Compassion, Leadership & Growth

This week my cup was overflowing, overflowing with emails, school starting for my children, rising priorities in my working life, closing on the selling of my house, and a myriad of other life tasks. I kept pushing through marking tasks off my list until I found myself nearly sick from exhaustion and emotionally off kilter.

I stand on the principle that experiences like this make me a better leader for my teams, a better parent for my children, a better partner to my spouse, and a better servant to our community. In this moment of exhaustion, I could not help but rationalize and strategize a new way to move forward with a higher level of compassion for those around me.

As I began to research all of the ways to elevate compassion in leadership, I stumbled across an article by the Harvard Business Review emphasizing compassion and wisdom, as one cannot be sufficient without the other. After studying The Wise Compassion Leadership Matrix, I quickly realized that I have experienced each quadrant throughout my career and must continue to reflect on these moments to persevere and grow my personal skill set as a leader.

It is inevitable that we all fail, burn-out, emotionally explode, or execute at a level that does not align with who we perceive we are as a leader. In these moments, we are forced to internalize, address imbalances, and truly move forward into the next-level leader that is needed to help our organizations grow and strategically move forward. As a leader our goal is never to stagnate, but to always evolve and we only do this through the uncomfortable circumstances, exhaustion, failure, and overwhelming events that happen to push each of us into the next-level leader our organizations need to adapt through constant external changes.

Learning to embrace the failure, emotional outbreaks, and pure exhaustion has taught me to slow down, realize what skill set of mine must be enhanced to evolve into the leader that I am becoming and the leader that my team needs. These experiences have helped me build wisdom, persevere, self-reflect to show up the next day with a smile on my face and bring positive energy towards who we are becoming.

It has taken years, a lot of failure, uncomfortable job changes, a wide array of bosses with differing personalities, even more mistakes, disagreements, and uncanny amounts of feedback to self-rationalize these actions towards progress rather than negative connotations for growth. At the end of the day, we can only be grateful for the messy circumstances, the burn-out situations, and the emotional reactions because ultimately it shows that we care and how we react following these situations shows our leadership as we move forward.