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WHAT IS COMPASSION AT WORK?

SUFFERING NEVER REALLY CROSSED ANDY’S mind, especially not as a hidden cost to his organization. But one day as he was running a meeting, a standout employee on his engineering team was unusually quiet and distant. Not knowing how to interpret this, Andy stood next to Xian as he was getting coffee during a break. He asked if everything was OK. Shocking Andy with the intensity of his grief, Xian told him that his sister, who lived in China and had planned to come to the United States to study, had been killed in a tragic accident. Feeling that there was nothing he could do at home, and drawn to be with his colleagues, Xian had chosen to come to work. Xian told Andy that sinking into the technical details of the meeting provided a kind of relief from the tide of memories that otherwise washed over him.

Facing this news, Andy needed to make a choice as a manager—one that his MBA curriculum and leadership development training hadn’t prepared him to make. Was he going to regard Xian’s life outside of work as a valid and important part of the ongoing situation he was managing, or was he going to treat Xian’s life, and the loss of his sister, as if they were outside work bounds?

Death has a way of making these considerations starker. Andy invited Xian to take time off if he needed it, to talk with him at any time, and even to come to Andy’s own home and spend time with his family. Not all managers would have made the same decision. The depth and quality of relationships at work are part of the complex landscape of suffering and compassion that we will explore together in this book. Andy’s choice to pay attention to Xian’s grief, to understand it as relevant to the work of managing, to connect with empathy and concern, and to act on those feelings offers a lived example that is like thousands of other examples we have gathered and analyzed in our research over the past fifteen years.¹ What may seem like small interpersonal moves on Andy’s part were actually potent for alleviating suffering.

But what if Xian had not been a star performer? What if the loss of his sister hadn’t seemed so obviously relevant? What if the grief had diminished Xian’s capacity to contribute to the team? Would Andy’s calculus as a manager have been different? What if Xian had mentioned to Andy on the coffee break that his sister had suffered from a mental breakdown? Or that she had a gambling addiction and had thrown the family into bankruptcy? The forms that suffering takes matter for compassion. How suffering resonates with cultural and organizational values is also part of the complex landscape of compassion at work. We don’t aim to provide easy answers, but we do draw on two decades of work in this field to deepen your capacity to think about complicated human dilemmas and how to handle them.

Most managers like Andy worry—separate from their personal feelings of empathy and concern toward their employees—about critical questions related to compassion in the workplace. Will employees who are treated with compassion take advantage of their managers or their organizations? Will compassion toward one member of the team, like Xian, set a precedent that locks the manager or organization into a costly pattern of action in the future? Will Andy be able to be fair to others if he opens his heart to Xian’s suffering? Will he look weak to the leaders who evaluate him if he offers flexibility to his staff? Addressing and overcoming these concerns is a fundamental aim of this book.

WHAT IS COMPASSION?

As organizational scholars, we study compassion from a social scientific point of view. Compassion is more than an emotion; it is a felt and enacted desire to alleviate suffering. We define it as a four-part process that involves: (1) noticing that suffering is present in an organization, (2) making meaning of suffering in a way that contributes to a desire to alleviate it, (3) feeling empathic concern for the people suffering, and (4) taking action to alleviate suffering in some manner.² This definition highlights the fact that compassion is a multipart process. We will explore in Part Two: Awakening Compassion in Our Work Lives how each aspect is affected by both human and organizational factors.

It’s also notable that compassion always unfolds in relation to suffering. This differentiates compassion from other positive interpersonal concepts such as kindness, gratitude, and happiness. Kindness, for example, is a desire to voluntarily and proactively support another person’s flourishing, while happiness is a personal sense of well-being. Gratitude involves feeling and expressing appreciation for a life experience. Experiences of happiness, gratitude, and kindness are important to developing a positive side of work. They are central concepts in the study of positive psychology, and research supports their role in cultivating mental, emotional, and physical health.³ Compassion contrasts with these in that it is explicitly linked to the shadow or darker side of life; compassion goes hand-in-hand with suffering. But it isn’t all dark. Because it deeply bonds us with others, compassion is wired into our brains and bodies in ways that motivate and reward us for responding to suffering.⁴ Compassion is central to human well-being, for those who provide it as well as for those who receive it. But because it encompasses both negative and positive, the dark and light sides of life, it isn’t always simple.

COMPASSION IN ORGANIZATIONS

Organizations matter in two ways when we want to understand compassion at work. First, workplaces provide a context that shapes what we notice, think, feel, and do as individuals. Second, workplaces are filled with people and resources that can be coordinated more or less competently to alleviate suffering. We look closely at both the individual and the organizational levels in this book.

One way to understand the powerful role of organizations in awakening compassion is to engage in a thought experiment about a specific instance of suffering, such as when members lose their homes in a fire. We have studied responses to the same kind of loss in different organizations and found very different patterns of compassion. Imagine one workplace where the organization is widely known as a great place to work, and members come to the organization with explicit values of taking care of one another. These values help position a loss of a home in a fire as relevant to the work community. Because it is important to care for people at work in this organization, it’s easier for people to feel empathy for the loss and step in to begin organizing action to alleviate the impact of the fire. It is seen as an appropriate and legitimate use of time and of the organization’s formal communication methods to organize action.

In another organization, an announcement about a fire that destroyed employees’ homes lands in a busy, high-pressure workplace where competition is rampant. People who open the announcement in their crowded email boxes feel a fleeting sense of concern, but this concern has to compete with budget concerns that receive more discussion. Many people don’t pay much attention to the announcement at all. They are focused on trying to one-up each other and keep their positions in the next round of layoffs. While the people who do hear of the loss wish there was something they could do, they don’t view it as legitimate to use the organization’s formal channels to organize about nontask issues, so they end up doing nothing. There’s no easy way to turn their concern into action, so feelings of empathy melt away under the pressures of the next deadline.

Notice that the two organizations in our thought experiment are each composed of kind people. But despite this fact, compassion unfolds very differently. In Part Three: Awakening Compassion Competence in Organizations, we will show in greater depth how elements of an organization such as network ties between people, cultural values, work roles, routines, and actions of leaders matter in creating these patterns of compassion that vary across organizations. While cultivating compassion in the individual members of organizations is helpful and important to awakening compassion, it is not enough. Understanding how structures and processes in organizations make it easier or harder to express compassion—not just at the interpersonal level but also at the systemic level—is essential for awakening compassion at work. It is this system-level organizational focus that is the distinctive emphasis of our research and this book.

KEY POINTS: DEFINING COMPASSION AT WORK

∞ Compassion is a felt and enacted desire to alleviate suffering.

∞ Compassion is defined as a four-part process involving attention, interpretation of suffering, felt empathic concern, and action to alleviate suffering.

∞ Suffering is pervasive in workplaces.

∞ Common sources of suffering flow from outside work boundaries, when people suffer from illness, injury, loss, divorce, financial pressures, addiction, or other hardships.

∞ Forms of suffering arise from work itself, through downsizing, restructuring, change processes, the stress of heavy workloads, performance pressure, feeling devalued, disrespectful interactions, and other organizational sources.

BREAKING THE SILENCE ABOUT SUFFERING AT WORK

When we recently asked members of one organization where we were doing research to name sources of suffering, they spoke of a lack of appreciation for their talents and skills, of being at the whim of supervisors who didn’t understand the difficulties of their work, of pressure of unreasonable deadlines and demands, and of feeling consistently devalued and disengaged when they wanted their work to be meaningful. These are pervasive forms of suffering at work. So pervasive, in fact, that they likely are taken for granted as part of the work environment and slip under the surface of everyday work life.

Of course there are many sources of suffering outside of work as well. Employees like Xian remind us of the suffering that flows from deaths or illnesses in families and life losses such as divorces and separations. Suffering arises from stresses in family roles, financial difficulties, addictions, and many more hardships. While these forms of suffering don’t originate within workplaces, they nonetheless seep in from outside. Silent suffering colors work.⁵

An additional source of suffering comes from organizations themselves, often through policies such as restructuring or downsizing, or as a result of change efforts and heavy workloads. It’s easy to overlook or dismiss this suffering. Managers and leaders may assume it’s not important or it will go away on its own without their attention. But organizations that create pain can also address it with compassion. In fact, our work shows that the very best organizations, leaders, and managers regard this as a fundamental part of their work.⁶

Research shows that compassion for this kind of pain leads to more adaptability and more effective change processes, which are part of the strategic significance of compassion at work that we will discuss in chapter 2. There are other benefits as well. Patty’s story, which is adapted from our research, illustrates how an organization can create suffering during change. It also reveals a few ways that compassion at work would enhance both Patty’s well-being and the effectiveness of the organization. Patty loved her work as an executive assistant assigned to several leaders. She found joy in building close relationships with them and used her personal knowledge about their likes and dislikes to anticipate their needs. Patty was masterful at recruiting resources that were maximally helpful, even before being asked. Executives she supported sometimes joked that Patty could read their minds. So when Patty received an email late one Friday afternoon telling her that she was being moved to a shared services group, she was surprised. The message told her that all executive and administrative assistants would now take work from a central pool. She felt shocked and devastated. None of the executives she supported were in the office this late on a Friday, so she had no one to ask about the change. Without anyone to help her make sense of the message, Patty spent the weekend worried and trying to understand what it meant for her.

First thing Monday morning, Patty arrived at her usual cubicle to find a moving trolley and boxes. She was instructed to pack as quickly as possible. She had to change locations before she’d had a chance to interact with anyone. The rush left her no time to say good-bye. The fact that she moved to a distant building made it hard for people she’d worked closely with in the past to find her. Patty began to do work from the request pool. While she was still an efficient employee, her daily experience of work changed dramatically. Online requests had to be fulfilled without knowing the people or the story behind them. Patty’s magic talent of “mind reading” disappeared with this lack of relational connection. The change diminished Patty’s sense of her own competence and creativity. She still received warm smiles and an occasional comment like “We miss you!” from the leaders she had worked with before. But given the new structure, Patty now found herself lonely, isolated, and often bored by work that had previously been a source of joy and inspiration.

In Patty’s case, an efficiency-oriented change created suffering as a by-product. Those who design and implement efficiency-oriented changes like these often give little consideration to how the process could be done in ways that minimize suffering. Managers and leaders likewise give little consideration to how they could alleviate suffering in the aftermath of change. But this book will show you that, while suffering might be inevitable, there are many opportunities for awakening compassion at work.

Let’s consider Patty’s case. How could her organization have implemented change with greater compassion competence? Five steps would have increased compassion without decreasing efficiency. First, the timing of the communication could have been adjusted with attention to suffering, so that Patty did not have to make sense of the change alone over a weekend. Second, those implementing the change could have explicitly linked it with the overall culture and values of the organization that gave worth and dignity to support staff, making the change more meaningful to Patty and elevating her role rather than diminishing it. Third, the organization could have adjusted the relocation routines so that people who cared about Patty knew how to find her and the sense of disconnection was minimized. Fourth, the organization could host a celebration in the service of embracing change, formally recognizing those who were moving into the support pool and also creating a chance to say a festive good-bye. And finally, the manager in the new shared services pool could involve Patty and others in crafting this new role with an eye toward making it as meaningful as possible. These five steps would have cost little, but they would have made the change easier for Patty and strengthened the overall adaptability of the system.

Without compassion, workplaces can become powerful amplifiers of human suffering. This book offers a fuller picture of how to create organizations that awaken compassion. First we define the key concepts and establish the case for compassion. The next part of the book focuses on individuals at work, and is designed to help you understand the four aspects of the compassion process more deeply and identify skills you can use to increase compassion in your work, no matter what it is. The third part of the book focuses on organizations. It is designed to help you become a compassion architect for your organization, explaining a framework for understanding and designing a social architecture that enables compassion. The fourth part of the book presents tools that bring all the ideas together and helps you apply them to awaken compassion in your own work life and across your organization.