Many leaders know compassion on a personal level: pausing to listen, offering support, extending care. This is leading WITH compassion. The next step is scaling it across the organization in order to lead FOR compassion. By shaping roles, routines, networks, and culture, organizations create the conditions for both people and performance to thrive.

Compassionate leadership doesn’t mean giving until you’re empty. By setting healthy boundaries and building supportive roles, routines, networks, and culture, leaders sustain energy while caring for others. This balance prevents burnout, fosters resilience and trust, and creates workplaces where compassion fuels both human connection and lasting performance.

To win support for compassionate leadership, start with what matters to leaders: results. Pair research on performance, retention, and innovation with real stories and your own example. Over time, consistent, authentic compassion proves that caring for people and driving results go hand in hand.

Do you want to lead with more compassion, but aren’t sure where to start? Wanting to show up for others means you are already on the right path. Opportunities to lead with compassion will arise naturally every single day. Compassionate leadership grows from how you choose to respond in your day-to-day moments. Learn where to start with these three pillars of compassionate leadership.

How do we change teams, organizations, and systems to exhibit greater compassion competence? Compassion flows from the inside out, so an important place to start is with self-compassion. In celebration of International Self-Compassion Day, four leading thinkers and practitioners of compassionate leadership share how they view self-compassion as important for leaders.

What guides you? Why are you doing the compassionate leadership work that you do? Purpose connects our actions to deeper meaning, at both a personal and collective level. Here are five books that will help you move more deeply into purpose at every level, from the individual to the systemic level, for your summer reading in the Northern Hemisphere or mid-winter reading in the Southern Hemisphere.

At every turn, it feels like we're at each other's throats. Headlines showcase another argument, another fight, another cycle of division. The temptation in these moments is to fight back – to defend our position with equal force, to escalate. But that only intensifies the violence. That only deepens the fractures. What we need instead is cooperation and collaboration.

These times challenge us at our core. What does it mean to be human? How do we create a world that supports the thriving of all people and the planet? What distinguishes how we weather the storm isn’t just our individual skill, adaptation, or resolve, but the strength of the communities we belong to.

We’re living through what some describe as a polycrisis: overlapping, compounding challenges of climate change, social inequality, political instability, global conflict, and rapid technological disruption. We’re stretched thin and often unsupported at work. Stress has become normalized, showing up in organizational culture, morale, and performance. And now, added to the mix: anxiety about A.I.

Compassionate action is where awareness, generous interpretation, and empathy take shape in the real world. True compassion calls us to act with both nurturing care and courageous resolve. While we cannot eliminate all suffering, we can respond with intention, offering what is possible. In organizations, compassionate action is the bridge between values and practice.