Compassion & Leadership
I have been studying, researching, and advising on compassion in organizations for seven years. Above all else, my single greatest conclusion is that top leaders must infuse compassion into their organizations.
My own research* has found that top leadership compassion had the greatest beneficial impact on several important employee attitudes and behaviours, such as burnout, engagement, and commitment. Unfortunately, however, in the same study top leadership was perceived by others as having the lowest compassion out of all of the referent groups.
So, what can you do as a leader? Here are a few suggestions:
Show personal vulnerability; society teaches us that those with high social power are expected to hide their own struggles or distress
Remember that workplaces are emotional arenas; don’t use “professionalism” as an excuse to forget your humanity
Acknowledge and address suffering inside and outside of the organization
Encourage compassionate actions by modelling and encouraging them. Remember that compassion is more powerful than empathy or sympathy because compassion includes an action to help, not just kind feelings.
Make compassion a value and norm in your organization (an example of this is LinkedIn having created the role of Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Training in order to operationalize compassionate leadership within the company)
Sometimes small ideas have a big impact. One of my favourite examples of compassionate leadership is from John Chambers. As CEO of Cisco, he implemented a system to advise him when anyone in the multinational company was experiencing a severe loss, so that he could personally reach out to them.
People aren’t likely to remember that you managed eked out that extra fraction of profit last corner, but they’ll most certainly remember when that you were there for them when they really needed you.
To learn more about compassion, see my previous post on Compassionate Climate. I’d also love to connect with you to discuss further.
*2019 study of 368 workers across a wide cross section of organizations and industries throughout North America, which found support via regression analysis for the hypothesis that: both, individual affective trait compassion & dimensions of psychological climate of compassion, are significant predictors of a) work engagement, b) affective commitment, c) organizational citizenship behaviours, and negative predictors of d) burnout. Special thanks to Dr. Lucy Jdanova for her support with this research.
