Daniel Murray
Leaders talk about culture, trust and performance as if they are separate problems. They are the same problem, surfacing in different meetings. Teams disengage when the people above them cannot read the room, cannot hold a hard conversation, and cannot connect the strategy they are selling to the daily reality of the people being asked to deliver it.
Daniel Murray is a corporate strategy consultant and author who helps senior leaders convert empathy into a measurable performance capability across culture, decision-making and team execution.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Daniel Murray
- A mathematician and MBA-trained strategist who treats empathy as an operating discipline, not a soft skill, and ties it directly to team output and strategic alignment.
- Author of The Empathy Gap (Wiley, 2025), which gives leaders a structured vocabulary and method rather than another plea for kindness at work.
- Eighteen years inside financial services and corporate strategy work with organisations including Commonwealth Bank, QBE, IAG, Westpac and BHP, so the examples land with executives who have budget to defend.
- Known for the “Pirates and Passengers” framework for reading team dynamics, which gives managers a practical lens for diagnosing disengagement before it shows up in attrition numbers.
- Equally credible on the harder end of the topic: ethics, AI adoption and the trust collapse leaders face when they roll out systems their workforce does not understand.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Director of Empathic Consulting, an Australian leadership advisory practice focused on strategic empathy, culture and performance.
- Author of The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence, Wiley, 2025.
- Author of Aligning Culture and Strategy: How clarity, empathy and leadership drive high performance.
- Executive MBA and BSc in Mathematics; former internal strategy and management consultant within financial services.
- Keynote and leadership development work with Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz, Perpetual, ASX, Tyro Payments, Swiss Re and Transport for NSW.
- Podcast guest on The Empathy Edge, Candour Communication Podcast, XY Adviser and Your Digital Reputation.
Biography
Most senior leaders already believe empathy matters. The gap is between that belief and the operating habits that would make it visible in a weekly business review. Daniel Murray works on that gap, and he has spent close to two decades inside corporate strategy functions learning where it actually opens up.
Murray founded Empathic Consulting after years as an internal strategy and management consultant in Australian financial services. His training is mathematical and his default is systems thinking, which is why his framing of empathy reads less like a values statement and more like a capability an executive can design for, measure, and coach.
That thinking became a book in 2025, when Wiley published The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence. The argument is that empathy is a strategic skill with a structure to it: perception, interpretation, response. Leaders who treat it that way pull better decisions out of mixed teams, reduce the hidden cost of disengagement, and hold harder conversations earlier. An earlier book, Aligning Culture and Strategy, laid the groundwork by making the case that culture only works when leaders stop treating it as a separate workstream from the strategy they are asking people to deliver.
The client list is telling. Commonwealth Bank, IAG, QBE, Westpac, BHP, Toyota, News Corp, Allianz and Transport for NSW are organisations where the cost of a distracted leadership team is counted in basis points and safety incidents. That is the room Murray is useful in, and it is why his work on AI ethics and the “Pirates and Passengers” dynamic inside teams reaches people who would normally switch off the moment the word empathy entered the agenda.
Key speaking topics
- Strategic empathy as a leadership capability
- Culture and strategy alignment
- Ethics and trust in AI adoption
- Team dynamics and disengagement
- Leadership in post-pandemic workplaces
- Executive decision-making under complexity
Ideal for
- CEOs, executive committees and boards wrestling with culture change alongside a live strategic agenda
- CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leader programmes in financial services, infrastructure and professional services
- Transformation and change leaders rolling out AI or operating model shifts that require workforce trust to succeed
- Senior leader offsites where the brief is honest conversation and behaviour change, not another motivational keynote
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of empathy that leaders can defend in a commercial conversation, not just an HR one
- A shared diagnostic language for team dynamics, including the Pirates and Passengers lens for disengagement
- Clearer thinking on how to introduce AI and analytics without eroding team trust
- Specific habits senior leaders can apply the next week in one-to-ones, escalations and town halls
Talks
A keynote version of Murray’s 2025 Wiley book, framing empathy as a structured capability that drives performance, innovation and alignment at the top of an organisation.
Key takeaways:
- Why empathy fails when treated as a personality trait rather than a skill
- The perception, interpretation and response structure behind strategic empathy
- How senior leaders use empathy to sharpen decisions, not soften them
A practical keynote on team dynamics that gives managers a lens for spotting disengagement, opportunism and quiet disagreement before they become attrition or execution risk.
Key takeaways:
- A model for reading who is rowing, who is along for the ride, and who is working against the direction
- How to re-engage the middle of a team without losing the top performers
- Where managers reliably misread the signals and what to do about it
A keynote on the leadership demands of AI adoption, focused on the trust and ethics questions executives face when rolling out systems their workforce does not fully understand.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI implementations break on culture rather than technology
- How to lead a workforce that is anxious about being replaced or surveilled
- Practical ethical tests leaders can apply before sign-off, not after rollout
A keynote built for the post-pandemic leadership agenda, focused on rebuilding cohesion and commitment in hybrid and distributed teams without reverting to control-based management.
Key takeaways:
- What drives commitment when physical proximity is no longer a default
- Why control-based responses to disconnection make the problem worse
- How senior leaders model reconnection credibly rather than performatively
Videos
Testimonials
Books
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| South America | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US West Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |