Empathetic Excellence: Why Competence, Merit, and Empathy Are the Only Formula For Keeping Your Best People

April 22, 2026: What does it actually take to build an organization where people perform at their best? In this episode, I'm breaking down what I call Empathetic Excellence — and it comes down to three things: competence, merit, and empathy. Not one of them. All three. I share two stories that have stayed with me — one about my daughter Naomi on the tennis court, and one about my father's first job in America — that I think capture this better than any research study could. I also get into why calling meritocracy a myth is a trap, what two dystopian novels from the 1950s and 60s can teach us about the workplace today, and why the diversity conversation inside organizations needs to shift from what people look like to how they think. If you lead people — or want to — this episode is for you.

You can listen to Empathetic Excellence: Why Competence, Merit, and Empathy Are the Only Formula For Keeping Your Best People online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Empathetic Excellence: Why Competence, Merit, and Empathy Are the Only Formula For Keeping Your Best People is an episode from The Future of Work With Jacob Morgan by Jacob Morgan.

This episode is 42:11 long.

This episode was published on Apr 22, 2026.

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