Today’s interview is with Minter Dial, an international speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialized in leadership, branding and transformation. Back in February 2019, Minter joined me on the podcast to talk about his book: Heartificial Empathy. Now, so much has happened since then that he felt compelled to update the book and is back to talk to me about why he felt the need to update the book, what’s changed, why the development of empathy is still important, how we can develop it not only within ourselves but also the machines that we develop, what to watch out for when we do so and how the emergence of ChatGPT and the whole generative AI wave affects all of this.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why you should be adopting an Experience Mindset – Interview with Tiffani Bova of Salesforce – and is number 469 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at TextExpander for sponsoring this episode of my podcast.

TextExpander is an auto-complete tool that allows your team to eliminate repetitive typing and stay on the same page with just a few keystrokes allowing you to delight more customers in less time.

Click here or on the banner image above to find out more and to get a 20% discount for the first 12 months of TextExpander if you use the code: SWINSCOE

Here are the highlights of my chat with Minter:

• Parameters for the need for more empathy (pandemic, mental health and the rise of generative AI) have moved since the last book was written, and that is what drove the rewrite.
• As a result, the book is around about 70% new content.
• While showing empathy is hard work, and it takes effort, that shouldn’t stop us from wanting it.
• Internal organisational empathy, i.e. how you show up in the way you manage your colleagues, your peers, and your employees, is the part that we need to get right first before we think of any external component.
• If you don’t model or have a congruent style of empathy within the business and amongst yourselves, then it’s very unlikely that targeted empathy towards the outside will actually work.
• However, you can’t just go around and spend all your day listening. You have to be pragmatic about these things.
• We need to understand that being empathic or having empathy is relative, appropriate, and it’s contextual as well.
• The challenge is developing that muscle, that habit, that behaviour, that capability to understand what’s appropriate and what’s contextual for the challenges that you’re facing.
• The notion of being empathic and feeling empathy are two separate ideas.
• The starting point in all of this is self-knowledge. When you have that, then you’re in a better position to get into the shoes of somebody else.
• Start by tuning into how many times in conversations you find yourself waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can tell them what you think. When that happens, then you have stopped paying attention and really listening.
• Chat GPT and generative AI are imperfect spanners.
• Will they help us deliver more empathic services or experiences? That will depend on how much we understand our own humanity, how much we really understand what’s going on for ourselves and whether we interact with empathy amongst ourselves.
• That journey is still going to be difficult but will be helped with these new arrivals.
• We tend to rate ourselves above average in both empathy and listening. But, that’s often not true at all.
• If you don’t approach things with humility, then it’s unlikely you’re going to get better because you haven’t identified any thirst to improve.
• There’s one overriding myth, and that is thinking that empathy is all about being nice, and it is not. It’s really about understanding.
• One 2022 study of CEOs exemplifies this when they found that 79% of CEOs believe that they will lose respect if they are too empathic.
• Minter’s best advice: Listen and listen and listen. Listen to what’s being said and how it’s been said, and when it’s being said. And, listen deeply and listen without judgement.

About Minter

Minter Dial is an international professional and energetic speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialized in leadership, branding and transformation. An agent of change, he’s a three-time entrepreneur who has exercised twelve different métiers and changed country fifteen times. Minter’s core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division.

He’s the author of the award-winning WWII story, The Last Ring Home (documentary film and biographical book, 2016) as well as four leading business books, Futureproof (2017) and Heartificial Empathy (2019 1st Ed. and 2023 2nd Ed.) and You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader (2021).

He’s been host of the MinterDialogue weekly podcast since 2010. He is passionate about the Grateful Dead, Padel Tennis, languages and generating meaningful conversations.

Check out the book – Heartificial Empathy, 2nd Edition: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, his site minterdial.com, say Hi to him on Twitter and Instagram @mdial and @mdial respectively and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by 1195798 from Pixabay