What medical training can teach leaders about empathy, feedback, and human connection
As Director of the Standardized Patient Program at Duquesne University's osteopathic medical school in Pittsburgh, Fulmer works with trained actors who help students practice the hardest part of medicine: not diagnosis or treatment, but how to communicate, respond, and connect when someone is scared, angry, or in pain.
It's work that's occupied her for more than two decades, but the mission has always extended beyond the exam room. What Fulmer is really after is something more fundamental—refining how we connect with each other, whether that's in a hospital, a classroom, or a corporate office.
"Compassion isn't a soft skill," she says. "It's a foundational one. And it can be taught, practiced, and measured just like any other skill."
It's a view rooted in osteopathic medicine, which approaches the body much like a good manager approaches a team: by understanding the whole system, not just the surface problem.
Osteopathic medicine views mind, body, and spirit as inseparable. The approach isn't just about treating disease but about understanding the person who carries it.
"If someone comes in with stomach pain," Fulmer explains, "we don't just look at the stomach. We look at the ribs, the muscles, their posture, their stress level. What's going on in their life? What brings them peace or joy? All of that impacts the body."
It's the same challenge many HR and L&D professionals face: how do you develop the whole person, not just the professional who shows up during office hours? When you address someone's development without considering their well-being, stress, or sense of purpose, you're treating symptoms instead of causes.
Organizations that recognize this—that engagement, empathy, and psychological safety matter as much as technical ability—tend to see improvements in both morale and performance.
BLURB: Modern leadership programs, like GLOBIS's Leadership Development module, now measure these outcomes with the same rigor once reserved for hard skills alone.
After each simulation with a standardized patient, medical students get scored. Did you listen without interrupting? Did you acknowledge the patient's fear? Did you explain the diagnosis clearly?
"Being genuine and seeing the patient as a human being are absolutely learnable skills," Fulmer says. "We can teach them through very concrete techniques: summarizing statements, reflective listening, and validating emotions."
Her team developed detailed checklists that break behaviors down into observable actions. A student might nail the clinical diagnosis but score poorly on connection. The feedback is immediate and specific.
Even the most intangible interpersonal skills can be structured into something teachable and measurable. The trick is refusing to treat empathy as innate—something people either have or don't. When you create frameworks for feedback and reflection, you turn empathy from an aspiration into a practical skill that improves with practice.
Fulmer didn't always lead this way.
"I used to have a more authoritarian approach," she admits. "I thought there were right answers and wrong answers. But working in this field has taught me to listen first. It's important to understand someone else's perspective before offering advice."
As a director within a medical school, she often finds herself advocating for resources and change without having final decision-making power. Her strategy? Make it about outcomes, not wants.
"When you make the conversation about how resources directly affect outcomes, leadership listens differently," she says. "It's not about what I as an individual want—it's about what we can achieve together."
She applies the same philosophy to managing her part-time standardized patients. One actor might teach a morning class and direct a play that evening. Sometimes compassion is adjusting a call time. Sometimes it's taking ten minutes to check in.
One morning, a staff member came to work visibly upset. When Fulmer asked if she was okay, the woman broke down. Her cat had died that morning.
"She’d been trying to hold it together. That was a reminder that people bring their whole selves to work," Fulmer says. "We all do."
It's a reminder that HR leaders know intellectually but sometimes struggle to honor in practice. You can't ask people to compartmentalize their humanity and still expect them to show up fully engaged. Treating employees as multidimensional humans, not simply as job roles, powers genuine trust and engagement in your culture.
The skills Fulmer teaches have taken her beyond medical schools. She's helped teachers navigate difficult parent conversations and trained Department of Veterans Affairs staff on client interactions. In other cases, the methodology she uses has been applied to workshops with police departments on "compassionate policing."
"These skills apply anywhere two human beings need to communicate," she says.
But her international work taught her something crucial: compassion doesn't follow a universal script.
In Kazakhstan, while helping establish a standardized patient program, she designed a training case about domestic violence. Local leaders pushed back hard. "In the U.S., we treat domestic violence as something a doctor should report," she explains. "In Kazakhstan, they felt that wasn't within a doctor's purview. It was eye-opening."
In China, she learned that breaking bad news follows a different protocol entirely. "If a patient has cancer, doctors may tell the family first, not the patient. Then it's for the family to decide whether the patient should even know. It comes from respect for family unity."
Compassion looks different in every context, but its essential elements—understanding and respect—remain universal. For global organizations, this means communication training can't be one-size-fits-all. The frameworks need to bend.
When asked about her kokorozashi—the Japanese concept of personal mission—Fulmer pauses.
"Earlier in my career, I wanted to be the best," she says. "I wanted to be respected. I still care deeply about quality, but now my mission is more about joy—personal joy. Because that joy affects how I serve others. I can't fix the world, but I can be accountable to myself and do my best. I want to reach old age and feel I have no regrets, that I did the best I could."
In many ways, that reflection completes the circle of her work. By teaching medical students to see their patients as whole people, Fulmer has learned to see her colleagues, her students, and herself the same way.
For HR and L&D professionals, that may be the real prescription: compassion, like any essential skill, begins with practice—and with the willingness to see the whole person in front of you.
Valerie Fulmer
Director of Standardized Patients
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