Compassion
Compassion is the ultimate empowered (and empowering) state. It is sometimes described as empathy + action. In this respect it could be seen as the pinnacle of emotional intelligence.
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
Let’s place compassion within an integrated model of psychological safety and the Learning Organization / Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO).
At a common-sense level, we can see that if we are listened to compassionately (attending, understanding, empathizing, and helping) then this would support psychological safety.
If we move beyond common sense to neuroscience and neurobiology we find the relationship between compassion training, the vagus nerve, and the neuroception of safety. Move beyond this and we can see how compassion supports a movement toward an important human emotional regulation system – calm and connect.
From this place, as human beings, we are better able to access the more generative parts of the brain that support collaboration, innovation and learning.
“Psychological safety is the perception that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”
Over 20 years of research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard University point to psychological safety being one of the most important components in a Learning Organization.
Such organizations, sometimes referred to as Deliberately Developmental Organizations, innovate and learn faster than their competitors and become more adept at transformation and transforming the marketplaces in which they exist. In many cases they create new markets. Either way, they are associated with growth and flourishing rather than stagnation or decay.
So, when we look at compassion and compassionate leadership in this way, it moves us beyond knowing that IQ is not enough, and that emotional intelligence matters. It points to a systemic relationship between compassion and human learning, growth, and flourishing. It places compassion at the heart of things.
Compassionate Leadership in Action
When we look to examples of compassionate leadership in the world today there are many, but perhaps the most prominent in the world of technology is Jeff Weiner, Chairman of LinkedIn. Jeff has been a practitioner of compassionate leadership for many years. During his 11-year tenure as CEO, LinkedIn grew its membership base from 33M to more than 690M, increased its revenue from $78M to over $7.9B and expanded the team from 338 employees to over 16,000. Given the growth of its network, it is most certainly fulfilling its purpose of “Connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale.”
And what of Satya Nadella, Jeff Weiner’s boss? We don’t yet fully know his legacy as CEO of Microsoft, but Cloud and AI are already two significant contributions to humanity. Again, Microsoft is most certainly living its purpose to “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Hear from Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of LinkedIn, about the rationale for exercising compassion in leadership.
When we link this back to the Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO) we see that leaders at later stages of adult development tend to have
certain practices that have supported their development and capacity to lead transformational change. Bill Joiner (2007) found that 50% of later stage Co-creators had a regular meditation practice, and 85% of Synergists.
Similarly, Professor Robert Kegan at Harvard University also found that a disproportionate number of Stage 5 adults (Self-Transforming Mind) had made self-transcendent experiences like meditation, martial arts, and other state-shifting practices a central part of their lives.
Slowing Down to Speed Up
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs) are experiences where, for a brief moment, people feel lifted above their day-to-day concerns, their sense of self fades away and they feel connected to something bigger.
Many Stage 5 adults described their frequent access to self-transcendent states as the “turbo-button” for their development, leading Kegan to state that transitioning to Stage 5 requires self-transcendence: where the self transcends its boundaries (the individual ego) and becomes part of something larger.
We offer powerful experiential learning in
compassionate leadership
and
compassionate listening. In the case of the latter, we apply this to key business/strategic topics in order to access new levels of breakthrough thinking and insight.
And the most powerful form of compassionate leadership development we provide is Compassion Cultivation Training. This is development ‘from the inside out’. Vertical leadership development of this kind changes the way we see and experience ourselves and the world and the decisions and actions we take in it. It supports leaders to navigate complexity with greater ease and to facilitate transformational change. Healthy ego development sits at the heart of this.
Come join one of our programs.
"Ego can climb Mount Everest, not Mount Kailash.
Because Kailash is inside you. Climbing it means end of Ego.
- Shunya