Now that much of the world is moving toward reopening after the COVID lockdown, it’s time to explore the many ways our lives and organizations will change in the post-pandemic society.
In our recent survey, “Compassionate Leadership Amid the Chaos,” we asked participants “What do you believe could come out of this crisis?” Respondents were able to select as many of the nine choices as they felt were correct for this particular question. We also asked people to characterize their primary organizational role as leader, team member, or solo entrepreneur to understand whether there were different reactions to the crisis based on these groupings.
The top three responses we received were consistent across the groups, with a slight variation of the order of the top three. Among all respondents, 73% said that they felt that “Greater awareness of human connectedness” would be something that would come out of this crisis. Given the speed and the manner in which the COVID-19 virus has spread around the globe, this is an understandable result.
The second most common response is not surprising either: 69% of respondents believe that “More job flexibility (e.g. work from home, part time)” will be the result of this current crisis. It is interesting to note that team members foresaw job flexibility as being a most likely outcome (80% of responses). However, only 57% of solo entrepreneurs expected more job flexibility. For a group that probably already has a greater amount of job flexibility, this doesn’t surprise, either.
The third most common response overall and in each group was “Increased compassion for all” with 51% overall response.
The most significant divergence in responses regarded the response of “Organizations exhibiting more care and concern for every individual.” This was the fourth most likely response among leaders (45%), but the eighth choice - or last choice other than “Nothing positive” – among team members (30%). Much like the compassion gap and the differences in emotions experienced described in earlier posts about the survey results, there is a gap between the leaders and their team members. Fortunately, leaders are the people who have the ability to bring “organizations exhibiting more care and concern for each individual” into being. The differences that have emerged from the survey between leaders and team members is somewhat concerning, but it is an issue that we believe can be remedied by intentional action on the part of organizational leadership, specifically action focused on the development of leadership capacity for compassion and compassionate leadership.
The survey did give respondents the choice of “Nothing positive will come from this”, and only 3% of respondents felt that was what would come of our current situation.
Much has been written about taking advantage of the current situation to evolve our human society forward. The results of this survey show that it is possible. If it is going to happen in organizations, we are going to need leaders to bring forth more compassionate organizations. Not only do leaders believe this can happen, they believe that it will. Team members are less optimistic. Now let’s see if leaders can rise to the challenge.
Are there other aspects of these answers that you find particularly interesting? Leave a comment below or send us an email at hqcfcl@gmail.com. We are interested to hear about your reactions to this information or any other comments you have.
Methodology
The Center for Compassionate Leadership conducted a short survey from March 27 – April 10 as a global community project to help us all appreciate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on leadership and compassion. We received over 200 responses from twenty-two countries on all six continents. (We didn’t receive any responses from Antarctica.) Nearly three-fourths of the responses came from the United States, with the United Kingdom and Canada representing another eight and six percent, respectively. We received multiple responses from Rwanda, France, Singapore, and Uganda, while the remaining fifteen countries had one response each.
Sixty-five percent of respondents identified as female, thirty-four percent as male, and one percent as non-binary. In order to best understand the role of compassion in leadership, we asked respondents to categorize themselves as a “leader, founder, or manager,” as an “employee or team member,” or as “self-employed or solo entrepreneur.” In our posts about the survey, we refer to those three groups as “leaders,” “team members,” or “self-employed.” For reference, 50% of respondents identified as leaders, 23% identified as team members, and 28% identified as self-employed.