There are ways for leaders to cultivate the compassion our workplaces need right now!
Todd Connor: We’ve been talking this week about the elevated consideration we have now—an expectation, really—for compassion from our leaders in the workplace. Compassion would have previously been seen as a nice-to-have, but the implications of COVID have raised that stake to a need-to-have as it relates to trust, a core component of great teams and relationships. Quite literally, employees are thinking, “If leadership doesn’t have an appreciation for my life and current circumstances, they might be putting me, unwittingly, in physical harm or in a state of emotional distress.” Seemingly benign decisions, from office operating hours to whether we need our video screens turned on, can have a dramatic impact on people’s lives.
Emily Drake: Compassion allows us to sympathize with others’ challenges and misfortunes. We know what it feels like to have leadership that believes compassion is key. Or empathy. And you can only be compassionate about your team if you lead with curiosity about other human beings with whom you work and interact. I can already feel the eyerolls in response: “Yeah, compassion is important, we knew that.” But this isn’t an intellectual exercise. If you try to make it one, you’ve missed the mark. You simply must go deeper than that right now. For many employees, the only real question they want their leaders to answer is, fundamentally, “Do you care?” Which also requires, perhaps, a sense of, “Do you know me?”
TC: I knew this idea of compassion as an essential leadership trait in this moment would be prevalent when McKinsey, in addressing this landscape-scale crisis, began talking about the importance of compassion, empathy, vulnerability and awareness both to persevere through the crisis, but also to design the future of work. It’s the old adage from Theodore Roosevelt that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
ED: Yes, and here again, the bar for being a leader has been raised. I hope you all are getting used to it, and getting help where you need it, because we will continue to be asked to expand our skill set. Many of the traditional instruments for companies showing that they care by way of HR benefits are being augmented by the need for more human-level expressions from leaders. It is also not a one-size-fits-all approach. It never has been, but particularly now. The needs of single adults working from home will be different than the needs of parents with middle-schoolers, those serving as caregivers, those living with people who are considered essential and in more at-risk COVID exposure environments, not to mention those living with people affected by COVID. The list really goes on and on. So, categorical assumptions no longer work. Curiosity for the lived experience of individuals and compassion for them will be even more needed.
TC: So, the question I know managers and leaders are asking themselves is how, at a practical level, do we do this? Compassion must be a verb, so it needs to be seen, and the good news is that there are, in fact, ways for leaders to continue their cultivation of this important skill. It begins with knowing the story of the people with whom you work. A simple prompt before a weekly team meeting might look something like this: “What’s one thing that’s been hard? ” or “What’s something in the background of my life that I’m managing?” Or also celebratory: “What’s something I’m proud of myself for?” Quick check-ins like this normalize a culture of humanity, invite compassion and actually allow people to show up whole-human in order to do the work. It’s also quick—a better conversational approach to team-building than the blunt-instrument of virtual happy hours.
ED: I love Kristin Neff’s work on this topic. She has an incredible TED talk about self-compassion because, you guessed it, building the skill first begins with doing your own work. I use this with patients all the time, and clients, too. Her self-compassion exercises are a must, and if you already work with a coach or a therapist, you can complete some of the prompts and bring these into your sessions. The first question about how do you interact with a friend who is suffering is key. It is incredibly hard to witness pain and do just that—witness—vs. seek to solve or make it about you. As with everything we offer, practice is paramount.
TC: You always bring in the truth! Start with self and go from there. And if I can borrow from Teddy Roosevelt (thanks, Teddy), I might evolve his adage to this moment we are living in and say, “People will not care about the work unless you work to show you care.” What we learn as parents, friends, neighbors, members of a faith or as members of a social justice movement will serve us in equal measure as compared to the strict business training we have received to date. I’m eager to see leaders shed some of this hesitation to keep the conversation focused solely on the business and invite this larger ethos of compassion and humanity. Our workplaces need it. Our world needs it.
Drake and Connor facilitate Crain’s Leadership Academy. Drake is a licensed therapist, owner of the Collective Academy and a leadership coach. Connor is the founder of Bunker Labs and the Collective Academy and is also a leadership consultant. Posted August 05, 2020 at: