Empathy as a Business Strategy
One of the clearest lessons from my career is that the empathy that matters most in product work isn't between designers and users — it's within the team that builds the product. UX folks who are deeply connected to end users but disconnected from their engineers, product managers, and stakeholders will rarely ship something great. The collaboration required to build something excellent demands a certain quality of relationship that you can't manufacture. People of different roles can't afford to act like consultants to each other. They need to actually trust one another.
A team that has that quality — where people genuinely care about each other and about the shared outcome — produces better work. Not marginally better. Dramatically better. This is the kind of care you see in a high-performing sports team, where trust is built through sustained shared effort, stress, and discomfort. Where people know they can depend on each other when it counts — in real-time on the playing field when the stakes are the highest. Take that mindset from the field to the office and see how well it works.
Leading Without a Title
Some of the most effective leaders I've worked with in my career have been individual contributors. Not because they had informal authority in some abstract sense, but because they understood something specific: leadership is behavior before it is position. You do not need a title to shape a room, move an idea forward, or change how a team approaches a problem.
If you're an individual contributor (IC) who wants to grow into leadership, or who simply wants more impact where you already sit, the question isn't “how do I get promoted?” The better question is: “what would I start doing differently tomorrow?”