Compassion

What Compassion means in leadership

You are writing a performance review for a colleague whose completed work fell this quarter. The draft is accurate about the missed work and strangely empty of the person you know. In a private conversation, you ask how the work has been going and learn only what they choose to share about a difficult period. You agree a feasible adjustment within your authority and keep private details out of the review. The form has found a box for every result. You still have to bring a person to the conversation.

The missed work remains part of the account. So does the person’s perspective, which you cannot obtain by guessing from a number. You ask without demanding a personal explanation, distinguish observed work from inference and discuss support you can actually offer. A private confidence need not become evidence circulated with the review.

Compassion gives…

A humane assessment can make it possible to discuss difficulty before the person is reduced to a verdict. Accurate expectations and feasible support give the conversation practical value without making disclosure the price of consideration.

Finding the balance

The work can be described accurately while the person retains privacy, a voice and a say in the help offered.

In ordinary life

A private question

Ask how the work is going without suggesting that personal disclosure is required.

A feasible adjustment

Offer a change you can actually arrange and check how it affects others.

Nearby virtues, different work

Patience

Patience supports learning over time; Compassion responds to difficulty even when the person already knows the work.

Candor

Candor makes the account truthful. Compassion shapes the attention and response given to the person within it.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Paternalism is a counterfeit of Compassion when you decide what a person needs without hearing them. Compassion offers attention and feasible help while preserving their agency.

How to cultivate Compassion

• Separate what you observed from what you have inferred about the person.
• Offer a private opportunity to speak without requiring a personal account.
• Agree a feasible response and keep confidence within the appropriate boundaries.

Try it today

Think of a minor difficulty in a shared task you can influence. Ask a considerate question without requesting private details, and offer one form of help the person can decline. Use only responsibilities and information that are yours to handle.

Questions worth returning to

• What have I inferred from the shortfall that I do not actually know?
• Can the person receive consideration without disclosing what they want to keep private?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. The wretch whose misfortunes call upon our compassion feels with what reluctance we are likely to enter into his sorrow, and therefore proposes his grief to us with fear and hesitation: he even smothers the half of it, and is ashamed, upon account of this hard-heartedness of mankind, to give vent to the fulness of his affliction.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   SECTION III. Of the effects of prosperity and adversity upon the judgment of mankind with regard to the propriety of action; and why it is more easy to obtain their approbation in the one state than in the other.; CHAP. I. That though our sympathy with sorrow is generally a more lively sensation than our sympathy with joy, it commonly falls much more short of the violence of what is naturally felt by the person principally concerned.

   Smith notices the hesitation of someone expecting little sympathy. A missed task may not arrive with a ready explanation of the difficulty behind it.

2. There are many vexatious accidents and uneasy situations which raise little compassion for the sufferer, and which no man but those whom they immediately distress can regard with seriousness.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 176

   Johnson observes how lightly outsiders can regard another person’s distress. Asking about the obstacle checks that easy dismissal.

3. In all cases where one feels ashamed to confess the real cause of one’s suffering, and where modesty leads one to drive one’s sufferings inward, the desires pent up in a little space without any vent choke one another.

   Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together with the Dialogue on Clemency
   THE NINTH BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO SERENUS. OF PEACE OF MIND.; section II

   Seneca describes the burden of distress that a person feels unable to confess. The practical response here permits help without requiring disclosure.

4. In fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of others.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education

   Dewey warns that one-sided control can harden attention to others. A leadership role gives a reason to examine whose experience reaches the decision.

5. It required, however, an adequate knowledge of adverse city conditions so productive of juvenile delinquency and a sympathy which could enkindle itself in many others of divers faiths and training, to arouse the club to its finest public spirit.

   Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
   CHAPTER XV; THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS

   Addams connects knowledge of conditions with the capacity to bring others into humane action. Compassion can organize practical help as well as feel concern.

6. It is the old particularistic sympathy, but it is not the sympathy which is a group product, which has come from the actual intermingling of myself with those who are in want and suffering.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Part I THE GROUP PRINCIPLE; IV THE GROUP PROCESS: THE COLLECTIVE FEELING

   Follett distinguishes distant sentiment from sympathy formed in actual contact. The colleague’s own account should shape the response.

7. He must draw out all the varying needs of the neighborhood as related to the cause and reconcile them in the remedy.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP; XXV NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION Leaders or Bosses?

   Follett asks the leader to discover different needs before arranging a response.

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