined what was actually useful to motivate folks, and
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this positive reputation outside of the organisation
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was very valuable and social status.
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So we tweaked around the number of
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dynamics to make social status inside the
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company much more dependent on marketing,
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on doing blogging, getting clicks, and so on on doing conference presentations.
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Also on helping these engineers get positive reputation
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outside of the organisation for their marketing contributions,
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and we saw a quick, quick rise
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in marketing efforts by engineers.
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So that's what you do to address the empathy gap,
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effectively change messaging to address what
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employees actually desire instead of what the
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company needs and frame organisational goals from the employee's point of view.
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So what does the employee get from it?
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The positive recognition outside the company
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rather than the company getting projects
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social status inside the company rather than again
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the company getting more money so incorporate social.
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And that's based on social intelligence,
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social intelligence and emotional intelligence into your
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messaging and apply these research based strategies.
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That's how you align internal culture
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with remote employee emotional drivers so that internal culture,
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which enables the motivation of what he actually wants to change
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that internal culture to align with what actually drives employee desires.
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And that's how you defeat the empathy can.
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All right, everyone.
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I hope you have found this episode of the wise decision makers show helpful,
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and it will hopefully help you address the empathy gap in your own team.
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That would be wonderful. All right, everyone,
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I look forward to seeing you on the next episode
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of the wise decision makers show in the meantime,
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the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.