The Ripple That Changes Everything
- Sarah Gruneisen
- Feb 2
- 4 min read
Michel on empathy, leadership, and letting others become significant
This part is for the engineer who dreads Monday.
The one who still cares, even though caring has started to hurt.
The one who has learned to stay quiet because speaking up feels pointless.
The one who sees the problems clearly but no longer believes their voice matters.
If that’s you, I want to say this first:
You are not weak.
You are not “too sensitive.”
You are not imagining things.
You are responding normally to an environment that forgot how to be human.
…
Now let me speak to the leader who might feel a knot forming while reading this.
The leader who believes they are being fair.
The leader who values objectivity, clarity, efficiency.
The leader who tells themselves: “I’m just being direct. This is just how work is.”
This is not an accusation.
It’s an invitation to look more closely.
When empathy isn’t a value, but a lifeline
When Michel was asked what ripple effect this program could have on the world, he didn’t hesitate.
“Empathy.”
Not innovation.
Not velocity.
Not scale.
Empathy.
And here is where many leaders misunderstand what that word actually means.
In The Leadership Leap, I describe 13 different types of empath, because empathy is not one thing. It is not just emotional attunement or “feeling with” someone. It is a spectrum of ways humans understand, relate, and respond to one another.
Some leaders lead with emotional empathy.
Others with cognitive empathy, understanding perspectives without absorbing feelings.
Others with detached empathy, background empathy, phenomenological empathy, or rapport empathy.
No single type is “better.”
But when leaders believe empathy only means feeling everything, they either burn out, or reject empathy entirely.
Both outcomes are damaging.
Engineers don’t disengage, they protect themselves
Most engineers don’t quit loudly.
They stop sharing ideas.
They stop challenging decisions.
They stop investing emotionally in outcomes.
This is not apathy.
It’s what happens when the wrong type of empathy is expected, or when none is practiced at all.
Michel learned that people don’t need their leader to feel everything they feel.
They need to be understood, seen in context, and responded to in a way that helps them thrive.
That is empathy in action.
And when empathy is practiced well, ownership emerges naturally.
The uncomfortable truth about “fair” leadership
Here’s the part most leaders don’t want to face:
Many harmful decisions are made calmly, rationally, and “fairly.”
Michel admitted that without slowing down and questioning his lens, he would have made the wrong call, not out of cruelty, but out of unexamined bias.
Not favoritism.
Not politics.
Mastery bias.
A form of cognitive shortcut that values what is easiest to measure and ignores what is hardest to see.
Empathy, particularly background and phenomenological empathy, is what interrupts this bias. It asks:
🔥 What is this person contributing beyond what I can easily quantify?
🔥 What context am I missing?
🔥 What would this decision cost the team long-term?
Without empathy, objectivity becomes blunt force.
“Soft skills” is a convenient lie
People often call this work “soft skills.”
As if allowing space
As if listening deeply
As if choosing the right moment to speak
were optional extras.
In reality, empathy is a precision skill.
It allows leaders to:
💚 choose which type of empathy is needed in a moment
💚 regulate themselves instead of reacting
💚 and respond in ways that stabilize rather than escalate
Calling empathy “soft” is often a way to avoid learning it properly.
Steering the ship without silencing the crew
Michel learned something that many leaders struggle with for years:
You can include everyone’s perspective and keep direction.
He practiced speaking last, not to disappear, but to let the room breathe.
This is where cognitive empathy, phenomenological empathy, and detached empathy work together:
❤️🔥 you hear perspectives fully
❤️🔥 you don’t absorb them as truth
❤️🔥 you hold the helicopter view
❤️🔥 and then you ask questions that guide the system toward the North Star
This is leadership maturity.
Not control.
Not consensus theater.
But stewardship.
Significance is not a reward, it’s a condition
One sentence from Michel deserves to be read slowly:
“You need to let people become significant for themselves.”
People cannot flourish where they are only tolerated.
Empathy, the right kind, at the right time, creates significance.
It tells people:
❤️🔥 You matter here.
❤️🔥 Your perspective has weight.
❤️🔥 You don’t need to perform to belong.
And from that place, innovation becomes possible.
Leadership without permission
Michel also named something quietly radical:
You don’t need a title to lead.
Different types of empathy allow people to lead from any position:
💚 engineers
💚 parents
💚 friends
💚 community members
When people understand themselves and others, leadership becomes a behavior, not a role.
And roles tend to follow.
If this hurts, stay with it
If you’re an engineer reading this and feeling seen, I’m sorry you needed this validation, and I’m glad you found it.
If you’re a leader reading this and feeling exposed , good!! That discomfort is where growth begins.
Empathy is not about feeling more.
It’s about supporting others better, without losing yourself.
And that ripple
when leaders learn to choose the right kind of empathy instead of avoiding it
changes teams, cultures, and lives.
Not slowly.
But deeply.
The dragon at the center of the ripple
Every leader carries a dragon into the room.
Not the kind that burns others.
The kind that guards, fiercely. 🔥🔥🔥 🐉
It guards control.
It guards certainty.
It guards the belief that if you loosen your grip, everything will fall apart.
For a long time, that dragon feels necessary.
It keeps the system moving.
It keeps you safe.
But dragons that only guard eventually stop the flow of life.
What Michel learned, and what this story is really about, is that leadership doesn’t require slaying that dragon.
It requires listening to it.
Understanding what it’s protecting.
Thanking it for getting you this far.
And then choosing to step forward without letting it dominate the room.
When a dragon learns to trust the ground beneath it, it doesn’t disappear.
It lifts.
And when leaders learn to choose empathy, not as softness, but as discernment, they don’t lose authority.
They create air.
That’s the ripple.
A dragon doesn’t make space by shrinking.
It makes space by learning when to stop guarding
and start flying. 🐉
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