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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Pallapa, Gautham, author.
Title: Leading with empathy : understanding the needs of today’s workforce / Dr. Gautham Pallapa.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021028974 (print) | LCCN 2021028975 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119837251 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119837275 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119837268 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Empathy. | Leadership.
Classification: LCC BF575.E55 P35 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.E55 (ebook) | DDC 152.4/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028974 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028975
Cover image: © runeer/Getty Images
Cover design: Wiley
Dedicated to my mother.
She taught me the value of compassion and empathy in a highly technology-dependent world. Her actions transcended her self-needs, and she was always willing to help others.
Her approach to life and work instilled in me a desire to lead with empathy and improve human quality of life.
Preface
My mother was a strong and empathic human. She was also incredibly driven and motivated to help people, sometimes at her inconvenience. When I confronted her about this growing up, she told me that a person's existence is meaningless until they improve another's life, even if it is in some small way. She confided in me that was a primary driver for her becoming a doctor. Seeing that look of happiness and gratitude in her patients made her feel joy and empathy.
My mother was a busy person, being an ob-gyn at one of Bangalore's top medical facilities in India. She then gave it all up to support her husband's PhD in England, switching from being a busy doctor to a stay-at-home mom, taking care of me, and later my brother. I never once heard her talk about her old days or how she missed her life while at home. She had put her family first and spent her energy with her children's upbringing and emotional support for my father during his doctoral studies. I remember several occasions where she went out of her way to help the friends she had made during our stay there. One particular incident stands out in my memory. A friend of hers was going through a rough patch, and my mother wanted to cheer her up. Despite being in her third trimester with her second child, she cooked her friend's favorite food and took me with her to her friend's house, braving a snowstorm. We had to change buses in between, and I remember not being very happy or cooperative during the journey, but she bore it all with a smile and patience because she wanted to be there for her friend. I did not know it at that time, but she had a wealth of compassionate empathy in her.
When we returned to India, my mother decided to return to work. Our stay in England had exposed her to other aspects of humanity, adversity, and suffering, and she decided to focus her energy there. It was the late 1980s, and the AIDS epidemic had started to become a topic of public health and concern. My mother decided that this was the area she wanted to work in. She joined her Doctor of Medicine program in Microbiology, specializing in HIV/AIDS. She then went on to become a leading expert in her field. We used to have passionate and heartfelt conversations on her research, patients, and their unique stories.
I learned about Devi, a victim of human trafficking, at the age of 13. She was sold to a brothel and forced to have sex at such a young age, an act that could only be described as rape, sometimes 10 to 12 times a day. She had her first miscarriage at 14 and mistook it for heavy periods. Not being exposed to sex education or the concept of safe sex, she became pregnant again and had her first child at 15. The child died within the first six months, probably due to an auto-immune disorder. Devi did not know it yet, but she was infected with HIV at a young age and probably passed it on to her child. She was rescued from the brothel at 26 and was brought to my mother's hospital for a checkup. It was at that time that she found out that she had full-blown AIDS.
Feroz traveled from Bangladesh (the actual township escapes my memory) to Kolkatta, India, searching for a job and a better life. He had promised his family that he would establish himself and bring them over within six months. Not being able to hold a stable job in Kolkatta due to his drug use, he moved to Bangalore in hopes that he could have a fresh start. However, unemployment stress exacerbated his drug usage, and Feroz quickly became an addict. It had been over eight months since he left Bangladesh, and through a relative learned that his wife and three children—unable to repay the debts that they had incurred—had committed suicide by eating rat poison. Consumed by guilt, Feroz took to drug abuse to numb his pain. Not having any stable income and using all his earnings to purchase drugs, he became homeless.
Mary's uncle abused her at the age of 5. She grew up in a dysfunctional joint family and ran away at the age of 10. She worked as a maid until the age of 15 but told that her employers repeatedly abused her. She resigned to her fate and went into prostitution. She told my mother that she received more valuable gifts from her abusers than her work and figured that she could have a better life as a prostitute than a maid. She made that decision at the age of 14. She was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 17.
I still remember the pain and compassion in my mother's voice as she recounted these stories. I wanted to follow in my mother's footsteps and be a doctor to make the world a better place, and my mother, fully supporting me, shared her work and stories to motivate me. Unfortunately, being two years younger than my classmates, I was deemed ineligible to pursue medicine for another year. Rather than waste a year waiting for eligibility, my mother persuaded me to take up engineering, my father's profession. She said that there were many ways to impact humans and that opportunity would always present itself to people who had the desire to help others. I took that to heart, and though I pursued engineering and later computer science, I sought to apply my knowledge toward healthcare applications. As an extension of my master's thesis, I worked on a device that performed vagus
