Chris Whitehead’s Compassionate Leadership: Creating Places of Belonging advances a structure of compassionate leadership that is strongly consistent with the model we have developed at the Center for Compassionate Leadership. After a foundational section on the human mind – critical for understanding compassion and how humans experience it – the book addresses Compassion for One Another, Compassion for Teams, and Compassion for Yourself. Each of these three areas are core parts of our model. The conclusions the book reaches and the teaching it prescribes overlap quite nicely with ours. I guess you can tell that we strongly endorse the point of view represented in Compassionate Leadership.
The subtitle of the book: “Creating Places of Belonging” refers to the author’s desire to offer a path to developing the opposite of workplaces that Gareth Morgan has termed “psychic prisons.” Mr. Whitehead is an executive coach, and the book develops a very direct, concrete path and prescribed actions for creating such a workplace. The breadth of territory that is covered is intentionally very wide and it is covered in a well-structured manner. Because of this breadth, it is impossible to cover any of the subjects extensively. The book often relies on the philosophical underpinning of one or two major teachers in the field – presumably those who have formed the basis of Mr. Whitehead’s coaching principles.
Each of the forty plus chapters closes with a recap of the key points of the chapter and a resource where one can learn more on the topic, providing a substantial bibliography for the ambitious learner wishing to go deeper. This alone would make the book a valuable resource for any library, but the much more compelling reason to read this book is for the thoughtful coverage of the full landscape of compassionate leadership that it offers.
Compassionate Leadership: Creating Places of Belonging is available for Kindle readers worldwide, from Amazon for readers in the UK, as well as directly from his website, https://www.compassionate-leadership.co.uk/. It would make a useful addition to the library of anyone interested in compassionate leadership.