Notes on Resilience 154: Empathy That Works, with Dr. Helen Riess
What if the fastest path to better outcomes is a renewed commitment to empathy you can actually teach, measure, and scale?
We sit down with Dr. Helen Riess—Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, founder of Empathetics, and author of The Empathy Effect—to unpack the science that turns the so-called soft skills into hard results.
Helen shares the journey from lab to classroom to enterprise, including a rigorously tested empathy curriculum that improved patient experience and shifted workplace dynamics. The numbers tell a powerful story: in a cohort of 500 clinicians, those who completed empathy training had an 83% higher retention rate.
We dig into why that happens and talk about the elephant in the room: a healthcare system straining under factory-like pressures, where new nurses often arrive unprepared, mentorship is thin, and burnout feels inevitable.
Helen explains why culture change starts when leaders practice self-empathy and model curiosity, perspective-taking, and honest optimism. We map practical moves that make empathy operational: structured feedback, micro-recognition, mentoring time, and training. This conversation applies to any business that prioritizes the customer, while treating employees as mere functions; caring for people isn’t a detour from performance—it’s the engine.
If you’re ready to replace cynicism with connection, and checkboxes with real behavior change, you’ll leave with a roadmap grounded in neuroscience and proven in practice.
Helen Riess, M.D. is the founder and Chief Medical Officer of Empathetics. She is also a clinical professor and research psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, the author of The Empathy Effect, and is a core member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. She has devoted her career to teaching and research in the art and science of the patient-doctor relationship. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
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