The evidence is compelling. Leaders who act with compassion preside over organizations with lower turnover, more committed employees, and create the opportunity for greater creativity and innovation. It’s important to acknowledge that compassionate leadership is a path and a process that evolves as we grow, more than it is a destination. Effective compassionate leaders point their compass in the right long-term direction and pay attention to what is right in front of them.
Start by taking stock of what you can see every day.
Compassion, and its positive impacts, don’t exist in the future. They exist right here, right now. If you want to measure your compassion and its impacts, start here. You might be amazed at how easily you will recognize the benefits of your compassionate acts.
The first component of compassion is awareness, and our awareness shrinks rapidly under stress. How quickly do you return to a calm state after a major upset or difficult conversation? Can you find ways to return faster?
Compassion depends on our ability to connect to and experience the feelings of others. How many times did you reach out to others today beyond the required minimum? What percentage of your encounters today did you start with a warm greeting? How many times did you look at your phone or email during conversations today?
Measure the things within your control and trust the process. By focusing on your own awareness and where you focus your attention, you will become aware of how you are spending the time in your days. By focusing on how you respond to others, you will quickly see when you are offering compassion and when you aren’t. You will also begin to see the impact on how you feel in your body and your mind, and how others respond to you. Everything else will follow – the lower staff turnover, the higher customer satisfaction scores, and more engaged, creative teams, for example.
Don’t compare your scorecard with others.
Whether it is in webinars, on the vast array of self-publishing web platforms, or on social media, you are seeing others’ “Greatest Hits.” Comparing your own everyday experience to those greatest hits will always result in challenging comparisons. The point of measurement is to provide you guidance for how you are progressing down the path. The comparison you want to be making is how well you are doing relative to your own goals, not relative to someone else.
Do what you can, and then let go.
There has always been suffering in the world, and there always will be. If you aim to eliminate all of the suffering in the world, in your organization, or even in your own life, you are assured of failure and certain burnout. The paradoxical aspect of easing up is that when you allow yourself more space you likely will find that you can accomplish more. The mantra of “work smarter, not harder,” has been offered so often of late that it has become almost cliché. In reality, this is a timeless idea. Martin Luther, who lived from 1483 to 1546, is reputed to have said, “I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours in prayer.” Our quiet time is the ever-replenishing internal resource pool that creates energy, capacity, and creativity for our active time.
Remember what can’t be measured.
Technological strides in our lifetimes have made measurement easier and more powerful. Whether it is the scans of modern neuroscience that show the precise mechanism driving our feelings and actions, or the ability of big data and AI to analyze massive amounts of information, we live in an era of never-ending measurement. Our future growth, however, lies in what we cannot yet measure. One day, no doubt, science will be able to explain and measure the impact of a lovingkindness practice on someone far away. Warmheartedness may be as easy to measure in the future as our body temperature. Don’t wait, however, for a scientist in a lab coat to be able to explain your intuitive knowing and the mysterious ways of universal energy. Things not measurable in a lab can still be assessed in that deepest part of ourselves, and can provide more valuable insight than FMRI scans of our brains.
In closing…
Measuring the impact of compassion at an organizational level is vitally important. Those impacts occur because of many individual acts combined with organizational policies and procedures that support a compassionate culture. That said, as leaders we each have our unique part to play to contribute to the larger whole.
Remember this is a process – there is no destination. Take stock of your behavior by observing your own feelings, responses, and interactions. Notice your baseline and continue to practice as you grow more compassionate day by day, action by action.