July 17, 2019 Three Untapped Levers of Productivity and a Hidden Link: ESP BusinessLeadership Share this post: A few years ago I started to think about the most untapped levers of productivity in business being empathy, sleep and purpose, which I have converted into the acronym ESP. I penned a blog post in 2018 that summarized my opinion. It turns out that, beyond the data that shows that empathy, sleep and purpose are good for business in terms of performance shareholder return, they are entirely congruent with one another. And this I didn’t know what I started to write about this. Purpose and Sleep Research led by Jason Ong, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, published in the journal Sleep Science and Practice in 2017, showed that people with purpose tended to sleep better. Noting that the population in the study were older, the report said, “Helping people cultivate a purpose in life could be an effective drug-free strategy to improve sleep quality…” And, in line with another practice that I like to recommend, meditation, it seems that mindfulness can help establish and/or enhance purpose (and I would say, improve sleep, too). Ong wrote, “Purpose in life is something that can be cultivated and enhanced through mindfulness therapies.” See more about Ong’s research at Science Daily Empathy and Purpose In terms of leadership, empathy is really developing into the killer app that fosters employee engagement while helping to produce better products and services for customers. If empathy is essential for building an ethical framework, it’s also vital for helping to build community and drive a sense of purpose throughout the organisation. Ming Chan wrote in a 2018 article, Why Empathy is the Most Effective Leadership Skill: “To foster a new generation of leaders and, in the process, build a thriving community and sense of purpose around it, the first step should always be to develop a sense of empathy.”Ming Chan Empathy and Sleep If I didn’t find a concrete and researched connection between being empathic and better sleep, there is plenty of evidence that a lack of sleep impacts empathy, both cognitive and emotional. The impact on affective empathy is more recent. This is supported in a study, published online in 2016 by the Journal of Psychophysiology, and led by Veronica Guadagni, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory of Human Cerebrovascular Physiology in the Cumming School of Medicine of the University of Calgary. Guadagni summed up the research: “If individuals describe their quality of sleep as poor—if they feel tired and not well rested—their ability to be empathic in unpleasant situations is reduced, compared to others who feel satisfied with their sleep.” Source Psychology Today Bottom line: There is a strong association and interconnectedness between Empathy, Sleep and Purpose. Whereas I used to write about this based on intuition and experience, I now can fall back on some hard research. And, I’d argue that to get the full effects on productivity, you’ll probably want to try to incorporate all three (ESP) into your business. Your thoughts? NEWSletter Subscribe to Minter’s Bi-Weekly NEWSletter and receive a free copy of the exclusive and updated 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation Your Gift For Signing Up 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed! empathy, esp, jason ong, ming chan, productivity, sleep Minter Dial Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, author & consultant on Leadership, Branding and Digital Strategy. After a successful international career at L’Oréal, Minter Dial returned to his entrepreneurial roots and has spent the last ten years helping senior management teams and Boards to adapt to the new exigencies of the digitally enhanced marketplace. He has worked with world-class organisations to help activate their brand strategies, and figure out how best to integrate new technologies, digital tools, devices and platforms. Above all, Minter works to catalyse a change in mindset and dial up transformation. Minter received his BA in Trilingual Literature from Yale University (1987) and gained his MBA at INSEAD, Fontainebleau (1993). His newest book Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, bowed in December 2018 and won the Book Excellence Award 2019 as well as being shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2019. It's available in Audiobook, Kindle and Paperback. He is also co-author of Futureproof (Pearson, Sep 2017) and sole author of The Last Ring Home (Myndset Press, Nov 2016), a book and documentary film, both of which have won awards and critical acclaim. Minter has a new book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader, published by Kogan Page, that released January 2021. It's easy to inquire about booking Minter Dial here. View all posts by Minter Dial Previous post Next post