We deeply appreciate that many of you participated in our recent survey exploring Compassionate Leadership Amid the Chaos. The global community responded and we are now able to study the data for key insights. We look forward to sharing full results of the different parts of the survey in the near future. For now, here is a first look at some of the preliminary conclusions that have jumped out at us.
We asked leaders and team members to assess how the leader’s level of compassion has changed in the current crisis. On average, both groups saw more compassion on the part of leaders. Among leaders, 74% said that they have responded to the current crisis with “more compassion” or “much more compassion.” Less than 1% said that they had responded with “less compassion.” Nearly one-half (48%) of team members answered “more compassion” or “much more compassion.” The most common response (46%) was no change, while 6% or respondents said that they were seeing “less compassion” among their leaders.
It is good news that both groups observe that leaders are acting more compassionately. There is however, a “compassion gap.” While 74% of leaders say they are acting with more compassion, only 48% of team members say they are experiencing more compassion from their leaders. This gap also appeared in a second question asking about leader’s responses to the crisis. We look forward to reporting more extensively on what the data tell us about this “compassion gap,” and some remedies available to close it.
In addition to compassion, there were nine additional leadership practices we asked leaders and team members about. There is a strong correlation between how leaders reported they were acting and what team members said in most areas. The one major divergence was in the area of becoming vulnerable, with leaders reporting a much greater frequency of becoming vulnerable than was experienced by team members. We will be digging deep into the details, both in terms of the areas of agreement, and the implications of the different perspectives on vulnerability.
The differences in fears and emotions among leaders and team members was more pronounced than the other areas of the survey. This is critical, as crisis and threat can cause us to shrink our range of perspective and focus more intently on our own needs. Leaders need to be able to understand their team’s emotions and fears to be able to respond to them most productively. This area offers the potential for very valuable learning, and we look forward to reporting our full analysis with specific prescriptive responses to this evidence.
Additional areas from the survey we look forward to studying include:
The broad range of emotions people are experiencing.
How self-employed workers are responding to the crisis.
What respondents are doing to support their wellbeing.
What survey participants believe will come from this crisis in the long run.
What we heard in the open-ended questions.
We would again like to thank all survey participants for sharing your perspectives. The responses are overwhelming in their richness. Our hope is that learnings from the survey will enable us all to transform this tragic crisis into an opportunity for individual and organizational growth, and for bringing more compassion to the forefront.
METHODOLOGY
The Center for Compassionate Leadership received over 200 responses to our survey from around the world. Participants are 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 this post, we refer to those three groups as “leaders,” “team members,” or “self-employed.”