The Role of Empathy in Business with Karen Price Owen

Armored leadership is a phrase Karen Price Owen uses about herself before she uses it about anyone else. Karen is a certified executive and life coach who spent more than 25 years in corporate leadership, most recently as a VP of marketing and communications in healthcare, before training with Martha Beck and moving into coaching full time. She joined hosts Stephen Sakach and Mike Liwski.

In this episode we explore:

• The cost of running a work self and a home self

• The four concrete qualities of empathy, none of which is sympathy

• Three questions that turn a one on one into an integrity check

• Why the body is data when a decision looks fine on paper

• BRAVING, and building trust as a checklist

• What to do when pressure rises and empathy usually drops

She opens with the belief she carried for decades, which is that being effective meant choosing performance over empathy. Empathy was for after hours. Work required a sharper, harder, bulletproof version of her. Her teams could feel the split even if they could not name it.

What changed was not her standards. She still held people accountable and still had hard conversations. What changed is that she stopped performing what Martha Beck calls the social self and started leading from the essential self, which meant she could say I do not know without feeling like a fraud.

Then she gets concrete, which is the part leaders can use. Empathy is four learnable moves, drawn from Theresa Wiseman by way of Brené Brown: take the perspective, stay out of judgment, name the emotion you see, and communicate that you see it. Not sympathy, and never a fix delivered before the person has finished speaking.

The systems half is where it stops depending on personality. Weekly integrity check-ins built on three questions. Values based decision making, where a leader learns to notice when something feels off even though it looks right on paper. BRAVING as a trust checklist. And permission for the messy middle, with reset days, because when pressure goes up, empathy has to go up with it. That is the same discipline a brand needs between what it promises and what a customer experiences, which is where Zero Company works.

Key Takeaways

• (3:03) The belief she carried for 25 years: “I had to armor up. I thought empathy was something you did after hours with your family and your friends,” and that business “required a different version of me, one that was sharper, harder, bulletproof.”

• (3:03) What actually changed when she stopped: “not because I became soft or lowered my standards, but because I became real.” She held people accountable while “still seeing their full humanity,” and could finally say I do not know.

• (11:55) Empathy defined as four moves, not a personality: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing the emotion, and saying so. Her summary: “Empathy is not, I’m sorry. Empathy is, I feel you. I hear you. I want to learn more.”

• (17:26) The practice that operationalizes it: weekly or biweekly one on ones built on three questions, “What’s true? What hurts? And what would feel better?” She notes Brené Brown catalogs 87 emotions, while business runs on three: “Stressed, busy, tired.”

• (20:19) Values based decision making, with the body as the instrument. Train leaders “to notice when something feels off, even when it looks good on paper,” because a decision outside your integrity does not feel right no matter how the numbers read.

• (29:44) On pressure: permission for the messy middle. Build reset days and North Star conversations, and know that when a burned out person cannot answer what do you need, “that’s a big red flag.” She could not answer it herself during the pandemic.

FAQ

What is armored leadership?
Leading from fear dressed up as strength. Karen Price Owen describes 25 years of it: refusing to say I do not know, reaching for a polished answer instead, and treating empathy as something reserved for after work.

How do you make empathy a system instead of a personality trait?
Karen Price Owen recommends weekly integrity check-ins built on what is true, what hurts, and what would feel better, plus values based decision making and a trust checklist like Brené Brown’s BRAVING.

How do teams keep empathy under pressure?
By raising it rather than dropping it. Karen Price Owen calls this permission for the messy middle, with reset days and honest conversations about what someone needs, because burnout is often what makes that question unanswerable.

The armor is not protecting the work, it is costing it. Hear the full conversation with Karen Price Owen, watch it on the video page, hear Christopher Steer on why empathy is not niceness, and find more on the Bliss Businesses series.