Myth-lighting: Compassionate Leadership
So, what do we mean by compassionate leadership and what are the myths around it?
The term compassionate leadership is the ‘practice of using your head and your heart to inspire and influence people so they can, in turn, inspire and influence others’ (Forbes: What Is Compassionate Leadership, Donnellan, 2022)
The notion of there being two types of leaders originated back as early as the 1950s, where distinctions were drawn between task-orientated leaders and socio-emotional leaders (Bales, 1958)*. It’s fair to say that the qualities we have long associated with leadership in general often fell into the “task-orientated” camp, with its association around goals, focus, logic and reasoning. Unfortunately, these are still solely often qualities we seek out today when selecting people who take leadership roles.
Socio-emotional leadership focuses us on self-awareness, ethical decision making, creative and insightful problem solving as well as social cognition, which are also skills we now regard as entrepreneurial and vital for growing and thriving businesses and most importantly, connecting with the people we work with*.
Advances in neuroscience now educate us that all of us have two different networks in our brains that allow us to be both task-orientated and socio-emotional focused – but not at the same time! When we activate one, it suppresses the other network, and vice versa (Jack et al., 2012; Boyatzis et al, 2014) – so if we spend more time using only one network, it will always suppress our access and practice of the other.
Surely great leaders should be able to lead from both? The good news is, it’s possible.
So, why would you bother focusing on this? There are numerous studies on the impact of heart-focused leadership, just some of the benefits include higher productivity and morale, higher levels of engagement and much better retention, not just of talented staff but also clients. The adoption of change has also shown to be faster and more seamless in organisations that can show heart and well as their head.
In an article by the Harvard Business Review, ‘Power can corrupt leaders, compassion can save them’, 2018, it stated that 91% of leaders surveyed said compassion is very important for leadership; while 80% said it was an area they wanted to improve on but didn’t know how.
So, what are the drawbacks? Here are some of the comments I’ve heard over the years,
“It’s fluffy leadership”
“It leads to an inability to have tough conversations”
“There’s no room in business for emotions”
“Any challenge is seen as bullying”
The science and the data counteract these views (reading suggestions below!)- compassionate leadership is a balance of both head and heart, not either or. Leaders need time to pause, think, reflect, in order to access both brain networks – or as Daniel Kahneman would call it, thinking slow. Compassionate leadership cannot be successful in isolation, it needs to exist and thrive in a business where the focus on culture is more than some words written on a wall and where performance is measured by the quality and skill of output.
And yes, we’ve not touched on the role of empathy here and how it differs to compassion, we’re keeping that topic for another “mythlight”, so watch this space.
* The Neuroscience of Leadership Coaching – Bossons, Riddell & Sartain, 2015
Further Reading:
❖ Dare to Lead – Bréne Brown
❖ Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates People and Organizations – Monica C. Worline and Jane E. Dutton, 2017
❖ The Neuroscience of Leadership Coaching – Bossons, Riddell & Sartain, 2015
❖ Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
❖ Compassionomics (The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference) – Trzeciak and Mazzarelli, 2019
