Compassionate Leadership
Tara Halliday
Transformational Leadership Coach | Imposter Syndrome Specialist | Speaker and Business Book Awards Finalist
High-Performance Executive Newsletter: Uplevel your success with less stress.
New challenges bring satisfaction and impact. Your current skills and methods might not be enough for your next advancement, or they can be costly in time, energy, and relationships. Upgrade with our newsletter, full of tools and insights based on extensive research in business performance, neuroscience, psychology, and more, to enhance and sustain your high performance.
The three essentials for high performance are neuroregulation (to get and stay calm), clearing negative self-talk and the beliefs that create it (including imposter syndrome), and creating new success habits.
This week, we're looking at practical ways to have compassion in leadership.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Compassionate Leadership
Compassion in leadership has many benefits, including increased performance, better teamwork, more resilience, good mental and emotional well-being at work, and great organisational culture. It also creates bottom-line impacts such as higher retention, which reduces hiring and training costs, and project efficiency and deliverability, which improve when turnover does not disrupt the project.
However, simply trying to ‘be more compassionate’ is hard because it comes with challenges and even contradictions at work. Here, we explore those difficulties and practical ways to make it easier for you to make balanced compassion a cornerstone of your leadership and work culture.
Personal Resourcefulness
It doesn’t take much effort to be compassionate when the people around you are positive and behaving well, when pressures are low and everything is going well. But when people are being difficult, pressure is high and things go wrong, focusing on having empathy seems so much harder.
This is not your personality or leadership style; there’s a good reason for it. When under stress, your body’s nervous system gets triggered into fight, flight and freeze states, and your brain assumes that there is a threat nearby. Your body’s physiological response to this danger signal is to release stress hormones and divert blood flow to major muscle groups ready for action. In doing this, blood flow gets diverted away from your prefrontal cortex, the logical thinking and strategic planning part of your brain, which causes big problems.
1.????? Impaired decision-making - with reduced blood flow, you literally have fewer resources (oxygen and nutrients) to think clearly and make good decisions. Indeed, your IQ is lowered by 13 points!
2.????? Lower creativity – a triggered state makes your brain 50% less creative, directly impacting your problem-solving skills
3.????? Emotional reactivity – the prefrontal cortex also calms and regulates your emotional responses, so when it has less blood flow, you have less emotional balance and control.
4.????? Reduced cooperation—The triggered state increases the sense of threat and makes you more combative, defensive, and impatient. This reduces your capacity for empathy and compassion.
This means that as soon as your nervous system is triggered, your ability to lead compassionately is reduced, and you have to fight your physiological state to maintain compassion.
The first practical step in maintaining a compassionate outlook is to regulate your nervous system any time it gets out of balance. Notice as soon as you go into fight, flight or freeze states. Don’t judge yourself for it (that will make it worse!); instead, take the basic steps to get calm fast. Check out The Power Reset issue for step-by-step instructions.
When your nervous system is calm again, you regain balance, compassionate intention, and the ability to act in a measured way. Getting calm puts you in a optimum resourceful state.
Emotional Triggering
Challenging people’s behaviour can create a strong emotional reaction. You may feel irritated, frustrated, furious, disappointed, or disgusted by what others have done.
As a leader, your role is often to have the difficult discussions, confronting the person and holding them accountable.
When you’re emotionally triggered, it’s hard to hold the other person in compassion. It feels like being compassionate will be letting them off the hook or somehow making their behaviour acceptable. It seems like a huge contradiction.
The problem here is that our emotional response has caused us to judge or label the other person, i.e. that their poor behaviour makes them bad. What can you do practically to change that? One thing:
The secret to holding compassion in the face of poor behaviour is to separate the person from their actions.
Several things happen when you separate the person from their actions:
When you are focused on addressing the behaviour as bad/wrong rather than the person, you create a layer of emotional detachment. Unconsciously, you stop seeing the other as the enemy, that is, they are a person like you. You can automatically have empathy for them as a human being. This internal empathy will communicate itself to the other person, and they will feel less threatened and more able to hear your comments as feedback rather than an attack on themselves. This is one of the benefits of compassion.
Also, when you hold the person accountable for their actions without making them bad, you can more easily apply consequences rather than punishment. Punishment is when you’re emotionally triggered, feeling they need to pay. Consequences are like you’re a traffic cop handing out a speeding ticket: it is simply the natural consequence of their actions. No drama.
领英推荐
When you’re not emotionally triggered, such ‘difficult’ conversations become less emotionally charged, and it is far easier to hold boundaries and standards.
Having compassion is not being permissive, which some people fear it may be.
To reach this sort of ‘engaged emotional detachment,’ a good framework for understanding people’s behaviour that separates their worth from their actions is required. See The Freedom Framework in ‘Dealing with Difficult People’ for the most powerful way to stimulate acceptance and compassion that I’ve found.
Compassionate Leadership
When you are able to regulate your nervous system using the above tools to get calm, and regulate your emotional responses by separating the person from their actions, compassionate leadership becomes a whole lot easier.
These two methods allow you to sustain empathy without burnout because burnout is caused by the exhaustion of trying to fight or escape physiological and emotional reactivity. The result helps resolve the difficulties people report with compassionate leadership. It means you can;
Compassionate leadership requires self-awareness and active regulation of the self, which is high emotional intelligence. It does require your attention and intention, but as work for a leader, it is well worth the effort.
…………………………………
What I’ve loved this week:
The Science of Change by Richard Boyatzis
This recently published book on intentional change management fascinates me as it incorporates science and not just theory. Boyatzis clearly states that sustainable change is only possible through compassionate leadership—when people are seen (understood), accepted, and nurtured. This adds more weight to the growing conclusion that compassionate leadership is a powerful approach that generates long-term business success.
……………………………………
An action step you can do this week …
Start with nervous system regulation whenever you notice yourself being triggered. Do the Power Reset before any high-stakes or challenging meeting, and do it immediately after any confrontations too. The goal is to get you calm and staying calm for as long as possible.
Try it out and let me know how you get on!
……………………………………
I’ll explore compassionate leadership in future issues too.
Do subscribe and share!
If you’d like to remove emotional triggering and make emotional regulation automatic and effortless, contact me about my best-in-class, one-to-one Inner Success programme.
Message me or book a quick 15-minute chat here: https://bit.ly/callTara
Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend and enjoy the holidays!
Tara
P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!
?
?
?
?