This year’s crop of highlighted books was chosen to help compassionate leaders continue to widen their circle of understanding and deepen their practice. Given the urgent need for facing the existential threats before us, the books below embody relevant compassionate Leadership themes: start from a grounded place, be aware of what truly is, see the whole picture to change the system, embrace the complexity and paradox that exists within the system, and be courageous in action. We hope you will find the unique wisdom in each of these books to be a meaningful contribution to your compassionate leadership journey.
Triple Value Leadership: Creating Sustainable Value for Your Business, Your Customers and Society
by Sander Tideman
The world is a very complex place, and its complexity grows every day. In such an environment, it can feel like repairing what needs healing is a game of Whack-A-Mole. In Triple Value Leadership: Creating Sustainable Value for Your Business, Your Customers and Society, Sander Tideman offers a broader systemic approach for organizational and individual success.
Triple value refers to a leadership approach that allows organizations to create value for the organization itself, its customers, and society at the same time. This requires a more holistic way of thinking beyond a simple profit for shareholder maximization. The triple value model, like the Center for Compassionate Leadership model, starts with the leader and moves outward through the organization into the full economy.
Most of the world’s economic structures have been created with a set of assumptions that Tideman persuasively argues are outdated: infinite supply of resource inputs, measurement in isolated silos such as corporations, and the widespread lack of acknowledgement of external impacts beyond the financial accounting within the siloed walls. By approaching business with a broader mindset, organizations can create regenerative businesses that benefit themselves, their customers, and the greater world.
The old mindset was easier. It optimized for one thing – shareholder profits. Triple Value Leadership is strongest in describing the balancing act that is required for trying to create sustainable value on a more holistic basis, requiring grounded dreamers who also know how to be relationship builders and warriors at the same time. Tideman presents a persuasive case that these traits, which might appear to be in conflict with each other, actually strengthen each other when in balance.
Tideman is a compelling visionary. He recognizes the depth of need for systems change, for transformation. Triple Value Leadership offers an ambitious and achievable prescription to match the scale of the challenge our species faces today. Read this book and change the world for the better.
How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down
by Y-Vonne Hutchinson
One consistently differentiating characteristic of compassionate leaders is their ability to have difficult conversations well. There are few conversations as difficult as conversations about race. In How to Talk to Your Boss About Race, Y-Vonne Hutchinson offers a luminous description of the reality of racism in the organizational world and a powerful arsenal of strategies to support compassionate leaders in their conversations about race.
Hutchinson is a Harvard Law School graduate, and How to Talk to Your Boss is written with a logical persuasiveness that reflects that noteworthy training. It begins with an objective description of the heartbreaking reality of race today, and leads the reader through a process to allow them to see themselves within this context, recognizing that we start from a grounded place, but will only be able to move forward with the support of others. When difficult conversations around race require persuasion around the value for change, the book offers the case for change five different ways.
While How to Talk to Your Boss About Race offers much to raise every reader’s awareness of the reality of race, it is explicit about the inadequacy of awareness alone. In the second half of the book, Hutchinson shows exactly how to move into action, with specific answers and language for the most common issues, including a particularly timely chapter on “Pushing Back Against the Pushback.” The strategies and conversational supports are practical actions everyone can take each day to help address racial inequity. The pragmatic realism of the book shows up in a late chapter on knowing when it is time to move on. If your boss isn’t listening to any of the five cases for change, there’s no value in continuing to bang your head against an immovable racist wall.
Compassionate leaders can’t give what they don’t have, and the conclusion of the book highlights the message that can never be expressed too much, “Take Care of Yourself.” We live in a challenging world, and those who want to make it more equitable need to start by making sure they are well grounded in security for themselves.
Whatever your understanding is about systemic racism or your current efforts in bringing about change, How to Talk to Your Boss About Race will support you in the difficult conversations we all need to be having.
A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change
by Dolly Chugh
Grappling with the American history of structural racism is hard. In A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change, Dolly Chugh presents a way forward. Chugh’s gifts as a teacher and psychologist – she’s a social psychology professor at the NYU Stern School of Business – allow her to challenge the reader in ways that keep them moving more deeply into the effort to dismantle our racially inequitable society.
Chugh doesn’t shrink from the challenge and won’t allow others to, either. An early chapter, “Dress for the Weather,” prepares people to face the difficulties that ultimately arise in social change initiatives. Her three-part prescription for action begins with embracing paradox (see review below on the book Both/And Thinking,) a critical skill for compassionate leaders. It continues with “connecting the dots,” a powerful case for understanding history and its impact on today through many pathways. In her therapeutic voice, Chugh confronts the reader with the stark ugliness that is the history of our social past. As the chapter sinks in, it becomes apparent that if you aren’t anti-racist, your inaction supports the racist status quo. With the clear evidence of structural racism presented, A More Just Future lays out all the ways we deny reality and challenges us to “Reject Racial Fables.”
Action can be the hardest step for complex problems. Chugh acknowledges this and exhorts social change makers to build their grit and take responsibility. As mentioned above, Chugh is a business school professor. This book is focused on the transformation of individuals who will use that transformation to change the world. Compassionate leaders need the road map provided in A More Just Change to flourish while effectively bringing about meaningful social change in their circle of influence.
Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems
by Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis
Our ancestors didn’t commission studies to consider whether a snake was poisonous. They simply reacted. Uncertainty and threat were united. We’ve developed a higher capacity to respond rather than just react, but our ancestral impulses live on. In Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis show leaders how to strengthen and use the more evolved parts of our brain to fuel success through effectively handling the discomfort and tension of paradoxes.
The ability to embrace paradox is particularly helpful for developing compassionate leaders, especially those who see a tension between performance and compassion. Both/and thinking allows leaders to set high standards while seeking to relieve the pressures and stresses of a performance-oriented organization. Doing this will leverage the power of compassion to free up creativity and drive employee engagement, which ultimately enhance performance.
So, how do we resist our evolutionary urge and hold both parts of a paradox? While it isn’t easy, Smith and Lewis show us the way. It begins with a grounded awareness of our reactions to all that arises. By using pauses and calmly recognizing reality exactly as it is, leaders put themselves into position to respond productively to paradox and tension. From that grounded place, leaders recognize that there is a time for expansion and a time for consolidation. Much like the seasonal flows driven by the sun or the monthly rhythms of the moon, leaders allow themselves the flexibility to respond as the situation dictates.
Both/And Thinking uses its own broad tool kit for teaching which includes case studies, practices, evidence-based research, and creative diagrams to deepen the reader’s understanding of developing their own both/and capacities.
Compassionate leaders intuitively see the particular and the universal at the same time, and use that vision to act wisely for the good of all. Both/And Thinking is a book that will help compassionate leaders strengthen this gift.
Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead In a Volatile World
by Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet, and Michiel Kruyt
Awareness is the first step toward compassion. In Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead In a Volatile World, the authors – all affiliated with McKinsey & Company – make a very compelling case, using psychology, neuroscience, leadership theory, and organizational vignettes, for the critical importance of awareness for leaders, and show how anyone can set themselves on the path towards deeper awareness.
The book focuses on cultivating dual awareness, or the “integrated awareness of both our external and internal environments and how they impact each other.” Creating deliberate calm couples the awareness of the inner and outer environments with the recognition of whether they are well matched.
Deliberate Calm is most illuminating in showing how to break out of what they call the “adaptability paradox,” which is that in times of rapid change, when leaders most need to adapt and behave differently, the stress of the situation causes them to rely ever more on the security offered by old practices. Recognizing the hurdle holding back the leader from changing requires inner work, and the case studies in the book show the power of dual awareness to foster adaptability and superior performance. Moving beyond the work individuals must do, Deliberate Calm shows how to bring this awareness to bear on creating effective team dynamics.
The awareness taught in Deliberate Calm is itself neutral. Utilizing dual awareness to advance the purpose of compassionate leaders will lead to deeper capacity for inner compassion, the creation of cultures with greater safety, connection and belonging, and an outward flow of compassion into the world.
Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way
by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter have contributed their powerful thought leadership to the field of compassionate leadership from its very beginning. Their previous book together, The Mind of The Leader, focused on three foundational qualities for leadership: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion. In Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, they zero in on how to apply these leadership skills to difficult situations.
Questions about bringing compassion to difficult situations are among the most common queries we receive at the Center for Compassionate Leadership. “Is it possible to lay people off compassionately?” “How do I give developmental feedback compassionately?” Compassionate Leadership is targeted directly at these tough questions. Leaders are encouraged to take a bigger picture perspective when “hard things” arise, and to recognize that in large organizations, every decision will have some people who benefit and some who do not.
The book hits its full stride as it describes the authors’ principle of the Wise Compassion Flywheel. Wise compassion begins with “caring presence,” which is supported by mindfulness practices. Leaders who practice caring presence are able to discern the required action, and are called upon to exercise “caring courage.” Caring courage, in turn, is carried out through the final two arms of the flywheel, “caring candor” and “caring transparency.” Each of these actions deepen trust and connection which further strengthen the leader’s ability to practice caring presence at the start of the flywheel.
Read our full review of Compassionate Leadership here.
Finally…
If you’re looking to be inspired by more great Compassionate Leadership books, read Our Five Favorite Books for 2020 and Top Compassionate Leadership Books of 2021.