Questions about bringing compassion to difficult situations are among the most common queries we receive at the Center for Compassionate Leadership. Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, encourages leaders to take a bigger picture perspective when “hard things” arise.
For our inaugural blog post, we thought we’d start with a question we are all curious about, Compassionate Leadership: “What is it?” First, let’s start with a shared understanding of compassion. A classic definition of compassion is the desire to alleviate the suffering of others. When we break that down, we believe that effective compassion requires three elements: an awareness of others and their feelings, an empathetic response to their condition, and finally an ability and desire to act. The key is putting compassion into action.
