As growth in the field of compassionate leadership continues to accelerate, so has the amount and quality published on the topic. This has been a stellar year for books supporting the movement towards compassionate leadership, making the selection of the top five quite challenging. While our bookshelves are overflowing with worthwhile reads, we recommend these five selections as the best of the best in 2021.
Whether for yourself, your team, or as a gift for an admired or aspiring compassionate leader in your life, any of these five books offer a wonderful way to launch into 2022.
We’ve presented the selections in alphabetical order. Each of you may feel drawn to start with a particular title based on where you are in your personal and professional journeys. They are all #1 to us, and hence we are delighted to share this year’s top choices. Drumroll please….
Boundless Leadership: The Breakthrough Method to Realize Your Vision, Empower Others & Ignite Positive Change
by Joe Loizzo and Elazar Aslan
Modern culture and organizations are structured based on an old – a very, very old – paradigm of survival and scarcity. If we continue in this manner, we threaten our own existence. Recent scientific discoveries coupled with wisdom that has been handed down for millennia offer us a new way of being, one where humanity can thrive and flourish together.
In Boundless Leadership: The Breakthrough Method to Realize Your Vision, Empower Others & Ignite Positive Change, Joe Loizzo and Elazar Aslan show us a path to move from the default survival mode of our distant ancestors to the thriving mind required of compassionate leaders to cultivate a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy world.
There is no finish line to the deepest forms of transformation, and Boundless Leadership is especially effective in focusing on the ongoing practice and process of leadership development. The book’s integration of embodied practices with heart- and mind-based practices offers a powerful means to pursue our endless growth and transformation. The boundlessness suggested by the title is dealt with in a depth that one rarely finds in leadership books.
For compassionate leaders who want to move beyond their limits, Boundless Leadership offers an important new resource for breaking through to a deeper level of awareness and presence in our leadership.
Compassionate Leadership: Sustaining Wisdom, Humanity and Presence in Health and Social Care
by Michael A. West
Through his position at the King’s Fund and as a university professor in the UK, Michael A. West has been a leading global thinker and writer on the topics of organizational culture and compassionate leadership for decades. While his work on compassion has been largely centered on the health sector in the UK, his impact crosses all geographic and sectoral boundaries.
In Compassionate Leadership, West offers his encyclopedic knowledge of compassion, workplaces, and health and social care in a directly presented and deeply thoughtful manner. With over 500 research citations, twenty-three pages of indexed topics, and an appendix of twenty scales for measuring each of the chapter’s subject areas, Compassionate Leadership is destined to become a primary reference manual for anyone committed to compassionate leadership.
The book, however, is not primarily a reference book. West has thoughtfully covered the full scope of compassion in the book’s eleven chapters. For colleagues that have been through the Center for Compassionate Leadership’s training programs, the arc will feel very comfortable, with the book covering compassion itself, self-compassion, psychological safety, and compassionate culture.
Compassionate Leadership is a must read for leaders interested in the topic, and it is a book that leaders will want to keep close at hand as a foundational source anytime a question arises on the subject.
Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive
by Kristin Neff
For twenty years, Kristin Neff has been a powerful advocate for self-compassion. Her 2003 research paper, “Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself” gave birth to the research field of self-compassion, a field which now has over 3,500 published studies and counting. In 2011, her first book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, helped the field grow to adolescence by bringing the significant body of academic research to the public. Now, with Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive, Neff brings our understanding of self-compassion into a new stage of maturity.
Neff deftly combines the science and the wisdom of self-compassion to help us unlock our full potential. Although the book’s title focuses on how women can harness the power of fierce self-compassion, this book should be read by everyone. We all have a part to play in supporting women to unleash their fierce self-compassion, and everyone will benefit by deepening their individual understanding of fully integrated nurturing and fierce self-compassion in their life.
Self-compassion is the constant starting point for compassionate leaders, and Fierce Self-Compassion is an ideal book for anyone who wants to develop a more complete and mature self-compassion practice and compassionate leadership style.
The Full Body Yes: Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out
by Scott Shute
Most of us distinguish the me at work from the me in the rest of life. It’s an understandable and pervasive response to our conditioning, systems, and culture. Yet the reality is that we are still one whole person, regardless of where we are operating at any given moment. COVID has hastened the timeline for more and more people to accept this fundamental truth.
In The Full Body Yes, Scott Shute takes us on an intimate tour of his personal life and outstanding corporate career that helps us all appreciate how to live an integrated life of happiness, purpose, and service. He shows us by example how to love ourselves, love others, and love all of life through the lens of compassion. Along the way, we laugh and cry, feel his pain and joy, and in so doing, accept more of our own.
Scott gives us permission to explore the difficult terrain of our inner lives and demonstrates why this deep internal awareness is the key to navigate our external journey with contentment and ease. In The Full Body Yes, we learn to embrace our common humanity and compassion by wholeheartedly appreciating the gifts of this beautiful, imperfect, and messy life.
As one of the few business leaders who walks the walk, Scott skillfully asserts that we can all change our work and world from the inside out. We recommend this book for anyone who wants to find a way to extend their deepest personal values into an organizational expression of compassion and service.
The Gifts of Compassion: How to understand and overcome suffering
by Stan Steindl
Psychology is a science. Writing about psychology, however, is an art. It takes a gifted writer to describe human nature and the complex human brain in engaging, expressive prose. In The Gifts of Compassion: How to understand and overcome suffering, Stan Steindl, PhD, displays the artistry of a storyteller backed by the knowledge and scientific grounding of a university professor and PhD of clinical psychology.
Steindl is able to hold in tension and bring together many issues that are often concerns of people first approaching compassionate leadership. He deftly treats the importance of integrating the strength and courage required for compassionate action with the kindness and tenderness necessary to acknowledge another’s suffering.
Based on the powerful, scientifically based compassionate mind approach pioneered by Paul Gilbert, Steindl makes this rich material accessible without dumbing it down. His writing is clear and precise, which is invaluable to appreciate the complex nuances of compassion. Steindl distills the extensive body of compassion research into a thoughtful and readable book.
This top five selection, with its focus on compassion, is ideal for anyone seeking to deepen their foundation in compassion for themselves and others to undergird their own compassionate leadership practice.
In closing…
During the closing weeks of 2021, we hope you find time to reflect and envision the next steps in your journey. These books will provide rich energy for your reflections on your own compassionate leadership practice. Please let us know what you discover and enjoy in these books. We’d love to hear your feedback as you make your way through the 2021 recommendations.