Compassion has the power to help employees flourish and create stronger, more innovative organizations. The evidence is clear. Creating compassionate organizational environments leads to significant benefits for the organization: lower turnover, higher employee engagement and satisfaction, greater creativity and innovation, and higher-quality connections with deeper trust. For leaders looking to improve their organization, this evidence suggests that finding ways to bring more compassion into our working world should be a no-brainer.
The implementation and application of compassion into systems and organizations is complex and dynamic work. Just looking at the surface level data hides one big catch: the intention behind your compassion matters.
Leaders must be scrupulous in examining their motives to act compassionately.
If you are offering compassion for the benefit of the recipient, research shows the many benefits that follow. We named just a few above. However, if you are offering compassion in order to get your team “better” so that they will help you out more, the approach doesn’t work the same. Fixing others is often a route loaded with false promises.
Researchers will sometimes call these two forms of compassionate action altruistic giving or strategic giving. The two different forms of giving actually trigger responses in different parts of our brain. We humans have highly tuned emotional sensors, and can detect the difference between these types of actions.
Researchers Cutler and Campbell-Meikeljohn, in the journal NeuroImage, define “altruistic choices to give as generous acts with no opportunity to gain extrinsic rewards as a direct result of that interaction. Motivations for giving in these contexts rely on intrinsic rewards … We define strategic choices to give as generous acts that might increase the probability of a defined extrinsic reward. Strategic choices can involve the intrinsic rewards of altruistic choices, but add the possibility of extrinsic gain, which is thought to be the dominant weight in the decision process.”
For our purposes, altruistic giving is compassion offered for the benefit of the recipient, while strategic giving is compassion offered in order to receive something back. When the expected return from strategic giving is more productivity, increased bottom line, or conditional outputs with little care for the person receiving the compassion, change falls short.
Leaders who focus on the economic benefits of compassion may “crowd-out” the more intrinsic motivation to do the right thing. When our focus is solely on the bottom line, we miss opportunities to care for one another. Ironically, this ends up hurting the bottom line.
We have seen this story before. There has been a backlash against efforts to commodify mindfulness in ways that run counter to the original purpose of bringing awareness to work. The mindful leadership movement is no stranger to criticism as the conversation regarding the power and viability of these models of leadership continue to shift and change.
With the 2019 publication of the memorably named book McMindfulness, Ron Purser brought the topic to the foreground. Instead of creating constructive transformation, some leaders used mindfulness to reinforce the status quo: “If my team is more mindful, I can work them harder.”
Compassion and mindfulness, practices that nurture the human spirit, can’t be instrumentalized. They have significant benefits that strengthen the wellbeing of employees, and in turn lead to superior organizational outcomes. But the focus has to start with benefiting the employee, not on how the leader or organization will benefit.
Which leads us back to where we started, our intention. As you steward your organizations, what is your intention for the power of compassion in these places where people come to work, grow and thrive? And how are you caring for others? If you’re feeling brave, share your intention in the comments below. And if you need more time to reflect on what you are hoping to achieve by changing the way you lead, start with the powerful question, what are we trying to gain?