The Center for Compassionate Leadership’s model integrates evidence-based business and scientific principles with the innate intelligence of contemplative wisdom. The model defines and nurtures compassion from the inside out, first with self-compassion, then compassion for others, and finally compassion for the greater good.
The middle circle of the Center for Compassionate Leadership’s Model is where the rubber meets the road. While the inner circle – self-compassion, and the outer circle – compassion for the greater good, both provide a foundation for acting compassionately in the world, compassion for others is where we interact and live in the world.
Having developed self-compassion as a firm foundation from which to lead, you can turn to your day-to-day leadership with compassion for others. The objective of compassion for others is to create environments that foster creativity, connectivity, support teamwork, enhance productivity, and increase team member contentment.
We draw on several well-established disciplines to achieve these objectives, all supported by evidence-based research, and briefly feature three of them below.
Psychological Safety
Google’s Project Aristotle studied team effectiveness to determine the factors that had the greatest impact on team performance. At the end of the extensive two-year study, a single factor emerged as the most important factor by far: psychological safety. Psychological safety is defined by Amy Edmondson, the leading researcher on the topic, as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” Organizations that value psychological safety encourage embracing uncertainty, robust questioning, honest feedback, and recognize that failure is a necessary precondition to success.
Effective Feedback
Effective feedback is a requirement for creating an environment of psychological safety and for maintaining teamwork towards shared goals. Our model teaches the language of effective feedback as well as the methods of sharing feedback most productively. These lessons are applicable to both developmental (or negative) feedback and amplifying (positive) feedback.
Unconscious Bias
Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about groups of people that we form outside of our own conscious awareness. We all hold unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups. Many of these biases originate from survival instincts which have evolved over the course of human history to favor our own type and distrust those not like us. They are deeply ingrained in our genes, but unproductive when trying to lead others. Our model teaches leaders how to identify their biases and how to respond to them productively.
Additional aspects of compassion for others include deep listening, non-violent communication, building trust, developing a growth mindset, emotional regulation, resilience, and aligning mission and culture, which we will address in future posts.
Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, and an advocate for compassionate leadership, speaks to the importance of building cultures and organizations where team members respect and trust one another. “Compassion helps reinforce the fact that we are all on the same team, that we’re all in this trying to realize the same mission, the same vision, manifest and execute against the same strategy… So that’s where I think it can be a game changer.”
What do you think is the game changer that will have the most impact in your organization?
Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash.