Driving Hard Results through Compassionate Leadership

There is an urgent need for a shift towards a new leadership style, one that will lead employees, teams, and organizations through and adapt to the circumstances of the ‘new normal’.

But for too long, what we have come to accept as the ‘norm’ is to have our organizational leaders focus largely on hard performance and facts: which can roughly be translated to, how well a business converts inputs such as capital, labour and materials into outputs like revenue, products and services and the efficiency of each input’s investment (ROI).

Managerial ‘Top Down’ Leadership quickly became a safe bet for choosing leaders. A straight-forward logical approach to measuring an organization’s inputs and outputs. As it happens, this particular type of leader has an impressive knowledge and track-record for driving efficiency using performance-related metrics.

That being said, the managerial leadership style which tends to be led by scientific, self-interest, rule-based or other control-orientated management principles has allowed the intellect, training, and tools to hone leaders' understanding of organizational structure, roles and responsibilities, and so forth.

Whilst it is the prevailing managerial leadership style, and it has its merits, the approach orients itself around short-term metrics as a result it can alienate employees due to its fact based, cold and inhuman nature. This is largely due to the fact managerial leaders and the organizational culture that is adopted is focused on supporting the control system of the organization. This naturally places more importance on the leadership's objectives than that of the human capital at its disposal.

Even with its successes, managerial leadership has lacked severely in others, notably, that of supporting the people behind the organization. Managerial leaders typically lack the emotional intelligence for key effective leadership traits such as; collaboration, listening, empathy, and compassion.

As with all things that deserve our time and attention we naturally reduce complex problems into smaller simpler parts. Once we understand the parts we can reassemble them with such precision we can overcome the problem to tackle new challenges.

The next step, or problem part, is that of re-establishing the humanistic nature into the organizational culture. Understanding and accepting that labour isn't just a component in the business system. It’s much more than that, labour means people, means life’s. And as much as we love machines and mechanisms, people are not ‘cogs in the machine’. People are much more complex and driven by emotions.

People require more than just input, an order, or worse to be micromanaged. They are emotional and have their motivations and as a leader, you will need to have the awareness to understand when to step-in and when to step back.

So how can this be achieved?

Loosening the grips of control

Managerial leadership operates in three distinct forms of control cultures according to Westrum R:

1. Pathological (Power Orientated, cooperation low, messages shot, responsibilities avoided, failure equates to scapegoating, novelty crushed)

2. Bureaucratic (Rule Oriented, cooperation modest, messengers neglected, responsibility narrow, failure equates to justice, novelty equates to problems)

3. Generative (Performance Orientated, co-operation high, messengers trained, shared risks, failure equates to enquiry and novelty enacted).

Self-interest, optimizing capital or economic efficiency and maximizing short-term shareholder returns appear to govern the managerial leadership cultures today. Internal competition is high, communication is disregarded and control in one form or another takes the reign.

That doesn't necessarily have to remain so. An organization’s culture stems from its leaders. Therefore, change also can arrive from leadership change.

Leadership that can identify the organization’s issues based on its current control structure is already making positive progress.

And this change is desperately needed, as the world shifts from these discrete organizations that place emphasis on competition first in their approach yet fail to form collaboration within their organization, to a world where collaboration is first and competition occurs between groups.

This mindset and operational change are due to increasing recognition of our interconnectedness. We need to think less of control and create an environment of collaboration.

Collaboration through acts of Trust

Trust is one of the most crucial elements of healthy relationships in an organization. If you, as a leader, wish to define a culture of collaboration you will need to start with trust.

“The greatest leaders are the ones that trust people often know more than they do.” - Simon Sinek.

Trust requires a certain amount of openness from an individual. Open to being vulnerable, granting them your trust, take time to build trust, matching your actions to your words, and consistently valuing and adding value to your team.

One of the most important aspects of being an effective leader is establishing a culture of trust. If you struggle to relinquish your control over-to someone then the issue is either with you and your inability to or your belief in the person you hired to do the job. Either way, this problem is damaging the culture and business growth. 

See people more than resources. See their value. This involves spending time getting to know each of your team members, learning as much as you can about them and seeking to understand what motivates them.

Express the values they bring. Ask how their families are, their interests, or side-projects. Be genuinely interested in them. Care for and remember their answers. Share why you believe in them. When you make it your goal to value people for who they are and not for what they can do for you, that is demonstrating compassionate leadership.

Leaders that grant their own trust will earn the trust of their teams. By bestowing their trust on employees, leaders are acting selflessly and with compassion.

Compassion > Trust > Collaboration = Hard Results

The first step for leaders on their journey towards hard results is compassion. This empowers trust between individuals, which in turn strengthens the relationship. When employees feel connected to their leader, when they believe in them, the cause is carried by each of them, through cooperation they will produce their best work and that ultimately leads to best results.

Compassion is not a “soft” skill. Rather, it should be considered a super power skill as compassion empowers teams best; it's a long-term strategy which in turn leads to powerful, tangible, business results.

I would be very eager to hear how others have utilized compassion into their leadership style. How have you seen the positive results?