Awakening Compassion at Work summary

Business people are tough and tend to take hard-nosed approaches. But sometimes, showing compassion to workers isn't just good for them as individuals; the business can ultimately reap the benefits.

Simply put, companies that value compassion will perform better.

So let’s dig down and come to grips with what compassion actually involves. The first stage involves the ability to perceive when someone is suffering.

But noticing suffering at work isn’t always as easy as you might think. So how do you actually set about doing so? After all, employees are hardly going to declare their problems to their employers at the top of their lungs.

The business world can be a lively, inventive and progressive place. But, unfortunately, some of its clichés can be pretty harmful too.

You often hear people spout nonsense like, “Work is incompatible with a personal life,” or “When at work, you’re there only to work.” But attitudes like this will only cause suffering in the long run, because they portray suffering as something you just have to put up with.

Empathy is a tricky feeling. It’s not some emotion that emerges from nowhere, completely unprompted – we actually have to put a lot of effort in.

That’s because while empathy is a deep-seated and innate emotion, there are various ways it can be blocked.

Sometimes having empathy isn’t enough – you often need to show it in the moment. In the end, empathy is not a feeling that should percolate over months. This means that if you’re going to successfully display your empathy, you’ll have to imagine yourself as a kind of jazz musician: you’re going to have to improvise!

Practically speaking, if you know you’re not the best at reacting to information in real time, you’ll have to consider your compassionate options for action ahead of when it might be needed.

It’s one thing for an individual to work on becoming more compassionate, but it’s quite another to change an entire company’s culture. It may be tough, but it can be done.

Once, during a trip as organizational researchers, the authors visited Midwest Billing, a company based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Midwest Billing does the paperwork for the area’s hospitals. Its employees are mostly women and there are few opportunities for promotion.

It’s human nature to turn to leaders in times of trouble – we need them for orientation and guidance. That’s why it’s especially important for people in positions of authority to be compassionate. If they are, others are sure to follow.

Put simply, the greatest leaders lead with compassion.