Compassion’s Role In Accountability

How can I be a compassionate boss while also demanding results and accountability? A lot of leaders do think of that split as a dichotomy. They think they need to inspire some degree of fear, or even scarcity thinking, to drive accountability and consistent results. They understand compassion is valuable -- same with vulnerability -- but they are afraid to show it, or they're not afraid to show it but they don't know how it interacts with results.

Here's a personal example.

In my first job, my family had a saying: "Get to Wednesday." Why? Well, every Tuesday happened to be the day when my recurring team meeting AND my weekly one-on-one with my manager occurred. The culture and my manager were so toxic that I cried every single Tuesday. It was my least favorite day of the week. But when I got to Wednesday, it felt like the worst was over. Hence the expression.

I tried to share my challenges, talk about what wasn’t working for me, but it fell on deaf ears. The problem with that job, and why I eventually left, is that the leaders did not create space for the voice of my suffering. And if you think senior leaders are not supposed to create space for suffering because they are supposed to drive returns… well the best leaders do both. The etymology of passion is suffering. Compassion means “with suffering.” No wonder it can be so hard. Many people are afraid of their own hearts and the intensity of the emotional reaction we would have if we actually allowed ourselves to exist with the suffering of others. Some of my colleagues are in deep pain, can I be blamed for not wanting to join them?

Every person that works for you has different experiences they are bringing to work: aging parents, misbehaving kids, marriage on the rocks, infertility, addiction, neighbors suing them, and dozens of things you can't even think about. Often at work, we put our heads down and focus on the deliverables, the tasks, the meetings, the calls, and the all-hands congratulations and kudos. That's beautiful, but we also need to make space for the experience of what people are bringing into work and give voice to some of the sufferings and the negative experiences, too. We need to deal with those before they become negative behaviors, which then become negative actions, which negatively impact our results.

That is the task of the leader.

That’s?the compassion side.?The accountability side is the self and how you manage YOU. People are more open to accountability discussions in the professional sphere, but great leaders do both. They take accountability for themselves and they have compassion for others. That’s the secret sauce.

And if you’re still not convinced…

That is from Robert Waldinger , who is the current (fourth) director of the 美国哈佛大学 Adult Study, which now spans 85 years. It started with 724 men; 40 are now alive. About 25 years ago, they added women (often the wives of the original men; sometimes the daughters). Now there are new tiers of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren coming into the study. Every two years, the study checks with the participants about how their life is going, but they also do brain scans, blood draws, and more. It's one of the most interesting and robust looks at human happiness across a lifespan. Unsurprisingly, the biggest finding is that close relationships with friends, family, and neighbors are what matters in your life. When they looked at some of the participants at age 50, the biggest predictor of their health at age 85 was not weight or cholesterol. It was the quality of their relationships. The people with poor relationships at 50 were, sadly, almost universally deceased by 85.

While work and the accrual of relevance, success, and income at work are important to people in the study, it's significantly less important than we think -- and almost all participants, of both genders, have indicated that over the course of it. Friendships, relationships, marriage, rearing kids, neighborhoods and communities, and even faith all come out ahead of work for people.

So have compassion for your colleagues, you might make a friend and end up living longer.

Elsewhere This Week

Here's a take crushing Barbie from Mattel, Inc. :

As I wrote Tuesday, I saw some inspiration in it:

I think the first tier of the Barbie discussion is that you need to realize it is inherently a corporate movie that attempts to bake in several messages, and it does a good job with those messages. Krystal Ball, in the video above, calls it "late-stage girl boss sh*t." The girl boss movement had problems, absolutely, but Barbie is not a girl boss homage. While it does paint in broad brush some aspects of the gender dynamic, I can tell you I've maybe never seen my daughter more motivated about her future than in a day or so after seeing that movie. That's very impactful. We messaged the CEO of 纽威品牌公司 , for pete's sake! (She wanted to work on Nuk pacifiers.) I understand the criticisms of the movie, but from where I'm at as a mom and a professional that's had to deal with the patriarchy and fawning CEO lieutenants, I think it's a good film with good messages. The sequel needs to deal with the BIPOC imbalance because a feminist movement that does not include the BIPOC community is just swapping one power structure for another.

Last Thing

Have you read All The Rage by Darcy Lockman, PhD ?

If you liked my Barbie article, read it! It’s a great book that hasn’t gotten enough credit about why our egalitarian values don’t match our life experiences.