In this third post in our series on creating your own compassionate leadership roadmap, we turn from the dimensions of individual compassionate leadership and organizational compassionate cultures covered in weeks one and two to the tools and levers to use to build and implement your action plan.

Compassion, at its core, is a distinctly human act. Does that mean that organizations cannot be compassionate?

The same attributes that lead to gaining power are attributes that are undermined once one has achieved a position of power. Dacher Keltner, in The Power Paradox, shows us the origins of power, how it is part of all our everyday transactions and can consistently be a positive thing, how power can be abused and lost, and the costs of subjecting others to conditions that create powerlessness.

No term describes the simultaneous presence of 2 positive attributes in an individual the way comorbidity describes the simultaneous presence of 2 diseases. This isn’t a surprise. Epidemiology has been around since the 1850s, while widespread scientific study of positive emotions and behaviors is more recent. This language gap should be closed and we propose doing so with a new word, “covitality.”