David sits down with organizational consultant Daniel Roth and discusses hisE3 Effect framework (Enable, Empower, Endeavor), which asks leaders three questions: Have you enabled your people with what they need? Have you empowered them to act? Have you built the follow-through that keeps performance improving? Roth, founder of the Pangea Effect and author of The E3 Effect, argues that empathy sits between enabling and empowering. Leaders who skip it end up managing chaos instead of building endurance.
What Is the E3 Effect Framework for Leadership?
Roth built the E3 Effect around three questions leaders should be asking constantly, not just during annual reviews.
“There are three questions as leaders that we can ask in our organization,” Roth explained, “which is: have we enabled our people with what they need? Are our people empowered to act? And have we built the follow-through that keeps performance improving?”
Enable covers the groundwork. Defining culture, defining success, hiring for fit, and setting expectations. Empower comes once someone is already on the team: giving them access to knowledge, resources, and the training that matches their level of proficiency. Endeavor is the follow-through. Buy-in, execution, and the discipline to keep improving instead of declaring victory too early.
None of that is groundbreaking on its own. What makes it useful is where Roth places the fourth element David raised in the conversation: empathy.
Why Does Empathy Belong Between Enable and Empower?
Roth doesn’t treat empathy as a soft add-on. He places it structurally, like a Venn diagram overlap between two of his three E’s.
“When you talk about empathy, I think of it almost as a Venn diagram between enable and empower,” Roth said. Enabling without empathy produces a job description. Empowering without empathy produces a task list. Put empathy between the two, and you get someone who understands why the work matters and feels equipped to do it.
Roth told a story from a transformation at an organization with more than 1,200 team members. Leadership expected several directors would need to be replaced. Instead of moving fast, Roth asked for 60 to 90 days to assess the operation before touching anyone’s job. One director someone who could rally a team like no other) walked into Daniel’s office a month in and admitted something most employees never say out loud: “I think what you’re doing is you’re bringing discipline and structure in, and I’m starting to see the value of that. Can I just have a chance? Don’t give up on me, please.”
Two years later, that director was one of the strongest leaders in the operation. The company didn’t replace him. Daniel gave him clear expectations, visible support, and direct feedback. The results determined the outcome rather than a first impression.
That’s the empathy-enable-empower overlap in practice. It’s not something you “perform” in a meeting. It’s a decision to observe how folks respond to change before deciding to move on.
Can a Team Innovate and Implement at the Same Time?
Short answer, according to Roth: rarely well.
“A team can either be innovating or implementing,” he said, “and they can do both of those individually well if they have the right leadership, the right clarity, the right expectations, and the right support.” Stack a new innovation on top of an incomplete implementation, and the second effort inherits the first’s instability.
This matters for any leader tempted to launch initiative after initiative because momentum feels like progress. Roth’s advice: let one change stabilize before layering the next one on top of it, unless the two efforts are genuinely unrelated. Choose sequencing over stacking if your team is already absorbing a previous change. That’s when the exponential benefit shows up, not when everything launches at once.
How Do You Stop Fear-Based Metrics From Hijacking Your Team?
Daniel sat in enough leadership meetings to know a little about metrics. Someone puts a 53-metric dashboard on the screen, everyone nods, and nobody can tell you which three numbers actually matter. Fifty-three metrics, one CEO, zero focus.
That actually happened at one of Daniel’s clients. He asked the CEO which metrics actually mattered. The answer came down to two: top-line revenue and attrition.
Here’s the problem he pointed out. “As a frontline team member, how much impact do they have individually on your top-line revenue? Not a lot.” And attrition, tracked obsessively at the frontline level, becomes what Roth calls “a fear-based metric. ” Either you’re afraid you’ll lose your job, or leadership is afraid of losing you, and neither feeling connects a person to the mission.
Roth’s fix borrows from Airbnb, which reportedly tracks a metric as simple as revenue per booked night. A single number that every role, regardless of department, can trace their work back to. His challenge to leaders: name the one or two data points your entire team can tie their daily work to, then build the rest of your metrics around that anchor instead of burying it.
What Does “Serve Warmly” Look Like in a Real Organization?
One of Roth’s clearest examples came from a healthcare company providing in-home urgent care. The scheduling team (the people answering phones to book appointments) needed a way to connect their work to the mission.
Roth interviewed the head of revenue, who said something simple: “When you talk to someone, it’s very important that they experience almost like a hug over the phone. Because in that moment, they know that we care.” Roth turned that into a North Star principle: Serve Warmly, paired with Execute Excellently. Every role, no matter how far from the sales floor, could relate to serving someone warmly.
Compare that to David’s own experience with outsourced call centers staffed by “very warm people” who are disconnected from the culture and, critically, not empowered to actually solve anything. Warmth without empowerment is a pleasant voice with no authority behind it. Roth’s point lands here: enable the culture, empower the follow-through, or the whole thing collapses into a nice tone and no results.
How Does Endurance Fit Into the E3 Effect?
David raised a fourth E – Endure. Daniel built on it immediately, tracing endurance down to resiliency, and resiliency down to a mindset of change. Leaders bringing change into an organization, Roth argued, need to expect that people will move through something like the five stages of grief, each at their own pace, because change often feels like a loss of value in the work someone has already done.
The remedy isn’t a memo. It’s compassion paired with clarity: naming what’s changing and why, and reinforcing that the person’s value hasn’t changed, even if their tasks have. “Everything we’re doing now, we’re standing on the shoulders of the work you’ve done before,” is the kind of statement Roth points to as the difference between a pivot that lands and one that breaks trust.
Your Next Move as a Leader
Roth closed the conversation on empathy, and it’s worth sitting with his framing: “When people care deeply about a mission, it’s easy to keep asking them to give more. And their commitment can hide how much they’re struggling to carry.” Sometimes leadership means removing an obstacle. Sometimes it means deciding what can wait. Sometimes it means telling someone directly that you can’t keep adding to their plate without taking something off it.
If any part of this resonates with a gap you’re feeling in your own team, Roth’s book, The E3 Effect, is available on Amazon, and Pangea Effect works directly with leaders to translate this framework into their organizations.
Daniel encourages you to pick one E (enable, empower, or endeavor) and ask honestly where your team is falling short this week. Start there.
Who is Daniel Roth and where can I learn more?
Daniel Roth is the founder and CEO of the Pangea Effect and the author of The E3 Effect, a bestselling framework for organizational performance. His book is available on Amazon, and he works directly with leaders through Pangea Effect. Daniel spent 25 years turning organizational ambition into actual performance, and he distilled that experience into a framework he calls the E3 Effect — Enable, Empower, Endeavor. He can be reached directly by email: daniel@pangeaeffect.com.
