Steph Porter on why empathy is listening then acting, not merely hearing, and what that actually meant on the hardest day a company she worked for faced.
Empathy is listening then acting, Steph Porter says, and the gap between those two words is where most leadership goes wrong. Watch the Founder of Ink and Iron PR take Stephen Sakach and Tullio Siragusa through fifteen years of high-stakes communications, including the crisis she had no way to prepare for.
Steph's framing of empathy has three parts and none of them are soft: listen actively and then act on what you heard, sense when someone is stretched before they say anything, and read whether the moment calls for speed or a pause. She is candid that the pause is the part she still works on, because pace is her instinct and pace does not always equal performance.
Then the story. A shooting at one of her employer's store locations killed an employee and a customer. Her call was that executives be on site the next day, that the PR team make the drive to be there with them, and that leadership stand at the memorial with the affected families before anyone opened a conversation about insurance or financial exposure.
Also in this conversation:
• Why she thinks systemizing empathy too far turns it performative
• Her unpopular take on in-person work for high-pressure teams
• Why internal alignment has to precede any external PR push
• The leader who asked every new hire their love language, and wrote it down
• The one habit she would give any leader: ask how someone is, not what they are working on
Listen to the full episode: The Role of Empathy in Leadership with Steph Porter (https://www.theblisspodcast.com/the-role-of-empathy-in-leadership-with-steph-porter/) Guest profile: Steph Porter (https://www.theblisspodcast.com/guests/steph-porter/) More from the Featured Guest Series (https://www.theblisspodcast.com/categories/bliss-businesses-series/)