Leading with the Heart: The Transformative Power of Empathetic Leadership
DDD Europe - Hands-on Lab
- Speakers
Anna Mamaliga and Claire Van Der Meulen
- Description
(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity)
You enter a meeting room, greeted by an atmosphere of apprehension. You're here to discuss the future of an initiative with your agile team. At this moment, traditional leadership methods fail. What's needed? Empathy.
"Leading with the Heart: The Transformative Power of Empathetic Leadership" shifts the lens from managing to leading people. This isn't a typical leadership talk—it's a transformative journey. Step into a room filled with energy, role-playing, and dynamic dialogues. Participate in empathy circles where we tackle real-life scenarios that challenge us emotionally and ethically.
Through interactive exercises, you'll experience leadership from both the leader's and the team's perspectives. These experiences will illuminate how an empathetic approach to leadership can dismantle barriers, foster open communication, and create a thriving, psychologically safe work environment.
Leave this session armed with the tangible skills to become not just a manager but an empathetic leader, capable of navigating the complexities of human emotions to elevate your teams to new heights.
Prerequisites
This lab is for everyone willing to take a different approach to leadership.
About Anna Mamaliga
“Leadership begins where comfort ends. When things get hard, it’s about being a little braver than what you ask of your team.”
Anna brings a deeply grounded perspective to leadership development with over a decade of clinical experience as a licensed psychotherapist and a strong track record in organisational change and talent enablement. Her work lives at the intersection of emotional intelligence and organisational transformation: where tough conversations, human complexity, and systems thinking meet. With curiosity as her compass and clarity as her craft, Anna helps people lead with heart without losing their edge. Through a unique blend of evidence-based psychology, organizational insights, and lived experience, Anna facilitates spaces where vulnerability is not a weakness but a bridge. In her workshops, leaders don’t just learn to lead with empathy, they practice showing up with it.
Because real leadership? It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about cultivating the courage to connect.
About Claire Van Der Meulen
Claire is a seasoned Agile Coach with a passion for people and building relationships that matter. She has a creative mind in continuous search of new conundrums to master and solve.
With close to 2 decades of experience in project and program management, working in diverse sectors ranging from automotive to government, Claire has a down-to-earth approach when it comes to people, processes and challenges. Over the past decade, her focus grew more towards the people side, so she took the lead in setting up a mentorship program, mentoring & coaching coworkers.
She loves the outdoors, takes pleasure in the simple joys of life and recently grew her family with Tess, the German Shepherd, and Wolf, the Malinois. She firmly believes in mens sana in corpore sano. Her motto? Live. Love. Life!