#026 Extraordinary Benefits of Understanding Others with Karen Faith
Release Date: 10/15/2024
#038 Connecting with our Purpose with Lisa Morris
Making Business Art
Do you feel you are fulfilling your purpose? Or do you feel unclear and searching for it? For many of us, discovering and aligning our lives with our purpose is no easy feat. My returning guest, Lisa Morris, spent over two decades in corporate consulting leadership roles focused on business and organizational transformation before she got clear on her purpose and changed her work life to be more fulfilling. She realized that her purpose is to help people clearly express who they are in creative ways. Today Lisa blends her business and design skills to work with entrepreneurs...
info_outline
#037 Community as Strategic Superpower with Andy Hagerman
Making Business Art
Have you ever felt disengaged or burned out at work? Many of us have, and the efforts to fix this in organizations like spending a lot of money on flashy events or retreats does not fix this problem. Returning guest and co-founder of The Design Gym, Andy Hagerman, discovered that designing moments for authentic human connection and building community within organizations is more efficient and effective at increasing engagement, creativity and productivity. In other words, this approach provides a powerful strategic advantage for organizations. In this episode, Andy shares how...
info_outline
#036 Supercharge Your Work with “Doing, Not Talking” with Adam StJohn Lawrence
Making Business Art
How many meetings have you been in lately where you felt engaged, got a lot done, and thought it was time well spent? Chances are your answer is “not many” or “none.” My returning guest, Adam StJohn Lawrence, thinks we can supercharge our productivity and get a lot more out of our meetings by infusing them with what he calls Doing, Not Talking. Adam is a master facilitator, author, and educator who works with private and public sector organizations around the world. He weaves together techniques from the world of psychology, design, improv, and theater to offer a unique approach to...
info_outline
#035 Increasing Team Creativity with Neuroscience with Caroline Szymanski
Making Business Art
Are you trying to foster innovation in your organization, but team meetings end up feeling like an uninspired replay of previous ones? Many leaders face this challenge. They have smart team members, but unleashing their team’s creative genius seems unattainable. Fortunately, social neuroscientists like our guest, Caroline Szymanski, Ph.D., can offer us science-backed insights and strategies to boost team creativity and performance. Caroline earned a Ph.D. focused on social neuroscience and team collaboration from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She went on to apply...
info_outline
#034 Designing a Culture of Innovation with Andy Hagerman
Making Business Art
Two questions that are top of mind for most leaders are: 1) How can my team perform better? and 2) How can we grow our business? My guest and co-founder of , , works with leaders of Fortune 500 companies to bridge the gap between these questions. Andy’s work focuses on helping leaders shape more collaborative, creative, and healthy team environments that unlock fresh and sustainable ways to drive business growth. In this conversation Andy and I discuss his transition from a traditional business career at a “big four” consulting firm to learning how to apply a human-centered approach to...
info_outline
#033 Business Healing: From Burnout to Prosperity with Marte Siebenhar
Making Business Art
Have you ever felt stuck, blocked, or that something you can’t quite put your finger on is preventing you from getting the business and personal outcomes that you desire? My returning guest and Business Healer, , struggled with overwork and burnout for years. As she sought and applied a variety of tools to help herself, she developed insights into how our unconscious mental and emotional blocks influence and limit the results we produce at work. Eventually she developed a way to heal and release what was holding her back while transforming her relationship with and performance at...
info_outline
#032 Igniting Team Connection & Performance with Christine Comaford
Making Business Art
Do you ever feel like chaos in your organization is getting in the way of teams being more effective at work? My guest and founder of SmartTribes Institute, Christine Comaford, has developed an approach that blends applied neuro-science and ancient wisdom to help leaders and teams cut through chaos and fear to build emotional engagement that increases performance, collaboration, and talent retention. In this episode Christine and I discuss the early days of her career in the 1980s working with tech companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple; starting her own businesses; her current work...
info_outline
#031 Unlocking Communication through Unconditional Welcome with Karen Faith
Making Business Art
Most of us want to be more influential, creative, and able to build key relationships in and out of work. But this isn't always easy to accomplish, and sometimes it seems it’s because someone is standing in our way. But that someone, more often than not, might just be ourselves. For this minisode I’m bringing back business ethnographer and empathy trainer, Karen Faith, to discuss a powerful approach to listening, communicating, and relating she calls the “Unconditional Welcome." In this conversation Karen and I discuss what Unconditional Welcome is, when and how to apply it,...
info_outline
#030 Rewriting the Story of Business & HR with Dart Lindsley
Making Business Art
What if instead of thinking of you as an employee, your boss and workplace treated you like a valued customer? My guest and HR transformation expert, Dart Lindsley, knows that industrial-age management practices are not working. He champions a new approach to how we design our work in organizations by treating work as a product that every organization builds and sells to their employees. Dart believes that by treating work as a product and employees as customers, organizations can build and deliver work that makes employees feel alive while delivering better results for all stakeholders. ...
info_outline
#029 Making Learning Stick in Organizations with Mark Boccia
Making Business Art
Most of us have sat through a mandatory class, training, or presentation at work that was pretty terrible. Worse yet, we probably felt like a hostage waiting to escape. Going through this type of experience hinders our individual ability to learn and causes teams to struggle to adopt new skills and ways of working. Fortunately, my guest and global learning leader for Amazon, , is dedicated to designing learning experiences that engage people and make learning stick. Mark balances pragmatism and business acumen with a human-centric lens to create educational programs that connect with...
info_outlineHenry Ford once said that “if there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from [their] angle as well as from your own.” What Henry Ford was talking about is practicing “cognitive empathy” also known as “perspective taking.” My guest and founder of Others Unlimited, Karen Faith, teaches people in organizations how to be more successful by learning and practicing “cognitive empathy” to achieve better results in communication, trust, culture, collaboration, and many other benefits.
In this conversation Karen and I talk about different types of empathy, her empathy training curriculum, the benefits of practicing “cognitive empathy,” the importance of personal boundaries, developing what she calls “unconditional welcome,” self awareness, practicing ethnography, and the arc of Karen’s professional journey from musician, to performance artist, to the present day, and the influence of her training in the arts on her work with organizations. Karen also shares her reflections on making business into an art form and how she has transformed deep personal pain into gifts she uses to help people change and grow.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Karen Faith is Founder and CEO of Others Unlimited. She is an ethnographer, strategist, and creator of the Others curriculum. Her findings, talks and workshops have guided initiatives at Google, Indeed, Intuit, Applebee’s, The NBA, The ACLU, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Federal Reserve Bank, The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art, and more. Karen is an alumnus of the Hyper Island Business Transformation course in Stockholm, Sweden, and a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood award for ethnographic research at Performance Studies International in London. She has taught her approach to students at Penn State, Juilliard, Chapman University, University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and the National University of Singapore School of Design. She’s presented at SXSW Interactive in Austin (2018 and 2022), DesignUp in Bangalore (2019), HOW Design Live in Chicago (2019), and the 4As Stratfest in NYC (2019, 2021, and 2023). Her TEDx talk on Unconditional Welcome has received nearly 2M views.
ABOUT MAKING BUSINESS ART
Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where we explore how to make our work more meaningful and enchanting for ourselves and the people we serve. We draw lessons and inspiration from entrepreneurs, designers, scientists, creative leaders and artists about creating remarkable experiences that light up our customers and our teams.
This podcast is the creation of and hosted by me, Ezequiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. I help leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve. I am very curious and love to learn about how things work, what makes people tick, and how to create more joy in the world.
Instagram: @MakingBusinessArt