In this accelerating, complex and pressurized world, it feels as if we are forced to choose between our well-being, caring for others, and delivering peak performance as leaders. Compassionate leadership offers a proven pathway that allows us to thrive in all aspects of personal and professional life. By creating environments of safety, connection, and belonging, leaders can shape workplaces that hold deeper meaning and generate greater impact for themselves and their teams.
Traditional models of leadership in Western culture tend to assume that compassion weakens power and leadership. Research evidence does not support this view. In fact, compassion not only enhances operational performance, it also strengthens perceptions of leadership skills for those who lead with compassion. In this blog post, we highlight three hallmarks of compassionate leadership that can elevate your teams and organizations to a less stressed, greater flourishing, and higher performing place.
Compassionate Leaders Create Environments of Safety
Our brain is constantly scanning the world around us for threats. This caution is what has allowed us to survive and evolve as a species. As many a witty pundit has said, “We didn’t evolve from the laidback apes.” When we sense a threat, our reptilian brain takes control and we move into fight, flight, or freeze mode. This is particularly helpful if we come upon a rattlesnake on a hiking trail, but almost counterproductive when our threats are non-life threatening and as frequent as a critical comment or negative interaction.
Compassionate leadership transforms workplaces by responding to team members in ways that help them sustain a feeling of safety, and also help them return to a feeling of safety after being challenged in a way that knocks them off of a stable center (resilience). The tools that leaders can use to create the safe environment include forms of communication, defining the team mindset, and how one reacts to both failure and success.
Physical safety is a basic requirement, and in many dangerous workplaces, organizations focus on safety to minimize risk of injury. However, most organizations and leaders can do more to create emotionally safe environments. In organizations that emphasize psychological safety, people feel comfortable speaking up, whether it is with concerns and questions for a chosen path, or to name mistakes or failures within a given project. The safe, open dialogue leads to much higher levels of creativity, engagement, innovation, and contentment among team members.
Compassionate Leaders Create Environments of Connection
You can hire the most talented individuals in the world, but if they don’t pull as one team, the individual genius will be wasted. Compassionate leaders understand how to create connection among team members to supercharge collaborative thinking and results.
Building connection begins with creating and communicating a shared set of values, goals and objectives for the organization or team. Compassionate leaders understand how to cast a strong vision for the future, shape that vision in partnership with one’s team to strengthen the vision and get collective buy-in, and then how to translate the vision into concrete actions and tasks that move the group forward toward the goal.
Cooperation vs. competition? One way connection can be undermined is when team members separate themselves from the group, either due to failure or to success. Compassionate leaders understand how to support people to allow them to bounce back quickly from failure, and how to celebrate success in ways that keep those who succeed fully connected to the team.
Compassionate Leaders Create a Strong Sense of Belonging
Compassionate leaders create environments that develop two related forms of belonging. Every member of the team is valued for who they are and compassionate leaders ensure that they understand that they are valued, seen and heard by the way they are treated.
We are all wired with the same deep desire to belong. Compassionate leaders are able to move teams beyond themselves to see how they each fit into the greater scheme of shared organizational purpose and common humanity.
Transforming culture in these three ways establishes a strong foundation for organizations seeking to evolve with truly compassionate values. Over the next three weeks, we will go into greater depth into each of these three conditions of a thriving compassionate organization: safety, connection, and deeper belonging.
This is one post in a series of posts about creating a culture of compassion. The other posts in this series are:
Compassionate Leaders Create Psychological Safety