A note on compassionate leadership

I think the starting place for any discussion about leadership should be the core values that underlines all health and social care work, which is compassion. To create cultures of compassion, we need more mature approached to leadership, leaving behind command and control, excessive hierarchies and professional silos which create conditions for bullying and burnout. We need a collective approach to leadership of all, by all, for all. Leadership is the responsibility to see those around us rise. And each of us through every interaction at work every day, makes a choice as to which we are creating.

I believe that compassionate leadership subsumes collective and inclusive leadership. If we are compassionate, we include everybody, we seek to involve everybody, to listen to everybody, to empathize with everybody and finally to help everybody. When we lead compassionately, we are concerned to involve everybody, to share leadership, to work across leadership boundaries, to prioritize care overall. Compassionate leaderships means being authentic, being open, being curious, having humility, being appreciative and thereby supporting those who we work with.

The four key behaviours of compassionate leadership are attention, understanding, empathizing and helping.

Firstly, we must pay attention to the ones we lead, and we do that by really being present with the other and listening with fascination. This will help us to arrive to an as accurate as possible understanding of the other’s point of view, of the challenges that those we lead face in their work, of what drives them or what inhibits them from being at their best. We must do this through an open dialogue, not though imposing our understanding of how things should be.

Further we need to have an empathic response for those we lead, caring for them as giving the stress that people face in healthcare service that is key.

Finally, what empathizing does, it gives us motivation for the fourth element of the compassionate leadership, which is helping those who we lead. We must always ask how we can be of service to enable them to do the job that they and us want to see done – which is delivery of high quality, compassionate care.  

I think of all these components the most important skill for a leader is listening with fascination. And the most important task is helping those we lead because above all leadership in not about being in charge, but about taking care of those in our charge.

The most important thing for leaders to start leading in a compassionate way is to start recognizing the importance of self-compassion. To have the resilience and the capacity to lead compassionately, leaders first must pay attention to themselves.  To understand the challenges that they face in their work and in their lives more generally. To really be aware of how they react to stress and pressure, of how tempting is to fall into a tendency to impose authority, to micro-manage, to behave like a boss rather than like a leader when things get difficult. For this, leaders need to empathise with themselves, to care for themselves. And then take intelligent action to help themselves in order that they can be their best selves, the best leaders that they can be and stay close to their core values.