Michael Kempner, founder and CEO of MikeWorldWide, explores the impact of kind leadership, curiosity, and empathy on employee well-being and effective decision-making. Our conversation will help you discover how to cultivate a vibrant and dynamic work culture that inspires your team to excel daily, and to eventually make the jump to leadership.

Here are excerpts from the full video interview:

What are you doing at MikeWorldWide to build an inclusive and empathetic workplace?

That's actually the foundation of the company. If you look at our core values, they're really two things: empathy and curiosity.

The fact is that even when I talk to my children or to my employees, I stress several things. I truly believe that if you practice empathy, feel it in your soul, and put yourself in somebody else's shoes in a true manner, it's almost impossible to make the wrong decision.

If you are curious, it means you're a lifetime learner who is truly empathetic, and it's hard to make the wrong decision. You’ll give yourself the tools to continue to grow and evolve as a leader.

It starts from the top in every organization. It's not what you say, but what you do, and you have to be very intentional about it. Empathy is something we practice as a core value of the company.

How are you driving inclusivity at MikeWorldWide?

If you know anything about my background and read what I write, that's how I grew up. This is an agency that has been all about diversity, representation, and justice. Since we started, before there was anything called DE&I, it was always our thing.

Again, It's all about intentionality. We have a very strong Chief Of People, and spend a good part of every meeting talking about how we can become more inclusive, more diverse, and more representative.

What can leaders do to support and drive employee well-being?

I know I'm being redundant, but it goes back to intentionality for me. The fact is that to understand the employee workforce today is to understand that mental health and personal care is a much greater priority than it was when I was first in the business.

It wasn’t something that people really thought about. It was about grinding it out and toughening up. Today, people do understand that this is a difficult job where there is a great deal of pressure. People have issues in their lives that they bring to work, and they then bring work home.

To make self-care and mental health a front and center issue is critically important. We do have many programs at MikeWorldWide. One of my favorites is something we call ‘Pre-PTO’. If you join our firm, we give you a week off with pay before you start.

Go relax, take your time, and enjoy yourself with your family because this is a career. PR is a lifestyle, not just a job. It’is a career that has a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on it, so we know how difficult the job is.

I often say my job is to make sure we don't make it any harder, but really our job is to try and make it easier. We have so many programs up and down that deal with mental health and personal care, but one of my favorites is to make sure people take a week off on us, before they start.

What’s your special approach to leading leaders?

I would start with the fact that I try to always hire people that are better than me. Everybody we hire, I look at as either a current or future leader. I start by treating them as adults, because I trust them to do their jobs.

I hire them because they're great at what they do. We often bring in people from other agencies, and I have to tell them to relax, and remind them they’re doing a great job. We don't judge you minute to minute, we judge you in the whole body.

I also have to get people comfortable with taking a risk. It's okay to fail. In fact, I would argue it's necessary. I try to teach people that it's okay to be wrong, but if you're wrong, do it for the right reasons. There's nothing empirical about it. You could do everything right and still be wrong. It’s about how you can teach people that it's okay to take a risk? How do you teach people that they're not going to get blamed or fired if they make a mistake? Just make good decisions, but if you're going to make the wrong decision, make it for the right reasons.

The other thing I try to work on is that I don't believe it's my job to tell people really what to do. People will come to me and ask what I think they should do about a client and my first answer will be “I don't know, I've never met them.” I can give them my advice and experience from what I've seen before, but the reality is that most people have the answer within themselves.

They either don't have the confidence or they may not know it's there. My job is not to make the decisions, but to help people come to the best possible decisions. My job is more of a coach and getting them comfortable and secure in doing what they know is the right thing.

Jacobs:

That's such a coaching perspective and a belief that all coaches have. You've gone beyond training to mentoring to coaching, which is how you grow a business. You don't grow a business by doing everything all the time.

You also mentioned failure. There are leaders throughout history who have been public about and celebrated their failures. Edison, Bill Gates, Ella Fitzgerald, the Beatles, and Dolly Parton, were all leaders who accepted that failure was a step on the road to success, and they didn't hide it.

Who are a few leaders from the world of PR that you admire and why?

You work for your employees, and you work for your clients. You may not have a boss in the traditional sense, but you have a lot of bosses, and particularly in this era where the employer-employee relationship is very different. You really need to make sure that your employees are first and you very much have to manage that way.

When I think about great communicators, my brain always goes somewhere else. I look at one of our clients right now, Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA commissioner and former CEO of Deloitte. I've known Cathy for a long time, and I look at her and actually watch her, or even study her sometimes. Her level of empathy combined with her strength in many ways has turned the WNBA from this tertiary three league to the hottest sports property in the world. A lot of that has to do with how she communicates with her people. She has very different stakeholders that have very different priorities, and I admire her a great deal.

Another one of my favorites is U.S. Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. He's a fantastic storyteller. He doesn't talk at you, he talks with you, he brings you in. He always speaks with empathy and never makes himself the center of the conversation. In doing so, he leaves people ready to climb mountains who would do just about anything for him. I've always made it a point to study great leaders and to see what they do really well and see what they might not do well.

There's some fantastic people in our industry who I think are extraordinary for different reasons. I'm a huge fan of Diana Littman, CEO of MSL U.S. and Josh Rosenberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Day One Agency.

What's your advice to managers who want to make the jump to leadership?

Take a few people that you really respect or frankly, don't like, and study them, watch what they do, see what works, and see what doesn't.

I take a look at my management style, and it is absolutely a composition of former bosses and sources I've had. I learned what to do and what not to do just by studying how they walk, talk, eat, and sleep.

You must also volunteer and get yourself involved. You're not going to become a leader by doing the minimum. You're going to have to be prepared to do the maximum. Be curious, understand empathy, understand and validate people's feelings. You may fully disagree with somebody when they come to talk to you, but they're not lying to you. They actually feel that way. Many people think they're just telling me this because they want something, but people don't lie when they're telling you how they feel. You need to understand where their feelings are coming from. Even if you disagree with them, if you don't validate it and don't believe that it's sincere, you'll never get people to follow you.

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Ken Jacobs is the principal of Jacobs Consulting & Executive Coaching, which empowers PR and communications leaders and executives to breakthrough results via executive coaching, and helps communications agencies achieve their business development, profitability, and client service goals, via consulting and training. You can find him at www.jacobscomm.com, [email protected] @KensViews, or on LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to the Jacobs Consulting and Executive Coaching YouTube channel.