The Case for Compassionate Leadership
Happy Memorial Day Weekend and the unofficial start to the summer season. I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
There’s a lot of talk in management circles on the benefits of empathetic leadership. For the record, I’m fully on board with the shift from directive, “my way or the highway” legacy management styles toward those that encourage more listening and mental agility. However, in our zeal to embark on the journey toward high trust, high accountability corporate cultures, it’s useful to pause and take stock of the meaning of words that are fast becoming part of the corporate lexicon. The last thing we need is for concepts like empathy to land in the category of misunderstood corporate buzzwords that leaders only pay lip service to because they really don’t understand what empathy means and how to apply it.
Said differently, it’s critical for the language we use in business to be helpful in creating organizational clarity. Ambiguity breeds uncertainty and is the path to remaining trapped in low trust, low accountability corporate cultures.
Empathy versus Sympathy
A great place to start the conversation is with definitions. Sympathy is when you share the feelings of others as opposed to empathy where you understand the feelings of others. To distinguish between the two, I like to think of sympathy as the lower standard, or in the terminology of business ethics, it is the less strict standard. To sympathize with someone, all you need do is feel sorrow or pity for their circumstance. Sympathy is self-centered in that it involves emotional understanding from your own perspective only. This selfish perspective often leads to providing others who are faced with challenges with unhelpful/unwanted advice which can be interpreted as passing judgment. Sympathy is a surface-level emotion and does not foster deeper human connections.
To empathize, I have to understand the feelings of another human. Empathy is non judgmental. Empathetic leaders use active listening in an effort to seek to understand, and avoid “gotcha” questions that are designed to tear others down.
Empathy is incredibly useful skill to hone as part of a broader emotional intelligence toolkit that also includes sub-skills like self-awareness, self-regulation, understanding social cues, and motivation. To be empathetic means that you are aware of other people’s feelings and can imagine what it must be like to be in their shoes.
If I’m acting with empathy, I can imagine what it must be like but I don’t necessarily verbalize that I’ve “walked in someone else’s shoes”—big difference. Don’t try to “one up” the other party and convince them that you’ve had it worse in an attempt to make them feel better. It won’t. All “one upping” does is focus the attention back on you.
As a business leader, you’ve likely had many shared experiences with your direct reports/colleagues that lead to genuine feelings of empathy for a challenge they’re going through or an obstacle they’re working to overcome. It’s critical for leaders to recognize that the difference in organizational position (boss versus report) and the distance in time between your experience and theirs will have an impact on how your feelings of empathy toward others will be interpreted. The hard reality is that even the most well-intended expressions of empathy are likely to be initially met with skepticism. This is why consistency, persistence, and showing vulnerability when appropriate are also key ingredients in the empathetic leadership equation.
Empathy versus Compassion
My goal with this muse is to gently, but purposefully change the arc of the conversation in corporate circles around the concept of empathy and empathetic leadership. In my opinion, empathy is great, but it lacks two essential ingredients—the willingness/ability to help, and the ability to detach. Compassion represents a logical extension of empathy as it combines the ability to recognize someone else’s feelings and the motivation to help them do something about it. This addition of the motivation to help requires an ability to separate or detach oneself from the challenge the other person is experiencing. Without this ability to mentally detach, their challenge or pain becomes yours and carrying around that emotional burden will ultimately lead to your own exhaustion and burnout. Yes, it’s awesome that you feel another’s pain and want to help alleviate it, but if it’s at the expense of your own well-being, what’s the point?
Therefore, I recommend a shift in terminology from empathetic leadership to compassionate leadership. Why? In a business context, it’s not enough to be empathetic toward the emotional challenges that stem from a project failure, broken process, and/or interpersonal conflict. To truly build a high trust, high accountability culture, we must be willing to reach across the aisle and lend a hand. To recognize emotional distress from a business challenge and then turn around and not do anything about its root cause, in my opinion, puts us in the same place as a self-centered sympathetic response.
A shift to compassionate leadership will truly send the signal that “we’re all in this together,” and that the journey toward a high trust, high accountability culture is shared across the organization. After all, flow that stems from smooth handoffs along the company’s value stream(s) is only achievable when we’re all willing/able to understand the challenges that are occurring up or downstream, and we’re all willing/able to do something about them—even when those challenges are not of our own making.
Learn more about establishing a high trust, high accountability culture in my book, The Balanced Business.
If you’re wondering why I sign off many of my muses with Grace, Dignity, and Compassion, now you know why compassion is part of my tagline…
