The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce - Paperback

by Heather E. McGowan (Author), Chris Shipley (Author), Denise Williams (Foreword by)

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 Advantage: 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 leadership: 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 workforce: 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 to:

• Rethink Your Workforce You'll gain new insights into today's empowered workforce and how best to tap their intrinsic motivations.
• Rethink Your Organization You'll learn how to reorganize work to become resilient in continuous change.
• Rethink Your Leadership You'll discover superpowers and unleash your Empath Advantage.

Whether you are a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, The Empathy Advantage: 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.

Back Jacket

Praise for the empathy advantage

"If you want to continuously innovate at the highest levels, you must unlock the potential of your people. This book shows you how."
-- Josh Linkner, New York Times bestselling author, The Road to Reinvention: How to Drive Disruption and Accelerate Transformation

"The Empathy Advantage is a map to the treasure at the heart of your work as a leader: your people."
--Heather A. Yurko, Vice President, Digital Talent, Mastercard

"Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have written the most important book on management for the post-Covid era."
--Dr. Raghu Krishnamoorthy, University of Pennsylvania; former CHRO, GE

Unleash Human Potential with Trust, Agency, and Autonomy

In the decade before the Covid-19 pandemic, the workforce was changing so quickly and across so many vectors that most business leaders--so busy tackling one new challenge after another--missed the trend lines. The workforce trends collided in the early months of 2020, and soon leaders faced more challenges than ever before. They had to keep their people motivated in the face of overwhelming pressures. Millions left their jobs because employers couldn't respond fast enough. Today employees feel empowered to ask leaders for more. Leaders must inspire a complex, diverse, and multigenerational workforce to outperform the competition.

Post-pandemic, the world's workforce is still empowered with agency and autonomy, and while that's a challenge for leaders, it's good news for business. Whether you are a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, The Empathy Advantage speaks to anyone with responsibility for recruiting, engaging, leading, and retaining the next generation of workers. Through learning to shift your mindset, culture, approach and behaviors to leadership, you will emerge better prepared to lead and inspire today's diverse, complex, multigenerational workforce.

Author Biography

Heather E. McGowan (www.heathermcgowan.com) and Chris Shipley (www.cshipley.com) are internationally recognized speakers, writers, and Future of Work strategists.