Compassionate Leadership

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

Compassionate leadership is a relatively new area of leadership for both scholars and practitioners, and it is gaining relevance — particularly in organizations that focus on human-to-human interaction. After a brief conceptual overview, the session will focus on identifying and exploring the fundamentals of compassionate leadership, and engaging in practical, developmental exercises aimed at improving the essential behaviors of compassionate leaders. The goal of this workshop is to spark a community of practice around compassionate leadership in order to build a network of practitioners and scholars focused on this topic.

Detailed Abstract

In this workshop, we start with our experiences of developing compassionate leadership in the health and social care sector. As compassion is the core value of many health and care systems, and a core work value of almost all those who work within these systems, it is vital that leaders embody compassion through their leadership. Not only has compassionate leadership a profound effect upon quality of patient care (clinical effectiveness, safety, patient experience and efficient use of resources); the health, well-being and engagement of staff; but also on the extent of innovation within the health and social care system that will deliver the changes and improvements needed to deliver the care that communities require.

Compassion can be described as having four behavioural components: attending, understanding, empathising, helping. It means first paying attention to the other person – to use Nancy Klein’s l phrase: ‘listening with fascination’; second is coming to an understanding of what is causing the other person difficulty or pain or distress; third is having an empathic, felt response; and fourth, taking thoughtful or intelligent action to help them. We need leaders at every level – as the carriers of culture – to embody compassion in their leadership.
Attending: This means leaders paying attention to those they lead - listening to them with fascination – taking the time to listen to the accounts of the experiences of staff throughout their work – the challenges, obstacles, frustrations, and hurts as well as the successes and delights.

Understanding: The second component involves leaders achieving an understanding of the situation others face. Ideally, this is best done in conjunction with staff because a shared understanding is likely to be both more accurate and helpful.

Empathizing: The third component of compassionate leadership is empathizing. Compassionate leaders are emotionally in touch with the distress or difficulties of those they lead; while being able to tolerate and not over identify with their distress.

Helping: The fourth component of compassionate leadership is taking thoughtful and intelligent action to help – working with those they lead to support them in their work.

In this workshop, we give a short introduction of what compassionate leadership is, and then focus the majority of time on experiential ways in developing these four aspects of compassionate leadership. While we have suggestions of exercises geared towards the development of each of those, we also want to draw on the Wisdom of the Many.

Our typical suggestions of exercises for each aspect are as follows:
- Attending: Exercises to enhance this include practicing mindfulness to listen with fascination and focus.
- Understanding: Exercises to enhance understanding include for example practicing appreciative inquiry, or conducting collective meaning-making sessions.
- Empathizing: This requires self-awareness and recognizing of emotional responses, practicing acknowledgement of emotional processes in others without fear and with openness, while not over-identifying. Exercises to increase emphasizing are: Meditation, cognitive re-framing, gratefulness practice, reversed role-play.
- Helping: practical help can reach from problem solving to typical coaching behaviors of a leader-coach. Exercises to develop this area of compassionate leadership are manifold and can include diverse methods, from problem solving methodologies such as TRIZ to coaching scenarios/role plays/vignettes to enhance coaching skills.

In this workshop we field different suggestions of developmental exercises – by nature these are experiential – with the audience and explicitly invite them to add their own suggestions of exercises. We then dive deeper into 1-2 exercises and practice those, and then reflect on this practice individually and as a group.

The workshop output – an overview of compassionate leadership in health and care systems as well as the collected suggestions on how to develop compassionate leadership – are shared with all participants after the session via dropbox or skydrive (or if ILA is interested, are made available through ILA channels). We are interested to sound out the idea of a community of practice around compassionate leadership in order to build a network of practitioners and scholars focusing on this topic, especially in Europe.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Development

Presenters

• Regina Eckert, Center for Creative Leadership

• Michael West, Lancaster University