Mimi Nicklin’s 2024 showreel captures her central message: empathy is not optional — it is essential. She emphasizes that all human beings need to be seen, heard, and understood. Beyond thriving individually, our shared success as “pro-social creatures” depends on empathy. She predicts that 2024 will mark the mainstream adoption of listening-led leadership, driven by multi-generational teams demanding deeper connection.

Mimi distinguishes between simply being present and being connected. Leaders must not only hear but also fully understand others, using curiosity to recognize perspectives, motivations, and challenges. This empathy enables people to feel better, perform better, and work better together. She closes with a compelling call to action: empathy is the defining skillset of our times, and there has never been a greater need for it than now.

In The Secret Behind Multigenerational Leadership Relies on Empathy, Mimi Nicklin explains why empathy—not hierarchy or age-based authority—is the glue that unites multigenerational teams. She asserts that leaders today must shift from commanding to connecting, using curiosity and listening to understand differing values, communication styles, and motivations. Rather than dismissing generational tension as inevitable, she argues that empathy creates psychological safety where voices across age groups feel seen.

Mimi explores how younger and older generations often misunderstand each other’s priorities—one may prioritize flexibility, another structure; one may use digital mediums, another face-to-face. Empathy enables translating between these languages. She also highlights listening practices that go beyond hearing words to capturing intent and emotion. Over time, empathy becomes a competitive differentiator: it helps leaders retain talent, foster innovation, and reduce cultural friction. Mimi concludes by urging leaders to practice empathy daily, as it’s the bridging skillset of our times.

Showcase keynote and Q&A presenting empathy as a hard, trainable leadership skill that drives retention, creativity, and well-being across modern workplaces.

Mimi opens by introducing Empathy Everywhere and her journey from global advertising leadership to author and advocate for organizational empathy. The pandemic accelerated her mission to write, speak, and build a platform around empathy as a critical business capability. She frames a long-running empathy deficit and explains why it matters now: humans need to be seen, heard, and understood to operate at full cognitive capacity.

She distinguishes empathy from intuition and emotion, positioning it as a hard, learnable skill rooted in the prefrontal cortex. Empathy improves communication, collaboration, and decision quality, which in turn drives innovation and performance. Mimi connects empathy to commercial outcomes, arguing that it is a workplace currency and data set for understanding clients, colleagues, and consumers.

She shares trend signals that leaders and recruiters now prioritize empathy, then highlights workforce dynamics such as the great resignation and employees’ willingness to stay longer, work harder, or even trade salary for more empathetic cultures. She describes ROI areas: consumer relevance, creativity, feedback flow, product and digital innovation, motivation, and mental wellness.

Values matter too. When empathy is low, social isms and disconnection rise. Quoting the idea that we see the same world through different eyes, she argues that empathy aligns diverse perspectives so teams can thrive.

In Q&A, she addresses burnout, noting that higher empathy environments correlate with lower burnout, especially in high-pressure fields. She clarifies empathy versus sympathy and reiterates that empathy is a skill set that strengthens with practice. On cultural differences, she observes higher natural empathy in collectivist contexts. On gender, she cites evidence that men and women are born with equal capacity, and points to well-known male leaders who champion empathy. She closes with what is next: a second book focusing on curiosity as the foundation of empathy, a new podcast, global travel, and scaling her Dubai-based agency’s empathy-driven branding work.