A compassionate vision for prioritizing empathy in business.
Hollingsworth champions the value of empathy in the workplace in this business guide.
In her nonfiction debut, the author (the founder and CEO of Hollingsworth Consulting) reminds her readers that, as a society, we have all lived through one of the most traumatizing events in modern history in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic—and the after-effects haven’t stopped. “We can’t seem to catch our breath,” she writes. “Political unrest, the economy, racism, the mental health crisis, climate catastrophes, school shootings, global conflict: it simply doesn’t stop.” All of this tumult inflicts increased stress on everybody; for this reason, Hollingsworth stresses the importance of her “Human Being First” approach. Per the author, this perspective should be applied to all aspects of the corporate experience. A sales director is reporting low quarterly numbers? Time-off requests are piling up? Communication blunders causing problems? Always remember: “Human Being First.” Discussing how leaders should handle conflict, the author cites what she refers to as the 5P=1N Rule: For every negative comment or interaction with Person X, there should be five positive ones, in order to avoid defining people by their missteps. Underpinning these concepts is Hollingsworth’s vision of compassionate leadership, which is composed of four elements: self-compassion, awareness, empathy, and action (actually doing something “to help mitigate unnecessary suffering amongst those you lead”). Chapters flesh out these elements with numbered and bulleted points based on research supporting the position that companies prioritizing love and human connection in hiring and management out-perform companies based on “baseline HR principles.” The book also includes discussion questions and several pages of endnotes providing further sources.
Readers with any familiarity with the working world may approach the author’s central ideas with a good deal of skepticism; a glance at any day’s business news seems to show that the corporate world is largely governed by petty tyrants obsessed with personal advancement at any cost. On every page of her book, Hollingsworth insists there is a better way: “Courageously vulnerable” leaders can set a very different tone. “Remember,” she tells her readers, “leaders set emotion norms in organizations.” The author’s detailed analyses of various aspects of leadership in times of crisis are all fascinating, particularly when she’s discussing the intricacies of navigating collective trauma. This involves leaders understanding what she calls their “Window of Tolerance”—appreciating how new social data or bad news can push them out of that window, and how attempts to “cultivate attunement” can yield positive results. Hollingsworth is consistently upbeat conveying her belief that trying times require even more sympathetic leadership—she reserves her most negative commentary for leaders who engage in what she adroitly refers to as “maladaptive perfectionism.” “If resilience is the ability to recover swiftly and gracefully from mistakes and difficulties,” she writes, “then maladaptive perfectionism is pretty much the total opposite of resilience.” What ultimately emerges from her clear, compassionate prose is an appeal for business interactions (and by extension all human relations) to proceed from a place of greater collective understanding. One can only hope the notoriously heartless corporate world is paying attention.
A compassionate vision for prioritizing empathy in business.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798990863316
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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