We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Liesel Mertes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Liesel below.

Liesel , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The origin story of Handle w/ Care Consulting begins when I began my MBA program in 2010. I accepted the offer from the Kelley School of Business at IU and found out, a week later, that I was unexpectedly pregnant with my third child, a little girl named Mercy Joan.

However, I was a confident multi-tasker, sure that my husband and I were up to the challenge of juggling a job, a degree program, two toddlers, and a (coming) infant.

I found out, at Mercy’s 20 week scan, that all was not well. She had a condition called an encephalocele, with a large, fluid-filled sac at the base of her skull. Doctors told us that there was a wide spectrum of outcomes with this condition – it was possible that she would live a full life with mild impairment, that she would need surgery, or that she would die. We wouldn’t be able to know until there was an outside-the-womb MRI.

So we spent months waiting and hoping and praying. Mercy Joan was born in February of 2011 and died just eight days later.

Her death was a devastation. I oftentimes experience myself as a high-achiever with a lot of bandwidth and I was not just ready to bounce back. I needed a lot of support to survive, stabilize, and return to a place of thriving. Some people were well-equipped to give me that care and then there were others who had no idea how much they missed me in their trite cliches or general indifference.

My experience also had me reflecting, more broadly, on my MBA program. I was in an expensive program, designed to equip the next generation of managers, and we weren’t spending 5 minutes of a single class session helping people learn how to show up with meaningful support during disruptive life events, whether that was a disruption that an employee experienced or a loss that affected them as a manager.

And that was a first murmuration of the work that later became Handle w/ Care Consulting, where we equip leaders, managers, and teams with the human-centric skills they need to give care when it matters most.

Liesel , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Liesel Mertes is an acclaimed workplace empathy expert. After experiencing her own loss, Liesel emerged with a deep understanding of what employees need to feel supported at work after a disruptive life event. As the Founder of Handle With Care, Liesel works with groups who want to boost employee satisfaction as well as attract and retain better talent.

Liesel engages with organizations around the globe, where her programs have been utilized by tech companies, government agencies and RV manufacturers (just to name a few). Her favorite clients are those who understand and know the value of supporting their employees with empathy and compassion.

Liesel’s expertise is broad – death and loss, diagnosis, relationship changes and life’s inevitable curveballs – and no disruption is considered less significant. On these topics, Liesel is a dedicated speaker, writer, workplace consultant and host of the Handle With Care podcast.

A calming presence in stressful situations, Liesel provides tools for organizations to help their employees survive, stabilize and thrive in the aftermath of adversity.

Why does empathy matter at work?
85% of workers report a decline in their overall wellness over the last year. Your employees feel over-whelmed and under-equipped. Your leaders don’t know what to say when someone on the team experiences a disruptive life event. Many will default to silence or a tired and awkward cliché (“It’s going to be ok” is rarely what someone needs to hear).

76% of employees directly linked their productivity to the presence (or absence!) of empathy at work. In the midst of juggling relationships, work-from-home and hybrid work environments and fluctuating stress levels, compassion/change fatigue is very real for employees and the managers who lead them.

Is your organization doing what it takes to help your people survive, stabilize and thrive at work? Do you know what to say (and not say) and how to support someone in a moment of crisis? Liesel empowers people to be workplace first responders, offering empathy and compassion when it matters most.

What training does Liesel offer?
• Human Centric Skills: How to Create a Culture of Empathy at Work
• How to Do Hard Things: Fortitude at Work
• Things Fall Apart: Combatting Compassion/Change Fatigue
• How to Have a Hard Conversation: Race, Bias, and Creating Cultures of Care
• Survive, Stabilize, Thrive: How to Cultivate Resilience
• Communication Coaching for Downsizing/RIF
• Handle with Care: Making Meaning After Loss
– How to Handle Hard Better

– Empathy@Work training event
Empathy Coaching for Leaders and Teams
Company Certificate in Workplace Empathy

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Perhaps this is a story about perseverance and a testimony to persistence in social media…

When I graduated from business school, I had two small children at home, one dead daughter, and I was pregnant with our fourth child, Jemima. I decided that I did not want to jump right into the job market. Instead, it was important to take time to integrate my loss and just exhale after a demanding two years.

I hated LinkedIn at this season of life. I was resting, grieving, making lunches for little children and nursing a baby. The platform felt, to me, like a reminder of all of the things that I wasn’t doing. It was hard to see all of my classmates touting their achievements.

So I deleted the platform and it was years before I got back on.

However, despite my early aversion, consistent LinkedIn posting has unlocked some of the biggest deals of my career. In 2020. as the world of consulting was collapsing, a comment on someone else’s post led to the biggest deal of the year.

In 2023, a $20K+ deal emerged from a cold LinkedIn search that a client did on #empathy. Be consistent, don’t measure your impact in likes from one day but in your consistent presence in thought leadership and being a good digital citizen over time.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Workplace empathy is one of the most interesting and impactful fields of leadership and organizational development.

One thing that helped to build my reputation is that this is an emergent field of study, not yet crowded with practitioners. The choice of including “empathy” in my title is meant to be provocative, to make people lean in and ask “why empathy”?

It also functions as a sort of resonance check with potential clients. I tell people, often, that I am the best fit with leading-edge companies that are already investing in their people. Those are the ones who already know the power of empathy, they just don’t know how to democratize the skill-set across the organization.

Finally, I think (hope?) that I’ve built my reputation by embodying my content…not perfectly, but consistently. I cannot tell/teach others how to show up with empathy and care if I am too busy building the business.

This is a gut-check to how I spend my time throughout the week. I work to be consistent in the small gestures of care – sending cards to colleagues whose parents have died, taking time at a conference to really hear/be available to what someone else is going through etc. I think that is the most powerful/attractional aspect of any change we want to see in the world – living it and hoping that others are drawn to it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lieselmertes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lieseljoy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liesel.mertes/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lieselmertes/
• Other: This short (3 min) video is a great introduction to who I am and what I do at Handle w/ Care: https://vimeo.com/643575106