today we're talking about compassionate leadership and how you can be a more compassionate leader so let's get into those details hey there and welcome back Alex Lian here this channel is all about helping you as a leader develop and to do that we're in the second video of a four-part series on compassion and I want to talk about compassionate leadership today there are lots of benefits to this employees will feel more loyal and committed or less likely to leave the work harder when they know their leaders care about them so yes we're mainly talking about compassionate leadership because it's the right thing to do from in my opinion but ultimately this does benefit the leader in the long run so the bottom line for me is that compassionate leadership is good leadership let's define this again compassion is care kindness especially the tendency to think about the needs and the good of others to me it's a state of mind a state of emotion that drives us to act with kindness toward others and we're going to talk about four ways that we can lead with more compassion this is especially tailored toward the workplace so number one you can help your people develop so as a leader you may realize that the people you lead are really under your care your followers need your help in lots of ways and you're there in many ways to serve them so part of your job as a leader may be the most important part is creating a culture where your people can thrive they could become the best version of themselves in contrast some leaders think it's all about them and everybody is there to serve them but I don't agree with this philosophy I agree with Robert Kay Greenleaf he wrote a lot about servant leadership and he said that the servant leader the compassionate leader thinks that there they are first and foremost to serve the people who were under their care so I had a boss once years ago who made sure that her followers were getting lots of training professional development she was putting them on interesting projects to to help us all grow we were all frontline workers really and she could we could tell that she cared about us because she was helping us develop and through that development she was improving our situation for promotion or future marketability for even other jobs at other organizations she was looking out for us as whole human beings John Eldridge another writer that I really admire and I'll paraphrase he said the key question for leaders is how are people doing under their leadership that's what we should ask ourselves that's the measure are people growing are they developing maturing and thriving so I think one of the most compassionate things a leader can do is to help his or her people develop now you also can do number two which is help people solve their problems now you don't do it all for them you don't solve their problems for them but there's a connection here between empathy and compassion empathy is how you put yourself in the other person's shoes and by doing so you can identify with what their problems are and then step in to help them solve their problems you don't solve it for them a hundred percent as a leader you don't want to get into that but there's an article I'll link to buy the rafi Park website about empathy and helping other people with their problems and generally it says that the compassionate leader will see that it's part of his or her job to support people in solving their problems so one of my supervisors over the years saw that I was getting really burned out and he encouraged me to take a proper vacation to really unplug and get some rest so that when I came back I wasn't burned-out anymore so he didn't solve my problem for me but he looked for a way to help me and support me through that potential burnout phase so as a leader you can see other people as whole human beings and then you can help them with the challenges that they may face as they come up the third way you can be a compassionate leader is through your compassionate vocabulary we should prioritize compassion in the way we talk words matter a lot more than people realize there's a concept called vocabulary of motives that Kenneth Burke made well-known and he says when we talk we reveal our motivations and some companies for example all they talk about are words like profit sales market share production territory competition my friend once worked at an organization and at a meeting his boss said that he hoped the competitors building burned down and if it did he would dance on the ashes he actually didn't say the word dance it was much more vulgar than that but the way we communicate are literal words and phrases our vocabulary reveal our motivations and reveal how we feel about other people and if it's one-sided like this you're not creating a system of meaning that values compassion so in contrast when we speak about treating people with kindness helping others develop looking out for the best interests of other people then we are introducing an alternative vocabulary of motives that prioritizes and promotes compassion I'm making an entire other video on communication and compassion and we're going to get into that in more detail it's the next video in this series and when it's done I will post to it in the description below this video but the short version of that video is that the way we express ourselves should be laced with compassion the fourth way that we can lead with compassion is to cultivate compassion through action make it part of the culture to be compassionate so great workplaces do this usually by putting their people first they have a people first their employee first philosophy so Wegmans grocery store is a well-known example of this they put their people first I have some relatives who work there one of my relatives work there until her late 70s and she was working part-time toward the end of her employment and as she got older she couldn't work as many hours or as hard as she used to but what they did was they gave her easier jobs and they let her go part time now a lot of places would have put the bottom line first they would have encouraged her Forest Church or retire but they never even reduced her pay and she had been working there for over 30 years so she was per hour she's making a lot of money by them but Wegmans cares about their people they had compassion for her because they saw that she really wanted to keep working for social and relationship reasons so compassion so Wedman treats people with compassion they're not treating them like robots they're not treating them like they're just a line on a spreadsheet and when you treat people well they treat other people well they treat customers well there's like ripple effect so as a leader you can take actions like this and overtime create a culture an environment where compassion becomes the norm so question of the day do you know any compassionate leaders I would love to hear about those leaders in the comments section below the video and in the next video of this series we're going to talk specifically about compassionate communication so I'll link to that when it's finished you can check it out I will also link to a PDF download that's free it's about the essential communication skills that every professional should have so you can check that out in the link below as well so god bless and I'll see you in the next video about compassionate communication [Music]