How important is compassionate leadership?

Recently, the Management Research Group (MRG) hosted a webinar on Compassionate Leadership: Coaching Leaders to Turn Empathy into Action. Based on their research, they’ve found that compassion isn’t just a “nice to have” – it has real benefits for both organisations and individuals. Leaders who are not just successful and effective, but also compassionate, can help make their organisations better places to work.

Here are some of the key insights they shared:

  • Compassion is not the same as empathy: compassion is empathy in action
  • Leaders who are both empathetic and compassionate outperform other empathetic leaders on all cognitive and people skills, and all but 1 business skill
  • Compassionate leaders not only increase their own wellbeing but also the wellbeing of their colleagues
  • As a group, compassionate leaders tend to show above average levels of strategic behaviours (70th percentile) and restraint (65th percentile)

Importantly, the top competencies associated with compassionate leadership include the capacity to contribute to team performance, enhancing employee engagement and being resilient.

For the organisation as a whole, Compassionate Leadership delivers major rewards such as:

  • Greater employee commitment
  • Openness to receiving help
  • Organisation-wide resilience
  • A reduction in punitive actions toward others

To explore further, you can download the webinar here: http://connect.mrg.com/on-demand-webinar-compassionate-leadership or read the full wrap-up here: https://www.mrg.com/blog/webinar-wrap-up-coaching-for-compassion/.

If have interest in knowing more about the LEA 360 that is referenced in the article and the webinar, please contact us.

Compassion is empathy in action