I will never forget the time someone once told me that I was too compassionate and I “cared about people too much” to be a good leader. That I’d need to develop a thicker skin and be “scarier” to ever move up in my career. They basically told me compassionate leadership was a scam. I was quite young at the time, and I remember thinking that if being a leader meant I’d have to lead with fear, then maybe I didn’t actually want to lead. Thankfully, I got to keep that story as a funny anecdote and it didn’t change who I was as a leader.

As part of the Option 1 Leader series (see this post for more information about what that actually means and what I’m doing with this series), I’m starting with compassionate leadership. Given that one of my first experiences leading in an official capacity resulted in being told that compassion was a liability when I saw (and still see) it as one of my greatest strengths, it felt fitting to write this post first. 

What is Compassionate Leadership?

Turning to the academic literature (you can take me out of academia, but you can’t take academia out of me) compassionate leadership is a rather contested term. It means different things from study to study and field to field (see Harris & Jones, 2023 and Ramachandran, Balasubramanian, James, and Al Masaeid, 2024 for examples) and really it appears that when we talk about compassionate leadership or even just compassion in a leadership context, we’re often not on the same page.

So before we dive any further, I’m defining compassionate leadership as leadership that requires the following:

1. Compassion (yes, rather obvious) and empathy. There’s a genuine desire to help people and see staff as people-first, not as resources to be extracts.
2. Integrity, the leader can be trusted to behave in a consistent manner, obviously interactions will differ between different people, but here I’m talking about leaders ensuring that they are being honest and truthful in all their interactions. This would be absent in a leader who says one thing to some people and something completely contradictory to another to maintain their authority.
3. Respect, the leader respects the people they work with (and work for). This is respecting everyone because they are a person, not based on how obedient someone is or what the leader sees the person could do for them.

Now that the definition is there, let’s first talk about what we might see from an option 1 leader regarding compassion. In a regular situation, our option 1 leader, might connect individually with their team members regularly, remembering details between conversations, noticing if something feels like it’s off with their team member and checking in with them about it. They’ll acknowledge that the people who work on their team aren’t machines and there will be some days that are more productive than others. They’ll listen to the struggles of their team members and try and remove roadblocks.

Now compassion isn’t just empathy and understanding though. It also requires the leader to lead a team, compassion includes creating clear expectations and accountability, and tailoring your leadership style to the individuals in front of you. For example, an option 1 leader demonstrates compassion by letting their team know that a big project with a tight timeline is coming up soon, talking through any issues and roadblocks as they arise, finding ways to support team members in ways that actually support them as individuals, and still hold their team to the stated expectations and timelines. 

The Option 1, Option 2, and Option 3 Leaders

Most leaders I know would say they lead with compassion, because they do care about the people they work with. Where we separate our option 1 and option 2 leaders, is when things get tough. 

Take that big project hypothetical from above, maybe it started with a 6 week timeline and narrow scope, and 2 weeks in a senior leader comes in, doubling the scope and telling our leader that they’ve already promised that the new scope would be completed within that same 6 week window. Maybe that senior leader says something like you’re the manager, make sure this gets done without overtime costs, or implies it doesn’t matter if staff are required to work extra hours because “that’s what we pay them for” or any other number of ways most middle managers have seen when a project scope changes mid-project.

Our leader, who thinks of themselves as a good leader, a compassionate leader, has three options:

Option 1: they could put their people first and push back on no-overtime costs, the increased scope or the timeline, they could treat their staff like people with lives, and they could establish expectations both with their team and the senior leader about how the project will proceed.

Option 2: they could take the message from the senior leader to their team and just tell the team to get the work done (because they know their job is on the line).

Option 3: they could buckle down, jump into the work themselves and work themselves ragged (because management rarely gets overtime) and just make sure they’re the reason that the project gets completed on time while sacrificing their own health and life.

Option 3 can be really tempting (ask me how I know that? Just kidding, I’ve done it. More than once). Because if you’re a people-first leader, and care about your team, sacrificing yourself lets you keep that value of being people first. But people-first and compassionate leadership, also requires a leader to remember they are also a person, and compassion should be extended to them as well. 

In organizations where you feel like your job is literally on the line and you don’t feel safe to push back, that’s where we can see people-first leaders fall down the path of making small compromises to their values because they need to protect themselves. Or cynically, there are the “people-first” leaders who claim to be that, but immediately will go straight to upholding the status quo or implementing the direction of senior leadership, because they have other values that are more important (whether they’re willing to acknowledge that or not). 

And going back to that first option? That’s an option with a real potential cost, being known as a “shit disturber” or a “disruptor” (as a former boss once kindly suggested as an alternative name for me), has a cost. A senior leader who tells you they don’t care how it gets done, that they don’t want any increased costs, or implies that they don’t care about staff wellbeing, because they’re paying staff to work for them, doesn’t tend to respond well to being challenged. 

Costs of Being an Option 1 Leader

I’ve seen people-first leaders bring evidence as to why they need to continue leading with compassion, evidence as to why a scope change or direction won’t work within the existing parameters get labelled as a trouble maker. I’ve seen their authority slowly removed, their voices slowly shut down, and I’ve seen them leave or be let go. Because that is a real risk of leading with compassion in a system that likes compassionate leadership when it’s easy, but the moment compassion competes with compliance, it becomes a liability. 

You might have made it here and are thinking, “well Rebecca, if being an option 1 leader is good, how do I fix the systems that see it as a liability?” And I have to admit, I sat with this question myself for a long time. Because I wanted a simple, straightforward fix, like if I could have put together a 3 step framework and solved the problem of compassionate leadership only being valued when it doesn’t interfere with other values, I could save the world. But the reason I’m not giving you a framework for how to navigate compassionate leadership in a broken system is the same reason the system keeps winning, because there isn’t a universal fix (and I’d guess that anyone who tells you there is hasn’t actually been inside the systems you’re navigating). What compassionate leadership looks like under pressure in your specific organization, with your specific team, your specific senior leadership, and your specific risk profile, is something only you can diagnose. What I can do is help you name what’s actually happening, so that when you’re in it, you know the difference between a systems problem and a you problem. 

If you’ve realized that you’re navigating a broken system but have no idea what to do next, you might find the “So…what are you going to do about it” workbook a useful tool to work through and come away with 3 concrete next steps that fit you and your organization. 

References

Harris, A., & Jones, M. (2023). Compassionate leadership. School Leadership & Management, 43(3), 185-188.

Ramachandran, S., Balasubramanian, S., James, W. F., & Al Masaeid, T. (2024). Whither compassionate leadership? A systematic review. Management Review Quarterly, 74(3), 1473-1557.