Meet Daniel Murray
Daniel Murray started his career in corporate strategy and management consulting, working with some of Australia’s largest financial services organisations. Over time, what stood out wasn’t just the strategy or the numbers, but how often performance problems came back to the messiness and complexity of one factor: people.
The most powerful and unpredictable drivers in any organisation are how leaders engage people, how individuals respond, how teams behaved and how these culminate into decisions made under pressure.
Today, Daniel works with organisations to help leaders build stronger cultures and drive better results by developing a more practical form of empathy. His work blends strategy, data and systems thinking with insights from neuroscience, psychology and behavioural economics, helping leaders make sense of what’s really going on beneath the surface and respond more effectively.
Daniel is the author of The Empathy Gap and the CEO of Empathic Consulting. He works with leadership teams and speaks at conferences across the globe, known for being engaging, challenging and refreshingly honest. Clients often remark at his ability to find the perfect answer to the stickiest questions and say his sessions leave them feeling clearer, more confident and better equipped to lead people with kindness without lowering standards.
My Why
I’ve spent much of my career working in and around high-performing organisations. What I saw, again and again, was that most issues weren’t caused by a lack of intelligence, effort or strategy. They came from people misunderstanding other people. We get trapped in perspectives and assumptions, have transactions instead of relationships. Avoid disagreements and hard conversations to protect harmony at the cost of results.
At the heart of it, we are confusing empathy with being nice. This is the change I help leaders make.
I believe empathy is one of the most misunderstood capabilities in leadership. When it’s treated as a soft skill, it gets ignored. When it’s done well, it improves trust, judgement and accountability. That belief is what led me to write The Empathy Gap and to focus my work on helping leaders use empathy in a way that actually works in the real world.
My work is driven by a simple idea: leaders must be humans who understand others. They must engage people while demanding high standards. When people feel understood and expectations are clear, performance improves not because teams are nicer, but because people are trusted and committed to shared success.
My Accomplishments
Author of: - The Empathy Gap (2025) - Aligning Culture & Strategy (2023) - The Monkey & The Rhino (2018)
Qualifications: - Bachelor of Science (Math) - Masters of Business Administration (AGMS) - Grad Dip of Behavioural Economics - TMS Accredited Practitioner - TMS Linking Leader Practitioner - Motivational Interviewing (Level 2)
Other: - Advisory Board - Sea Shepherd Australia - CBA Annual CEO Award Winner 2010
Fun facts
My undergrad degree was in pure and applied Mathematics... Know a lot more about how Banks & Insurance Companies work than most... More tattoos than you might expect... Love being in my massive market garden in my front yard... Have cycled thousands of kms across Australia & Thailand for charity... including towing a trailer & on a tandem
How I can help
Helping leaders hold people accountable without damaging trust
Turning empathy into a practical leadership skill, not a personality trait
Helping leaders see what they’re missing in people, teams and themselves
Pushing leaders to live their values through behaviours & actions
Building stronger, kinder cultures without lowering standards
More from Daniel Murray
2019 - HR Techfest ↗
2019 - HR Techfest
Profile information supplied through Cuppa’s talent directory. Availability and suitability are confirmed on enquiry.