Why compassion is the key to successful strategy
Over coffee with another consultant last week, the topic of sympathy vs. empathy vs. compassion came up. They told me about a keynote they had seen on the importance of empathetic leadership and confessed that they often found empathy draining. They felt guilty for saying this, but I assured them that they are not alone.
Empathy, or experiencing another person's emotions as if those emotions were your own, can be draining
Here’s why: taking on the emotions and emotional pain of another person as our own can result in empathetic distress. Rather than motivating us to help the other person, empathetic distress can cause overwhelm, withdrawal, and burnout.
Additionally, empathy, or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, can sometimes simply be impossible. For example, I cannot fully understand the experience of a wheelchair user in New York City. Someone who has never experienced food insecurity cannot fully understand the experience of food insecurity. Someone who has never been the primary caregiver of a newborn baby cannot fully understand the experience of being the primary caregiver of a newborn baby.
And we should not have to fully understand the experience of someone in order to care for them.
That’s where compassion comes in, and it’s one of the most valuable and underutilized qualities in leadership (and life!)
Sympathy, empathy, and compassion are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. While sympathy and cognitive empathy are similar (you understand what someone is going through but your emotional state doesn’t match theirs; even though the phrase “I feel bad for them” is almost synonymous with sympathy, a more accurate phrase might be “I’m thinking about how bad they must feel”), emotional empathy means that you feel the same feelings as another person – or try to, in the case of flexing the empathy muscle.
Compassion goes beyond mere emotion to include the active intention to help others.
I don’t need to understand the experience of a wheelchair user in New York City to advocate for working elevators at subway stations or curb cuts on sidewalks.
I don’t need to fully understand the experience of food insecurity to donate to food pantries or support policies that address the root causes of hunger, including poverty, systemic discrimination, and inequities in access to housing, health care, child care, education, and other basic needs.
I have been the primary caregiver of a newborn baby and can assure you that I did not in any way understand the experience of being the primary caregiver of a newborn baby before I had the experience.
I don’t need to have the experience or feel the actual pain. But I do need to care.
I’m not saying don’t feel empathy. I’m saying don’t stop there. We can kind of look at it like a journey, the root of which is caring. Sympathy can be caring to notice. Empathy can be caring to get curious. Compassion is caring to take action.
Don’t just notice someone’s pain, feel bad for them, and move on with your day. Don’t wonder why someone is struggling, start to feel your own sense of distress, and stop there. Take action – practice compassion.
Because compassion is a practice
It’s something that must be done rather than simply felt. And unlike empathy, I don’t feel drained when I practice compassion. Compassion can take resources like time, money, or energy, but it doesn’t leave me feeling distressed. Research has shown that the phrase “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer, and rather than causing a dopamine depletion like emotional empathy can, compassion is neurologically rejuvenating.
Compassion is simply a sympathetic consciousness of someone else's distress along with a desire to alleviate it – but not many leaders want to acknowledge that there might be distress at work
Say you’re growing your team and to support this growth, you’re launching a new management training for newly-promoted folks as well as those who have been in management roles for a while so that everyone has an aligned management philosophy and practice. Super simple and standard organizational change!
All of a sudden, a six-session management training pops up on someone’s calendar. Maybe it conflicts with meetings they had, or they had no clue that they were part of it, or they’re just bogged down and don’t want another thing on their plate, or they’re promoting someone on their team and now they have to stop and wonder, should the promoted person take the training too? Who should they ask?
All of this can cause distress! It’s time-consuming, tiring, and a burden to deal with organizational change, even when the change seems positive.
And this change process hasn't even gotten to the important (actual change) part: the fact that the managers need to learn and then do the new management behaviors the training is supposed to teach them.
If you caused these folks distress, do you think they are going to skip into this training, ready to roll? No, they're not.
Of course you don't want to alleviate the distress by canceling the training, but you can alleviate distress with your overall strategy. And the earlier you do this, the better.
So here are a few inflection points in the change process where you can leverage compassion to design a better strategy:
Ideation: From the very spark of an idea
The moment a leader says (to themselves or others) "Hey, we’re going to do this new thing," they should think: What challenges or barriers do we anticipate for people? So often, folks get an idea and jump straight into project mode, but considering a change's impact on people can alter the direction of a change strategy itself — and for the better, because the earlier you think of challenges and barriers, the earlier you can design a strategy that supports folks on their journey to your desired future state.
Navigation: Managing the project, supporting the people
If you come to a crossroads during your change and you’re deciding between a few different paths, before you get too deep into your spreadsheets and project management tools, consider the human beings: How will each path impact employees? The aim is not to choose a path that everyone likes; the aim is to consider the impact of a decision on your people to help you imagine the real-life outcomes of your cost calculations and projections.
Communication: Asking someone to change their behavior causes disruption
Each and every time you’re going to ask people to do something differently, your strategic north star should be: How can we reduce burdens and barriers to people adopting these new behaviors? Will your emails shock folks or smooth things out? Will your invitation irk or induce a sense of ease? Will managers who have to reinforce these behaviors feel abandoned or empowered?
Compassion is a gut check
Just caring enough to notice your people as people, get curious about how change will impact them, and then take action to alleviate the burdens and challenges of change will result in better, people-centered strategies every single time.
