For HR professionals, there are many pivotal workplace conversations: discussions that can go one of two ways, ending up as a grievance or a breakthrough in personal development. Large-scale change, communication breakdowns, times of personal crisis. You may feel torn between helping the team member with their personal emotions and protecting the organisation. How do we increase the chances of a positive, transformational outcome?
Here I’ll be sharing a bit of theory, recently brought to life engagingly by relationship expert Paul C Brunson in his keynote at Employee Benefits Live 2026 at ExCeL London on the power of human connection in the workplace.
And then I’ll be sharing my own deeply personal experience of the power of empathy in enabling transformational change and action.
Enhancing autonomy, competence and relatedness
In conversation with Employee Benefits Editor Debbie Lovewell-Tuck, Brunson explored how we can enhance a sense of belonging at work. Among his range of references was Self-Determination Theory, which ties growth and motivation to meeting three basic human needs. Whether in the workplace or in therapy, people are most able to grow and take action when they experience Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness.
Autonomy includes a sense of choice and psychological freedom, feeling in control. With autonomy, people take action because they want to, not because they have to. Competence is a sense of feeling effective and skilled, which leads to higher confidence, persistence and engagement. Relatedness brings improved wellbeing, trust, and emotional safety through feeling connected to others.
How can we increase these at work in order to boost engagement and motivation? Empathy plays a big role as sometimes we need to step right back from advice-giving and put ourselves in the shoes of the person taking the action, asking questions to find out what they need to feel in control, to know they are competent and to feel connected to others.
By supporting autonomy, competence and relatedness, HR professionals and business managers foster what’s called “intrinsic motivation”, a self-motivated wish to take action, rather than extrinsic pressure coming from reward or punishment.
Holding SPACE
Drawing out people’s real feelings and needs when they bring us a crisis situation may seem a mysterious art to some, but there’s another, evidence-based framework here too. Paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott talked about the concept of “holding” in 1960, referring to the way a parent’s care, when reliable, steady and accepting, can enable a child to grow and develop confidence.
The term “holding space” for another adult sprang into popular view when Canadian writer and facilitator Heather Plett shared a viral blog post in 2015. She was bringing forward what many coaches, counsellors and therapists knew: that people are often best helped by “being willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on, without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome”.
So holding space is a kind of extreme empathy: being there while the other works out what they are thinking and feeling. It is very different from giving advice or feedback. And it is at the root of enabling autonomy, competence and relatedness, because it is out of the security of being seen, heard and witnessed that these human needs can flourish.
Brunson shared a handy mnemonic for what we must offer in order to hold space:
S: Safety: a genuine invitation to talk
P: Presence: being fully available; no distractions
A: Acceptance: focus first on understanding experience rather than judging
C: Check-in: clarify understanding; tune in to the other; check understanding by summarising what we think they’re sharing.
E: End: gracefully — e.g. I know this has been hard; how would you like to take this forward?
This is how we can start from the experience of another to the extent that it unlocks real motivation, rather than simply achieving compliance.
Acceptance at the hardest time
So here we come to my own experience.
Sadly, my husband died at the end of August this year, having lived with heart failure for 3.5 years. As I cared for him, I could sense he was in an end-of-life phase from early June. For complicated reasons, he had fallen between the care of different specialists and was back in the hands of a GP who neither pursued really active medical intervention nor spoke honestly about end-of-life.
After John died, although I knew his death had been inevitable, I also knew I needed to contact the GP to talk through how things were handled, and give him some feedback. Just as I was getting around to that difficult conversation, he reached out to me. As he began to say that we should talk, I sensed he was upset and I somehow managed to find it in myself to “hold space” for him. Instead of stridently spelling out his failings, I found myself asking him what he thought had gone wrong.
John’s GP knew he had messed up. He said he was usually the one who was good at end-of-life and other doctors referred people to him, but this time he’d missed important signals. He was tentative in exploring it (just as for an HR leader, such conversations can be explosive and potentially litigious).
I told him I had compassion for him as a human being: this seemed a pivotal moment and his emotion was obvious. I acknowledged that it was, of course, not his fault that my husband had a life-limiting condition or that he had died. Eventually, after we built those bridges, I said I felt things could have been handled differently, with either more hands-on treatment or more honest discussion of end-of-life care and that I had not been fully listened to as a carer.
But the vital insight here is what happened next. The GP has now convened meetings with senior practitioners and with registrars about the need to approach end-of-life with greater sensitivity, to involve family more fully and recognise the needs of carers. He has gone on to see the transformational impact of admitting his failings and his learning in front of his colleagues. And we are in ongoing dialogue about what else can be learned from this.
It took two of us for this conversation to go this way, including his openness and ability to find humility despite the professional risk. My compassion and ability to draw on my professional knowing even in this highly charged personal circumstance. What followed was a textbook example of someone empowered to make change: intrinsically motivated, putting human connection at the centre and taking transformational action.
Jennifer is a business psychologist, leadership coach, coaching supervisor, speaker and consultant to HR leaders. She serves the HR and employer community as an independent consultant, chief purpose officer for Halo workplace nurseries SaaS platform, strategic advisor to Bright Horizons, and conscious communication coach with MyndUp.
Jennifer was a pioneer of parent transition coaching in the early 2000s, and as a director of My Family Care, then head of thought leadership with Bright Horizons, as well as through her consultancy People in Progress, she has worked for over 20 years with the US and UK’s largest employers in banking, professional services, STEM and wider sectors, designing and running programmes, evaluating impact and ROI and developing coaches and coaching capability.
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
