'You care too much'

"You care too much about your team." Those words, from a colleague in HR, rang alarm bells in my ears. Did I care too much? Was I being a "soft touch"? Perhaps I was failing in my duties as a director. Worried, I asked my colleague why my level of care was more than she expected. She shrugged. "You're always looking for ways to find more support and to give people chances. That's fine, I guess, but you just seem too invested."

I understood. From her perspective, my attempts to understand and support my team, to give them resources in times of difficulty, to be compassionate towards their suffering, was perceived as a weakness. Sadly, this didn't surprise me. Being compassionate at work is often viewed as being weak, a soft option, or an easy choice. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. Compassionate leadership can be hard to do, especially when yours is a dissenting voice, but it is certainly worth the effort.

It is increasingly understood that compassion is one of the most effective and impactful leadership approaches available. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that compassion training significantly improves our wellbeing, makes us more likely to support each other in times of need, and is strongly correlated with perceptions of positive leadership. Rather than leading through fear and retribution, experiencing compassion from others allows people to stay calmer instead of acting with fear. When we feel fear or threat from leadership, our amygdala – the small yet powerful part of our brain which is responsible for threat detection – releases stress hormones which prepare our bodies to either fight the threat or try to escape from it. This is why, when we feel unsafe, our reactions are typically fight, flight or simply freeze.

As well as being damaging for individuals, such responses are detrimental to any workplace. People who consider their workplaces to be psychologically safe will stay longer and perform better than those who feel unsafe. In a psychologically safe environment, people feel able to challenge without retribution, co-create better solutions, and will learn from mistakes rather than burying them in a volatile corporate graveyard. By stark contrast, those who do not feel safe at work are more likely to hide mistakes and, ultimately, to leave. Even while they remain, an employee in the grip of fear cannot produce their best work and is unlikely to collaborate effectively. The impact of draconian leadership on both individual wellbeing and organisational performance is devastating.

By contrast, a compassionate context helps us to regroup and maintain more of an equilibrium. Experiencing compassion allows our prefrontal cortex – the area of our brain which regulates our emotions, thoughts and subsequent actions – to consider then modify the amygdala's stress detection. In a compassionate environment, we allow our calmer, more considered prefrontal cortex to remind our amygdala that we are, in fact, safe. When we feel safe, we have less anxiety, make better decisions, collaborate more effectively and experience a host of individual wellbeing benefits. So, we can see that compassion is anything but weak. It is, in fact, an incredibly powerful and humane approach to life and leadership.  

An Achilles Heel?

Maybe my colleague was right, though, if my care was excessive. Is there a point at which our care for others is overplayed, and our compassionate strength becomes our Achilles Heel? In a way, any singular leadership approach has risks. Tough leadership styles can lead to fear and underperformance. Overly-compassionate leadership styles might result in a leader becoming overwhelmed by everyone else's suffering, and colleagues might take advantage of any perceived softness inherent in a compassionate approach. As in many areas of life, it is in the extremes where things become difficult: Introvert vs. extrovert. Strong vs. weak. Statistically speaking, most of us will occupy a middle ground – as an ambivert, with both introversion and extroversion aspects to our personalities, or as a non-linear, complex human who contains a multitude of both strengths and weaknesses.

Instead of extremes, perhaps consider this continuum. At one end, we have empathy, where we can feel how another person might be feeling and so consider their perspective. The proverbial walk in another person's shoes, if you like. In the middle, we take action to alleviate suffering, and so turn empathy into compassion. Empathy plus action equals compassion. To the other end of the continuum, we have altruism. Altruism is where we do good for others, even when it is to our own detriment; we are so exhausted by our compassionate action that we are like a wrung-out dishcloth which cannot absorb another drop. In altruism, our action to alleviate all the suffering we experience fails to consider one critical person: ourselves. We need to learn to position and balance ourselves in the middle of this continuum, firmly in compassion. By neither languishing in empathy or hurtling into altruism, we can be truly, usefully compassionate.  

Did I care too much? If I was tipping into altruism, then possibly, yes. If I was forgetting to check my own resources and remain mindful of my typical patterns of behaviour, then almost certainly. But if I was noticing the suffering of people I worked with, feeling a very human, emotional response to their pain, checking my resources, and taking action to alleviate that suffering, then I was not caring "too much".  I was simply practicing compassion. We all suffer, just in different ways and at different times, and we all benefit from compassion.

Too much?

What about the risk that people will take advantage of compassion in their leaders? Compassionate leadership does not turn a blind eye to anti-social behaviours or under-performance. Accountability and results are still hallmarks of any compassionate organisation; indeed, positive financial and social organisational outcomes are supported and reinforced by compassion. How that compassion is expressed may vary by context: supervision support for therapists is a compassionate mainstay of the healing professions, just as the moments shared between soldiers who have lost a colleague are also a compassionate response to suffering. When things go wrong, the compassionate leader seeks to understand rather than rushing to judgement and retribution. Regardless of the context, a compassionate response nurtures psychological safety and, in doing so, creates the conditions for safety, innovation and growth.    

The individual and organisational benefits of caring deeply and being consciously compassionate are significant. Compassionate leadership reduces anxiety and fear, improves engagement amongst employees, results in more collaboration and supports our brains to make better decisions. Such results are critical to organisational and individual health, and so far outweigh any perception of compassionate care being "too much".

- Kirstie Drummond Papworth is a psychologist, Behavioural Change Executive Coach and compassion researcher. She works as an executive director at a leading global business school and runs her own successful behavioural change consultancy, Tangerine Thistle. She holds webinars and workshops for the British Psychological Society, and has delivered keynote addresses on compassionate leadership for BBC Radio and TEDx conferences.

About the book: Our volatile, complex, and fragile world requires leaders who understand how compassion connects them with their employees, stakeholders and wider communities. Yet many leaders are reluctant to embrace this emotional response lest they appear weak. Compassionate Leadership draws on new and established research to show that compassion is, in fact, a formidable and sustainable force for positive leadership. By dissecting the common myths, pitfalls, and concerns about demonstrating consideration, Papworth emphasises the individual benefits and shows how leaders can design a business which establishes and reinforces a compassionate culture.