9 Ways Empathy, Compassion and Kindness Can Help Create and Sustain High Performing Teams

Can empathy, compassion and kindness be the “secret sauce” behind building high performing teams?

Let’s explore.

A high performing team is one in which every person in the team fully understands his or her goals and the metrics of success of the team and aligns their activities with the achievement of those goals.

Every person brings complementary skills or skills that overlap, but that together are effective to achieve the best results with the highest levels of excellence. A high performing team has clear goals and the metrics to measure the achievement of those goals; and defined roles, responsibilities, levels of flexibility and freedom to operate and levels of accountability to respond. It also communicates effectively and has a team leader that supports and challenges every person in the team, rather than doing the “technical” work of the team by him or herself. In a high performing team every individual trusts each other, they have each other’s back, they celebrate successes as the success of the team while recognizing and rewarding individual contributions, and finally learns from everything in the spectrum of success and failure.

Now let’s define empathy, compassion and kindness:

Empathy is actively relating and participating in the emotions that other people express and imagining oneself in those same conditions and predicaments. Empathy is understanding what other people are feeling and creating a common emotional connection to that expressed by them.

Kindness is being considerate and caring for other people and leading with kindness creates an environment of trust, safety, belonging and inclusion.

Compassion is a deep and intense emotional connection with other people's sorrows and pain, together with a strong inner urge to alleviate their suffering and remove the source. Compassion is also the willingness to do something and relieve the suffering of others.

Do you start to see the connection?

A high performing team has to align with the goals; have and embrace freedom and responsibility; trust each other; support each other; celebrate and recognize contributions; learn from failure; and have an effective leader that supports and challenges each person. For all this to happen, the fundamental building blocks have to be in place. Those building blocks are, among others, empathy, kindness and compassion. These three are predecessors to building a high performing team. The latter can’t exist without the former, but it’s very likely that the former (with some “polishing”) can lead the latter.

Most US employees believe that empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction (90%) and lower employee turnover (79%). In addition, most CEOs (87%) see that there is a direct link between empathy and financial performance.

Let’s break it down now and explore how empathy, kindness and compassion can, in fact, help you in building high performing teams.

Better Leadership

Leading with kindness, empathy and compassions means fully and unconditionally supporting the team and each individual for them to achieve their best and deliver the team's goals with excellence. Leaders become champions of people's success, which is conducive to team's success as well.

Trust

Empathy, compassion and kindness all MUST come from a place of authenticity and care. Trust is built and increases significantly when every team member sees that others want to genuinely help them achieve the goals. Trust is essential to high performing teams.

Alignment

Kind, empathetic and compassionate leaders can have deeper and more real conversations with every person in the team. This allows the leader to better align each person's skills with everyone else's and also with the needs of teams to achieve the goals.

Psychological Safety

High performing teams are innovative. Innovation requires that people feel safe to use their creativity and imagination, voice their ideas, take risks and experiment with them. This is only possible if psychological safety is in place.

Inclusion

Kindness, empathy and compassion are about the inclusion of each person. When team members feel included they are more likely to speak their minds, which is conductive to more ideas floating around, but also potential errors identified on time.

Support

The labor to create a high performing team isn't just about the leader, but every person in the team. They too have to be kind, compassionate and empathetic. This means that they care for the success of the team by caring for each other and having each other's back!

Curiosity

A high performing team is built with meaningful and potent inquiries, not just with "solutions and responses". High performing teams deal with complex issues and projects. Curiosity is essential because it is in the questions where more opportunities for excellence can surface.

Appreciation

High performing teams are measured by the achievement of their goals with excellence. However, it is also valuable to recognize the effort put forward by the team even if an outcome was not achieved. This recognizes the learning journey that a team goes through to achieve excellence.

Care

A high performing team isn't built when a leader only cares about the people in their role as a "team member" and not as the humans they are. Leaders who genuinely care for the WHOLE person create the conditions for compassion and kindness beyond work, which matters for team performance.