How Keynote Speaker Karen Faith Can Help Your Company Be More Empathetic
The Human Connections Speakers Bureau was established to offer a fresh perspective on the perception of an HR speaker. Companies in every industry often seek new opportunities to help inspire, motivate, and engage their workforce. We have assembled an introductory team of powerful HR speakers from diverse backgrounds who can help your company in numerous ways. Karen Faith is one of our Human Connection speakers whose power lies in helping individuals to better understand empathy from a human level.
Today on the blog, we want to introduce Karen and provide a little more insight into what you can expect when booking her for your speaking engagement!
Who Is Karen Faith?
Karen is a person who believes “all problems are people problems.” This can carry significance across every organization, regardless of industry. With a background in ethnography, the method of observing human interactions in social settings and their “cultural context,” she has spent quite a bit of time learning to understand human behavior and how to help others. From shadowing executives negotiating mergers to facilitating difficult conversations around race, gender, and power, she practices ethnography to this day by simply walking in others' shoes.
She has helped companies across the nation and around the globe to shape initiatives and create awareness and understanding of empathy.
Today, other than being a founding member of the Human Connections Speakers Bureau, she is the CEO of her own empathy training company, Others Unlimited. She brings her humor and heart to audiences to help shape a new perspective on the concept of being human in a very strange time. She’s worked with some serious companies like Google, Amazon, Intuit, and others, and she is a force both on stage and in a training setting.
What is Empathy?
If you ask Karen, compassion is often correlated with empathy, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but compassion is a different kind of practice. She breaks empathy down into 3 categories:
Effective Empathy is the one that looks the most like compassion. Caring about someone else, caring about your impact, and caring about what someone is going through.
Somatic Empathy is what she calls the “spooky, sci-fi empathy,” where you can physically feel the pain of another person.
Cognitive Empathy is the kind that Karen teaches. This is the practice of shifting a perspective and learning how curiosity and non-judgment can allow you to engage with another person’s experience from their perspective.
Why Does Empathy Matter in the Workplace?
Regardless of what industry is being looked at, empathy is a vital concept and skill to be aware of when seeking to grow your business. Hiring an HR speaker or empathy trainer for your company or organization helps to improve communication with your team and your customers, as well as helps to enhance collaboration amongst team members. It can help to foster stronger relationships both inside and outside of the workplace. It helps to make employees feel empowered, creative, and inspired to lead. Empathy can also enhance conflict resolution and customer service by enlightening your team to understand others from a different perspective.
How Can Karen Help Your Company?
With her keynote presentations, Karen has proven she can help shift the perspective of companies all over the country. Empathy is not easy to teach, but Karen has created programs that help to build cognitive empathy through mental practices surrounding research and learning about being curious about another person’s point of view.
This can help your company be better listeners and be more understanding of your customers, colleagues, leaders, employees, and anyone with whom your team interacts. This helps to truly understand the other side of a sale, the other side of a customer service argument, the other side of an in-office debate over the next best action.
She truly helps your team embody a new mindset with her cognitive empathy training, to help employees feel engaged and inspired with a breath of fresh air. Cognitive empathy training and practicing cognitive empathy can create a more caring environment within your organization from top to bottom.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to empathy!
To learn more about how Karen Faith’s ethnographic background and empathy training can help your business, simply fill out our contact form to get in touch with us! We will listen to what your organization is struggling with and work with Karen to create a program that can help your company be more successful and connected! Let’s get to work!