Four years ago, something shifted in our workplace. People’s energy felt less resilient, more strained. Mental health enquiries to HR were rising, and beneath the surface buzz of successful campaigns and wins, our people were quietly burning out. We’d survived the pandemic, but surviving isn’t thriving.
This observation sparked what would become one of the most transformative internal initiatives we’ve ever undertaken: our ‘Together, Me & We’ (TMW) leadership programme. What began as a response to a wellbeing crisis evolved into a complete redefinition of ‘leadership’.
The backbone was a unprecedented partnership between HR and our strategy department that transformed how to approach leadership development.
As HR professionals, we’re all grappling with similar challenges. The traditional leadership playbook isn’t working. The post-pandemic world, with its hybrid working pressures, social disconnection, and economic uncertainty, demands something different from our leaders.
From Performance to Connection: Redefining Leadership Excellence
For years, leadership in our industry followed a predictable script: be visionary, be decisive, be driven. These qualities still matter, but they’re no longer sufficient. What employees need now isn’t just excellence – it’s empathy.
We began calling this shift “Leading in The Empathy Era,” recognizing that leaders must now perform and be present in equal measure. This isn’t about turning managers into therapists or abandoning performance standards. It’s about equipping leaders with the tools to navigate complex human realities with both clarity and care.
We created a long-term leadership development journey focused on behavior change at scale. We started at the top with an intensive in-person session for our leadership team, then cascaded the experience through senior leaders, managers, and eventually every person in the agency.
Working with trained psychotherapists who understand both business dynamics and human psychology, we covered real-world empathy skills: holding difficult conversations, supporting someone in distress, and maintaining resilience as a leader under pressure. The focus was always on practical application rather than theoretical concepts.
Empathy as a Business Superpower: The ROI of Human Connection
Make no mistake, empathy isn’t soft, and it’s certainly not fluffy. It requires courage, consistency, and accountability. True empathy involves listening deeply while also giving straight feedback. It’s about showing appropriate vulnerability while knowing your limits. Most importantly, it drives real business results.
The key insight here is that empathy isn’t about avoiding conflict – it’s about having conflict well. We taught our teams how to approach emotionally charged moments with composure, manage their own nervous system responses, and create psychological safety even during difficult feedback conversations.
The Game-Changer: HR and Strategy Department Partnership
The biggest success factor of it wasn’t our content or methodology – it was our unconventional co-leadership model between HR and Strategy.
This wasn’t a typical “HR owns wellbeing, strategy owns business outcomes” arrangement. Instead, we recognized that in today’s landscape, wellbeing is a business outcome. Our strategy lead brought commercial rigor and business context, while HR contributed deep people expertise and cultural insight. Together, we created something neither function could have achieved alone.
The partnership manifested in several ways: joint planning sessions, shared presentation of content to leadership teams, co-facilitation of workshops, and most importantly, unified messaging that positioned empathetic leadership as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance requirement.
This approach solved one of the biggest challenges facing wellbeing initiatives: credibility. When business leaders see strategy and HR partnering on leadership development, it signals that this isn’t a “soft skills” add-on—it’s fundamental to how we compete and win.
The collaboration also helped us develop a new behavioral framework reflecting our core values: curiosity, courage, compassion, and pride. Rather than HR creating this in isolation, we worked together to define specific behaviors we expected, encouraged, and rewarded, while clearly identifying what we would no longer tolerate. The framework gave us a common language for addressing culture gaps and celebrating wins, transforming abstract values into concrete actions that people could understand and implement daily.
How to guide:
Start at the Top, Then Cascade Down: Culture change begins with leadership modeling. Begin with an immersive session for your executive team, then gradually involve senior managers and the wider organization. Leaders must live the values before they can teach them.
Treat Empathy Like a Skill, Not a Personality Trait: Don’t assume people inherently know how to support others. Provide practical training: active listening, emotional conversation management, burnout recognition, and boundary setting without losing compassion. Empathy is a muscle that grows with intentional use.
Make Behavior Change the Goal: Focus on specific behaviors rather than buzzwords. Define what empathy in action looks like at your organization, then embed those expectations into performance reviews, development plans, and daily language. Ask yourself: What do we want our leaders to do more of? Less of?
Break Down the HR Silo: This is where our approach differed significantly from traditional wellbeing initiatives. Co-leading from both people and business functions creates unprecedented credibility and momentum. When HR partners with strategy leaders specifically, it signals that empathy isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s how the business performs at its best. The strategic perspective brings commercial rigor while HR brings people expertise, creating a powerful combination that neither function could achieve alone.
Create Ongoing Reinforcement: Culture change doesn’t happen in a single session. Develop a consistent drumbeat through lunch-and-learns, regular check-ins, reflection tools, and team rituals. Keep asking: Are we living the behaviors we say we value?
The Road Ahead: Embedding Empathy in Everything We Do
The HR-strategy partnership continues to evolve, with both functions now jointly responsible for culture initiatives and leadership development. This shared ownership has created sustainability that wouldn’t exist if either function owned it alone.
The advertising industry can no longer afford to treat wellbeing as an afterthought. In a world where talent is everything, creativity is fragile, and emotional intelligence is the new leadership currency, initiatives like this aren’t just nice-to-have – they’re essential for sustainable success.
The empathy era is here, and the organizations that master it will have a significant competitive advantage in attracting, retaining, and developing the talent that drives tomorrow’s success.
