Overview: Compassionate leadership allows leaders to connect with their followers on meaningful levels. Compassion builds trust and commitment. By leading compassionately, leaders maximize productivity and employee retention. They build meaningful relationships and encourage employee involvement.
“We are all different. Don’t judge, understand instead.” – Roy T. Bennett.
Compassion is one of the cornerstones of constructive human relationships. In the context of intelligent leadership and leadership coaching, compassion is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.
Leadership compassion facilitates the psychological well-being of employees and their engagement. Genuine compassion comprises empathy, presence, dignity, authenticity, accountability, and integrity. Compassion builds trust, allowing employees on its receiving end to achieve alignment with organizational values and develop psychological ownership of their work.
Intelligent leaders aim to build meaningful relationships. Compassion encourages personal and professional growth, allowing leaders to create cultures predicated upon empathy and an executive coaching mindset.
Some leaders may feel they can accomplish more through authoritarianism and dominance than through compassion and understanding. While that may be true under special circumstances, it doesn’t work over the long term.
Breaking Down Compassionate Leadership
What does it mean to be a compassionate leader? To make compassion a centerpiece of leadership, individuals must ensure they lead with their heads and their souls. Compassionate leaders are:
- Open-minded and have their employees’ best interests at heart
- Accepting and encouraging of diversity in their workforces
- Kind and thoughtful
- Supportive of their employees’ aspirations and needs
- Committed to ensuring the psychological safety and happiness of their teams
Compassionate leaders are masters of cognitive and emotional understanding. They know how to create motivational connections.
How to Lead with Compassion
To show compassion and understand their teams, leaders must know their employees individually. It’s easier to motivate people if leaders understand their passions and motivational triggers. The way to know them is to take the time to engage each team member in conversation. When there is trust, people are eager to share information about their passions and needs.
Active Listening
Active listening allows leaders to pay close attention to what people are telling them. Furthermore, people like to know their opinions and feedback matter. Through active listening, leaders communicate that they do, indeed, value employees’ ideas and opinions.
Some leaders reach out for feedback proactively. Requesting feedback from employees that are passionate about certain projects is an effective way to make them feel appreciated and to motivate them.
To empower and engage employees, leaders can give them opportunities to speak at meetings. They can also provide them with enough time to present their perspectives and acknowledge their contributions.
Implementing Cultures Focused on Compassion
Creating a comprehensive team culture is a lengthy and effort-intensive undertaking. Setting up a framework of values that support compassion is a good start. Communicating these values clearly to team members is the next step. Once everyone is onboard, leaders can use this set of values as a point of reference around which they can rally their teams.
Some values that support compassionate leadership are:
- Collaboration
- Giving and demanding respect
- The appreciation of teamwork
- The acceptance of diversity in perspectives and abilities
- Innovation and openness to change
- Open-minded attitudes
- Steadfast focus on critical thinking
Transparency and Gratitude
Transparency is essential for trust and compassion. Compassionate leaders deliver relevant, direct, and honest criticism coupled with genuine desires to help recipients overcome problems and challenges.
Compassionate leaders won’t keep their employees in the dark about the performance of their organizations and the challenges they meet.
Actively Supporting Employee Well-Being
Compassionate leaders ensure their employees have resources to live healthy, productive lives and establish work-life balances. They lead by example, showing their followers how to achieve the balance that allows them to remain consistent and productive over time.
Compassionate leadership improves productivity, encourages involvement and innovation, builds meaningful relationships, and motivates employees sustainably. Compassion lends a leader power that neither dominance nor authoritarianism could ever match.