Compassionate Leadership Explained

Empathy vs. Compassion

Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s emotional life, almost in all its complexity, both cognitively and emotionally. Empathy creates a feeling of understanding the other party. It is instinctive, rooted in our brains, and it is what in psychology they call cognitive empathy. Most people mean this when referring to being empathic.

However this is only one part of empathy, the other is emotional empathy. The Professor of Psychology at Yale University, Paul Bloom, says, “Recent research in neuroscience and psychology (to say nothing of what we can see in our daily lives) shows that empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel.” 

On the other hand, compassion would be when you see another person in trouble and want to help them selflessly. A clear example is when a person in the street drops their shopping basket, and you help them pick everything up, even if it means you miss the bus that takes you to work. 

This is because compassion refers to the empathetic understanding of a person’s feelings (emotional empathy), accompanied by kindness (natural inclination or tendency to do good) and altruism (seeking the good of others selflessly) to calm the pain of that person. Compassion creates a feeling of selflessly helping the other part.

Why is Compassionate Leadership important?

Through the development of emotional empathy, compassion must create an emotional distance between the individual and the situation. This emotional distance allows you not to fall into biases, such as treating your teams better than the rest due to proximity and being aware of treating everyone equally.

We can be more resilient with compassion, helping ourselves and others recover from problems with learning and improve our overall well-being (The EU will allocate €5.1 billion over the next seven years to help build resilience in health).

Compassion at this point creates honesty and transparency, generating a more psychologically safe work environment and strengthening personal and professional ties.

It also allows you to focus on the outside, the customer and their pain, and how to help them with the product or service to mitigate or overcome that pain by covering their needs.

Compassion can allow us to increase motivation and engagement with our employees and customers, facilitating new, more productive work environments. 

People feel more secure and protected, valued by being able to act for themselves, receiving and giving help to others.

Compassion generates a higher retention rate in employees through their leaders. People feel more involved, secure, and willing to collaborate as equals. Compassion breaks the hierarchical or pyramidal barriers of the organization.

Examples of Compassionate Leaders

Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi are two of the best-known Compassionate Leaders throughout human history.

During Covid-19, Compassionate Leadership has been seen in all areas: food distribution in places where people could not leave their homes, applications and home delivery systems by neighbors who acted as Compassionate Leaders to advanced people age, etc.

In organizations, where even governments have restored the return to offices, companies have maintained teleworking five days a week to facilitate family reconciliation for their employees.

What are the traits of a Compassionate Leader?

What makes a leader a Compassionate Leader? Let’s look into some of their characteristics:

• Active listening
  Compassionate Leaders listens to their teams. But, they also communicate that they are fully aware of what they are told, being attentive and empathic at all times.

• Humility
  It is a human virtue attributed to those who have developed awareness of their own limitations and weaknesses, and act accordingly.

• Acceptance
  Compassionate Leaders accept that every person and client has a personal life with worries outside of work.

• Emotional empathy
  Compassionate Leaders yearn to understand the other person and feel their pain as their own.

• Kindness
  Compassionate Leaders want to do good for other people.

• Altruism
  Compassionate Leaders perform acts of kindness without expecting anything in return from others.