No one is an island. In our competitive world, the temptation is to focus on our individual needs and limit our dependence on others. However, organizational and team success requires cooperation and collaboration, and compassionate leaders need to create environments that allow team members to feel safe enough to share openly and work with others.
Given the challenging backdrop our organizations and teams are dealing with after eighteen months of pandemic stress, it’s an ideal time to emphasize leadership practices that build compassion, psychological safety, connection, and belonging in our work cultures and beyond.
Approaching decisions, projects, policy changes, and everyday workflow with a collaborative mindset sets a positive new tone for what’s next. Allowing everyone’s voice to be heard, and recognizing that each person brings unique perspective and gifts to building solutions is at the heart of compassionate culture.
Individual achievement is an illusion.
All that we do, and all that we know, has come either directly or indirectly through relationship. Our writing and our speaking all arise from a shared language we acquired from others who already knew how to speak and write. Our walking, riding a bike, or climbing a hill was supported by others.
That which is innate has come to us through inherited biology handed down to us by generations of ancestors. That which is learned has come through learning experiences – sometimes through formal instruction and other times through our observation of others. None of it came to us alone. Even “self-taught” learning is rarely purely self-taught. The books we read were written by others, or the explorations we initiate started from someone else’s seed of an idea.
Compassionate leaders acknowledge everyone’s contributions to the process. The collective efforts and inputs to the greater whole – even when the contributions might seem small.
Creating together means embracing difference.
Research shows that diversity can benefit team and organizational results, but that research comes with substantial qualification. Diversity efforts that are viewed as existing for organizationally self-serving reasons, i.e., benefiting results, are viewed skeptically and do not help results. Diversity efforts that are reflected more in policy than in actual practice don’t support organizational success, either.
When organizations diversify because it is what is just and equitable, then the organizational actions reflect that intention. Everyone is respected and their voices are valued and supported in a psychologically safe environment. People learn from each other, and view their differences as chances for enrichment rather than opportunities for persuasion. Teams can then come together, and with the guidance of compassionate leadership, reach decisions that are richer than those that could have been made under less open models.
Unfortunately, there is nothing about this that is easy. On the individual level, everyone has to be able and willing to practice inquiry much more often and advocacy much less often. On the organizational level, it requires allowing the organization to be changed. Organizational leadership usually likes the culture the way it is – they contributed to creating the culture and it probably is optimized to support the leader in their job. Compassionate leaders look beyond themselves and allow change to flow through the organization. When they allow such change effectively, the organization and its team members benefit.
Creating together means speaking up.
Remember the last time your colleague spoke up at a meeting regarding something you wanted to mention, but had misgivings about expressing? Were you relieved that the subject was raised? Did you feel other people in the room offer a sigh of relief?
Creating together can be a very messy process. One key to successful team creation is for team members to learn from their differences, rather than pretend they don’t exist or shove them aside. This is risky and it can be scary to speak up. Naming issues directly and speaking up in ways that respect others with different opinions and viewpoints is necessary to move teams forward. As it is with many hard tasks, compassionate leaders need to embody and model such courageous action by going first. They also need to encourage healthy dissent and respond to such behavior positively.
In closing…
We lead with compassion to accelerate the change we want to see in our world and to live in alignment with our values. Developing a culture of compassion requires courageous compassion for ourselves and others so that we move into intentional action for the benefit of all. When the team is aligned in purpose, and you have set the stage, working with peers and colleagues can be the most joyful and inspiring aspect of our compassionate leadership journey.
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash.