Compassionate Leadership: A Simple Guide for Everyone

Compassionate leadership has a magical ability to transform our workplaces into spaces where people can thrive and be their best selves. But what exactly does it mean? Simply put, it's about leading with kindness and creating a work environment where everyone feels valued and supported.

Understanding Compassion in Leadership

Compassionate leadership is built on two main ideas:

1. Compassion: This is about understanding and caring about others' pain and struggles and wanting to help alleviate their suffering.
2. Leadership: It’s about guiding and inspiring people toward shared objectives.

In their book, Awakening Compassion at Work, Monica Worline and Jane Dutton explain that you can lead with compassion or lead for compassion.

Leading with Compassion

Leading with compassion is all about day-to-day interactions. It's about how leaders behave regularly, either reducing or increasing stress for their team members. For example, sharing unpleasant news is hard, but compassionate leaders face it with courage, ensuring they deliver such news with understanding and respect.

But it's not always about the big moments. Small gestures like greeting team members warmly can make a huge difference in building positive work environments. Clear communication about project goals is another act of compassionate leadership. These practices bring rapid positive changes and pave the way for broader organizational transformations.

Leading for Compassion

Leading for compassion is about extending compassion beyond individual interactions to shape the overall environment and system of the workplace. This is a gradual process, involving collective efforts and actions. A workplace that embodies compassion will show kindness as a norm and will approach mistakes with a learning mindset rather than blame.

To embed compassion deeply into the organization, it should be a part of hiring practices, performance standards, and even meeting guidelines. But for all this to work, two things are crucial: the commitment from top leadership and a clear, shared understanding of what compassion means in the organization.

The Importance of Genuine Compassion

Research supports the transformative power of compassionate leadership, but the compassion must be genuine. Compassion isn’t a tool to get better organizational results or manipulate workers; it’s about focusing on others' needs and well-being. While compassion motivates, it must be balanced with clear boundaries, proper encouragement, and well-defined purposes.

Compassionate People Like Helping the Group More Than Themselves

?Extending compassion toward others biases the brain to glean more positive information from the world, something called the “carryover effect.” Compassionate action — such as giving some of one’s earnings to charity — also activates pleasure circuits, which some people call “the warm glow.” In the words of Dr. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford, “Humans are the champions of kindness.” But why? Zaki’s brain imaging data shows that being kind to others registers in the brain as more like eating chocolate than like fulfilling an obligation to do what’s right (e.g., eating brussels sprouts). Brains find it more valuable to do what’s in the interest of the group than to do what’s most profitable to the self.

Compassion is Hard-Wired into the Human Species

?Compassion is reproductively advantageous, being part of the care-giving system that has evolved to nurture and protect the young according to researchers Paul Gilbert and J.L Goetz and colleagues. Compassion can be seen as having evolved from an adaptive focus on protecting oneself and one’s offspring to a broader focus on protecting others including and beyond one’s immediate kinship group according to Franz de Waal. Compassion may also have evolved in primates because it is a desirable criterion in mate selection and facilitates cooperative relationships with non-kin according to de Waal and Dacher Keltner.

Compassion also Means not Being Overwhelmed by Others’ Suffering so That One Becomes too Self-Focused

?The idea that compassion means approaching those who are suffering with non-judgement and tolerance — even if they are in some sense disagreeable to us — is central to some research and Buddhist beliefs Clara Strauss and colleagues, and the Dalai Lama conceptualize compassion for others not only as being aware of and moved by suffering and wanting to help but also as including the ability to adopt a non-judgmental stance towards others and to tolerate one’s distress when faced with other people’s suffering.

Compassion has Tremendous Benefits for Both Physical and Mental Health and Overall Well-Being

?Research by Ed Diener, a leading researcher in positive psychology, and Martin Seligman, a pioneer of the psychology of happiness and human flourishing, suggests that showing compassion for others in a meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery from disease; furthermore, research by Stephanie Brown, at Stony Brook University, and Sara Konrath, at the University of Michigan, has shown that it may even lengthen our life spans. Another way in which a compassionate lifestyle may improve longevity is that it may serve as a buffer against stress. A new study conducted on a large population (more than 800 people) and spearheaded by the University at Buffalo’s Michael Poulin?found that stress did not predict mortality in those who helped others, but that it did in those who did not.

Compassion Has the Capacity to Change the World

?Research by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia suggests that seeing someone helping another person creates a state of “elevation.” Have you ever been moved to tears by seeing someone’s loving and compassionate behavior? Haidt’s data suggest that elevation then inspires us to help others — and it may just be the force behind a chain reaction of giving. Haidt has shown that corporate leaders who engage in self-sacrificing behavior and elicit “elevation” in their employees, also yield greater influence among their employees — who become more committed and in turn may act with more compassion in the workplace. Indeed, compassion is contagious. Social scientists James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard demonstrated that helping is contagious: acts of generosity and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. Our acts of compassion uplift others and make them?happy. We may not know it, but by uplifting others, we are also helping ourselves; research by Fowler and Christakis has shown that happiness spreads and that if the people around us are happy, we, in turn,?become happier.

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In?an article?for the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, Emma Sepalla, director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, cites the growing incidence of workplace stress among employees. She argues that a new field of research suggests when organizations promote an “ethic of compassion rather than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an upward bottom line.”

?Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, writing in the?Harvard Business Review Blogs, argues that organizations must develop a “culture of compassionate coaching.” This means not merely focusing on coaching employees on their weaknesses, “and that creating a ‘culture of unconditional love’ binds the team together.”

?According to Rasmus Hougaard, Managing Director of?Potential Project,?leaders who dare to show compassion are rewarded with team members’ loyalty. He cites research by Professor Shimul Melvani, from the University of North Carolina’s Fliegler School of Business, who found that compassionate leaders have increased levels of engagement, and have more people willing to follow them.

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Of the over 1,000 leaders that Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter and Louise Chester interviewed and reported on in the Harvard Business Review,?91% said compassion is very important for leadership, and 80% would like to enhance their compassion but do not know how. Compassion is a hugely overlooked skill in leadership training.

Summing It Up

Compassionate leadership is a powerful force that can transform workplaces, fostering a positive, thriving environment for everyone involved. It begins with small, everyday acts of kindness and extends to systemic organizational changes. The change requires individuals who are not only knowledgeable in leading with compassion but also courageous enough to enforce policies and practices that sustain compassion in the long run. Keep in mind, that compassion is not just a nice-to-have quality; it's a must-have for creating a better, more humane world of work.

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