Why trust matters more than information | Curiosity, performance & human behaviour | Daniel Murray

In this episode of the Bee Formless™ Flow Driven CEO Podcast, I connected with Daniel Murray, Founder of Empathic Consulting and author of The Empathy Gap, to challenge something businesses do every day: reduce people to numbers and then wonder why performance varies.Daniel’s inflection point came while looking at a resource plan filled with names and FTE allocations. One person was listed as a “1” for five days a week, yet Daniel knew some days he showed up closer to a 0.2 and others more like a 1.3. The spreadsheet ignored that variability because, as the project manager told him, “it doesn’t fit in the spreadsheet.”That question changed Daniel’s work. What determines how someone shows up, and what role does their environment play? He compared it to growing tomatoes: yelling at them doesn’t make them grow better. You look at the soil, water and sunlight. People are not so different.We delved into why “busy kills empathy”, how quickly assumptions replace curiosity under pressure, and becoming consciously curious: noticing the story we have created about someone, parking it and making the effort to understand what is actually happening in their world.Daniel believes information is becoming abundant and cheap, while trusted relationships are becoming more valuable. We talked about AI reinforcing our assumptions, creating personal echo chambers and increasing the empathy gap if we stop questioning what comes back to us.I agree with Daniel's view, that our job as leaders is to help people be happy and successful. Sometimes that means listening, creating options and giving difficult feedback, yet the conversation changes when it begins with: “I care about you.”THE SHAPE SHIFT IN MOTIONAt the heart of this conversation was a shift from managing through assumptions to understanding the human conditions that shape performance.LEARN (LETTING GO)✨ People are not fixed resources on a spreadsheet.✨ Assumptions may be efficient, but they are not always accurate.✨ A strong strategy can still fail if we ignore how people feel along the way.UNLEARN (CREATE, REIMAGINE & RESHAPE)✨ Replace assumption with conscious curiosity.✨ Look beyond individual performance to the environment surrounding it.✨ Treat empathy as a capability that can be practised, not simply a personality trait.RELEARN (TEST & IMPLEMENT)✨ Protect time for real one-on-one conversations.✨ Ask what people are worried about before problems become resistance.✨ Build trust deliberately as information becomes easier to access and harder to verify.ACTIVE RECOVERY (REFLECT & RESET)✨ What assumptions are you currently making about someone on your team?✨ Where has being busy stopped you from being curious?✨ Do your people know that you genuinely care about their success?🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-empathicconsulting/🌐 https://www.empathicconsulting.com💭 What could change if we became curious about behaviour before judging it?Book a Strategic Shape Shift Diagnostic to illuminate what needs to shift across leadership, business and brand, from the inside out.🔗 https://calendly.com/beeformless/strategicshapeshiftdiagnostic#beeformless #flowdrivenceo #danielmurray #empathygap #empathy #trust #curiosity #humanbehaviour #performance #growth #insideouttransformation