Emotional Intelligence for Everybody Else: Part 4 - Compassion
Emotional Intelligence for Everybody Else: Part 4 - Compassion
Compassion means "suffering together" but haven't we already been through enough?
Introduction to Compassion
Nearly a year ago I wrote “11 Promises from a Manager.” It’s been read millions and millions of times, more than everything else I’ve ever written, combined.
Since then I’ve been coaching people on leadership and management and I’ve been reading and writing about emotional intelligence. I think I understand why these posts resonated with so many people.
I wrote these “promises” as I was thinking of the ways I’ve fallen short as a manager. I was worrying about how I wanted to improve in the future. As I read thousands of messages people have sent me since, I’m struck by how full of hope and optimism they are. People have shared with me their wishes and dreams for how they want to be treated at work.
Clearly, some managers are doing an amazing job. I am inspired by many of the stories I’ve heard. I also hear from people who are slighted and mistreated by their bosses. Some report discourtesies, others experience reckless disregard, some are bordering on abuse. There are hearts and souls out there that are really taking a beating. I’ve been listening. I hear you.
The word compassion literally means “to suffer together.” By now I think we’ve all done that enough. Leaders are meant to make choices based on an understanding of the people in our care. That’s what this chapter is about.
What Matters Most
Like empathy, compassion at work is misunderstood. When people think of compassionate behavior, they think of an HR person, a cup of chamomile tea that’s rapidly getting cold, and a soggy box of tissues.
They imagine emotional conversations behind closed doors, and someone sobbing uncontrollably. Stoic colleagues roll their eyes as one employee trails behind another headed out the door. They are fleeing a meeting that’s gone off the rails. They’ll head out to the courtyard for a smoke, or maybe to the nearest restroom to privately decompress.
I watched an alarming training video on a popular networking site. The instructor was meant to be preparing me for handling “difficult conversations.” She read a script for handling an emotional employee. It went like this: “Sarah, could you please give me some ideas for how you can avoid becoming emotional every time we talk?”
Whoa! If you’re a manager who needs to be kept safe from employees with emotions, maybe you should consider keeping an aquarium instead. Try this: “Sarah, what are some ways that I can remove obstacles to your success?” If an employee gets emotional, you could say: “I understand this is a difficult conversation. Should we stop, or do you want to keep going?”
Managers do not have a right to an environment free from evidence of their colleagues’ emotions. In a healthy workplace, people are going to express their emotions, their gender, their religion, and all kinds of other stuff — whether you like it or not.
Compassion calls on us to keep an open heart and an open mind. We’re at the ready to help out when we can, in whatever way we’re best able. One way to help is by encouraging people to feel safe expressing their emotions in appropriate ways. It’s compassionate to normalize normal behavior.
If employees feel safe shouting about a sporting result, or high-fiving when they close a business deal, others should feel safe crying when they get bad news or difficult feedback. Co-workers or managers should normalize this. That’s inclusive. Inclusive includes compassionate.
In a compassionate workplace, it’s safe to cry, and it’s fine to high-five. The door can stay open if the meeting’s a bit tense. You can stay, or you can flee, and nobody will roll their eyes.
Leading with Compassion
Let’s pry apart the definitions of empathy and compassion. Empathy is a prerequisite for compassion. Compassion gets empathy out of bed and puts it to work. Empathy brings tissues, compassion shows up with a shovel.
Empathy, understanding, and compassion — they are all praiseworthy traits for a leader. A compassionate leader is expected to make difficult choices that show that they understand the people under their care. They do the work and make investments or sacrifices to change the world around them.
Oxford University Press suggests indifferent or heartless as words with the opposite meaning to compassion. Unfortunately it’s not hard to imagine a leader making choices that seem indifferent to people under their care. It’s almost the stereotype of a bad corporate leader, actually! They even made a television show in which one scene after another models this kind of detached, clueless leadership. It’s called, predictably, The Office!
Compassionate Choices
Imagine a manager schedules a meeting with a subordinate without supplying an agenda. Depending on how things are going for that employee, they might assume the worst. They could think they’re about to be disciplined, or fired. They may have anxiety about how they ought to prepare. Fear of seeming ‘out of the loop’ prevents them from simply asking the manager what the meeting is about.
So they will suffer in silence. It might not be extreme duress. A stoic employee might not be badly affected. But some will be made miserable by this experience. Whether the harm is small or great is not the point. The point is that it’s needless — easily avoided by the manager’s compassionate, courteous choice.
Is the manager truly heartless or indifferent because they did not do the compassionate thing? Surely not. They’re probably a nice enough person. But they’ve fallen short as an emotionally intelligent leader. Empathy would have prevented them from realizing the impact they’ve had, and compassion would have helped them to avoid it.
Compassionate leaders inspire confidence and calm. They’ll minimize unnecessary anxiety when they can. Here are some examples:
Do not joke about firings, layoffs, or job loss, or other subjects that are important to the team.
Ensure that employees hear about news that affects them directly in 1:1s whenever possible, rather through email or humiliating “big reveal” announcements.
When you slide into text or direct messages, say “hi and why” right away, rather than building up suspense with charming small talk.
Keep their 1:1 time sacred with direct reports, rescheduling it when necessary but not cancelling it.
Managers should try to keep 1:1s to a predictable agenda that ensures the employee’s needs are met. No surprises.
Leaders can signal compassion for co-workers they haven’t hired yet by explicitly welcoming candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Standing up for marginalized communities in your online activities may signal your compassion for the diverse workforce you want to recruit.
Caring for Others
Compassionate behavior at work builds trust and respect with your professional community. This contributes to your long-term success in many ways. These next few sections draw on writing that I’ve developed in collaboration with others from the respective communities.
Communities of Color
I spoke with people of color about their experiences at work. I asked how people with privilege could show compassion for co-workers from races and ethnicities that have traditionally been marginalized in many professional spaces.
I do not speak for these communities and you should hear directly from people who come from these communities about these topics. Talk to the people you work with and ask them for their ideas and advice. A common theme I heard from the people I spoke to was that they appreciated real and sincere efforts made by their peers and leaders to advance the interests of a diverse workforce.
I heard several times that in order for it to matter, work towards equity for people of color needs to impact them in the ways it matters most. Slogans and promises only go so far. Instead, compassionate people should make take action that will have measurable impact on people’s lives. For example, ensuring the fair distribution of opportunities that have traditionally been unevenly distributed or denied to people of color. That means ensuring progress on recruiting, promotions, and pay equity, and swift and just action against harassment and discrimination.
Efforts towards equity are undermined when people minority backgrounds wonder if they’ve been selected only because of the community they represent. Compassionate leaders can reassure their colleagues that they are equally deserving of the recognition they’ve earned. And they can ensure that the recognition of their progress and advancement are recognized based on their merit, free from bias or discrimination.
Another common, heartbreaking theme emerged from several professionals of non-white ethnicity. They described feelings of doubt and uncertainty about their performance at work that was compounded by fears of bias, deliberate or unconscious, from managers and peers. Some workers of color clearly feel the presence of unconscious and systemic bias is frequently present in their daily lives at work.
Chronic Illness
Your compassion is welcome by people who are sick, chronically ill, or experiencing other medical issues. Healthy people rarely fake illness, but ill people fake wellness every day in order to meet expectations in our ableist society.
There are a lot of reasons why people go to work when they medically should not. These include financial hardship, childcare, family limitations, or impositions pressed on them by their bosses. “Hustle culture” leads many of us to work harder and longer than we should. What can we do for people like this? We can try to recognize when they have passed their limits, and offer them our care and our support.
A person’s health is a private matter. A person struggling with an illness will be in a situation that is difficult to understand from the outside. The likelihood of an incorrect assumption or misunderstanding is high. A compassionate choice is to scrupulously avoid making an assumption, presumption, or judgement about someone else’s situation. This is especially true if you have reason to believe you might not know the whole story, which you don’t.
In another article, I provided some tips on how to relate to chronically ill people at work. These were developed with a community of sick friends. It’s a good starting point for a compassionate person to begin to understand the subject better.
The LGBTQIA+ Community at Work
Queer visibility has improved in many Western workplaces, but the struggle for queer rights around the world means that LGBT people everywhere are still vulnerable. Compassion for the queer people you work with is always welcome.
I spoke to gay, lesbian, trans, and non-binary people in the United States and Europe about their experiences at work. They noted some improvements in their feelings of safety at work over the past few years. This wasn’t a large enough sample to represent the issue on a global scale, nor do they fully represent the diversity of the queer spectrum. But it gave me an interesting collection of perspectives to consider.
We talked about how people at work show compassion and respect for non-binary and transgendered people by respecting their preferred pronoun use. Companies have many options for how they can support this behavior. When they do, they normalize the participation of the non-binary and trans people in the population of their workers.
The gay and lesbian people I spoke to consistently mentioned that improvements in trans visibility at work has had the effect of improving queer visibility as well. The socialization of pronoun use in workplaces seems to make some workplaces more comfortable places for queer communities to exist.
People who normalize respectful pronoun use are making a compassionate and supportive choice that eases the inclusion of queer communities in their workplace.
Queer Questions
If you’re not sure how to be helpful, compassionate, or respectful to a queer person, it’s almost always best to ask. It’s rare that a kind and courteous question should get you in trouble.
Part of being queer is sometimes getting the occasional inappropriate question. If there’s something you’re not sure about, the most important question to ask yourself is this: why do you want to know? A simple rule of thumb is that a personal question asked out of curiosity is never appropriate for work. As a compassionate person, there’s no need to ask a question that there’s no need to ask. Got it? Awesome.
Neurodiversity at Work
The world is neurodiverse, filled with people who function in all different ways. Many have characteristics that are neurodivergent, meaning their brain function may diverge from what is considered typical. (A person is ‘neurodivergent’, while a population, company, or team is ‘neurodiverse.’)
Common ‘ND’ conditions include ADHD, Aspergers, Autism, and Dyslexia, and others may identify themselves as under this same umbrella. Someone who is not neurodivergent can be called “neurotypical.”
ND people at work deserve our compassion. We live in an ableist society and work in places and ways that are designed with neurotypical people in mind. Our lives are rife with assumptions about what’s normal and what’s best, and many of these work against ND people at work. That’s surprising considering they make up as much as 15% - 20% of the world’s population.
Neurodivergent people are the best advocates for their own needs. I don’t identify as part of this community, and your best bet is to get advice for how to work with an ND person from someone who does. If somebody’s identified themselves to you as ND, they’ll probably appreciate a polite, courteous question about how you can support them better. You can also read up on how to show support for ND colleagues at work.
It’s not appropriate to ask somebody at work about any aspect of their identity that they haven’t offered voluntarily to you. You don’t need to know if somebody is Autistic or has ADHD. In the context of someone whose disability needs accommodation, they’ll decide what disclosure is appropriate and necessary. Your HR department should handle this. If you find yourself with questions for a ND person, once again the question to ask is why you’re asking. If it’s to satisfy your own curiosity, such a question is not appropriate at work.
Caring about Yourself
That brings us to you. You’re here because you want to improve. We want to be something more or better, to have things greater, or to provide more for our loved ones. This drive is what brought us to our careers. It’s what gets us out of a warm bed on a cold morning, and in front of our glowing but ungrateful laptop on a lonely Monday. It’s the reason you’re reading this text today.
Our desire to be better is, in a way, an act of compassion for ourselves. It’s a gift we’re giving to ourselves in the future.
Compassion for yourself is the culmination of this emotionally intelligent journey. It began four chapters ago with Self-Awareness — the identification of our real self. Empathy allows us to imagine what it's like to be the kind of person we hope to be. We learned to Respect and admire the qualities of other people, and those great qualities make every person worthy of thoughtful actions.
Empathy brings the tissues, remember? Then compassion brings a shovel. Every day you’re doing the hard work of improving yourself. It is the act of generosity towards yourself.
So why does it hurt so much?
“Get comfortable being uncomfortable” is a slogan that inspires us to travel beyond our comfort zone as we overcome limiting beliefs that hold us back. “There’s no growth without discomfort” is another of those “no pain no gain” aphorisms.
“Hustle culture” and social media have glorified overwork, overachievement, and the endless comparison of ourselves to others. Without compassion for the person you are today, your aspirations for tomorrow will ensure the finish line is never within reach.
Hold a quiet space in your heart to feel some compassion for yourself. Believe that the way you are today is good enough. You can be patient, loving, and accepting of that person, and still be reaching for a better version of that person tomorrow.
The person who you are today deserves the greatest investment of your emotionally intelligent abilities. You are worthy of your own empathy and respect. Compassion calls you to make choices. Compassion calls you to act with care.
Make the compassionate choice now to release yourself from feelings of guilt or disappointment about your limitations. No one was made as perfectly as we wish to be. The most perfect thing is to accept who we are today, and hope to improve tomorrow.
Tips for Compassion
Compassionate people are often eager to express their support, and their generosity is usually appreciated. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right way to be helpful. When somebody else is suffering, asking “Is there anything I can do?” might be less helpful than a specific offer of assistance in a concrete form. Put some effort into considering the best way you can contribute. Then make sure you’re ready to be taken up on it.
Release yourself from a commitment that you made to yourself unnecessarily. Breaking a promise made from discipline is keeping a promise made to compassion.
Reconsider work habits that might serve the hollow purpose of signaling your virtue to yourself or others. I am looking at people with a 7:30am team meeting, 37 unused vacation days, and no time for lunch blocked from their calendar.
Celebrate your imperfections. I call this “Role Modeling Bad Behavior” and it also contributes to a compassionate environment on your team. When you are working too late, or on the weekend, and you send out an email — call yourself out on it. “I am not supposed to be sending out email at 9pm. I’ll do better next time!” Trade in the quiet guilt for a cheap transgressive thrill. At the same time, remind the people that you work with that you care enough about yourself and them to envision a healthier future for you all.
See the previous articles in this series, Emotional Intelligence for Everyone Else - Part 1: Self-Awareness. Part 2: Empathy, and Part 3: Respect.