About
The Compassionate Leader
The Compassionate Leader is a home and community for leaders, teams, organizations and change agents committed to the practices of compassionate leadership and psychological safety to enable accelerated learning, growth and flourishing.
At the heart of compassionate leadership is the capacity to attune to others with a view to increasing their flourishing and well-being by enabling empowered action and transformational change. At its simplest it involves:
Attending – slowing down and paying attention to others at a deeper level
Understanding – ‘cognitive’ empathy of others’ wishes and struggles
Empathizing – ‘affective’ empathy where others ‘feel felt’ and can connect with their emotional intelligence
Helping / Enabling – either taking direct action to help or in a coaching context, enabling others to take empowered action
Transformation
The Compassionate Leader: Enabling collective intelligence, empowered action, and transformational change.
Since its inception in 2019 The Compassionate Leader has facilitated and enabled three major transformation programs:
Coaching Through Covid – a compassionate coaching response for doctors and nurses in ICUs and others in the frontline of the pandemic – impacting the lives of over 650 frontline workers and the resulting ripple out to their patients, families, friends and colleagues.
Caerus Change – equipping over 400 practitioners in EMEA to use the Fearless Organization Scan and helping Microsoft scale psychological safety across its Western Europe business – read the Harvard Business School case study here
Key UK Government defence organization – a four-year program (ongoing) enabling the embedding of psychological safety into their cultural transformation making the world a safer place.
Inspiration
The Compassionate Leader was inspired by vows taken with two extraordinary human beings many years ago.
Both are concrete examples of a different kind of leadership. The kind of leadership that our world very much needs today to create a better, safer, more sustainable future. Fortunately, contemplative neuroscience now better understands the impact of certain mental training in supporting flourishing at an individual, organizational system and societal level.
Compassionate leadership is something we can all aspire and move towards. It’s a core part of our DNA as human beings – a natural state, and something we can all access given the right conditions. And importantly, it’s something that can be practiced and cultivated through mental training – much like going to the gym. And when we do, it creates the conditions for us and those around us to flourish and thrive.
So, the practice of Compassionate Leadership is about creating the conditions for growth and flourishing – our own, others and the world around us.