Can You Be Too Compassionate as a Leader?

I was asked this question at a recent leadership breakfast and I’d be interested to know what your initial reaction to the question is.

Perhaps you, like me, had an intuitive response paired with a healthy dose of curiosity as to what prompted the question.

As we unpacked this leader’s context, we realised her question stemmed from a belief that compassionate leadership is at odds with having the ‘difficult’ conversations she knew she needed to get better at, and because of this belief she was at risk of rejecting the favourable aspects of her leadership.

Both this conversation and the high level of interest in my recent LinkedIn post on the power of compassion, have prompted me to again reflect on what compassionate leadership is, and what it is not.

Compassionate leadership in a nutshell

The three broad aspects of compassionate leadership include having and showing empathy for what others are feeling, seeking to understand what they are thinking (which can only happen with deep listening), and being motivated to benefit others as an end in itself (rather than a means to an end).

Compassionate leadership is not about perpetuating the so-called ‘friendly-culture’ or ‘nice-lady’ syndromes where people are nice to each other but don’t share what’s on their mind, let alone give meaningful feedback.

In Conversational Intelligence® we describe this as demonstrating care and candour. Both are vital for building trust and having the effective conversations that are essential for high performance.

I really like the way Brené Brown expresses this same concept: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

More on compassionate leadership

The formative concepts of compassionate leadership are attributed to the field of mindfulness pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This Positive Psychology article on using compassionate leadership in the workplace includes thorough descriptions and practical strategies if you would like to know more.

There is even an HBR Assessment that you can do entitled “Are you a Compassionate Leader?”. It maps where you are across two scales: wisdom vs. ignorance and compassion vs. indifference and then offers practical strategies for you to implement, depending on your result.

Out of curiosity I took the survey twice. The first time I answered modestly and scored in quadrant 2, very close to the HBR.ORG average (moderate compassion and moderate wisdom) and the second time I channelled a leader with extremely low emotional intelligence (moderate indifference with low wisdom). Interestingly, both responses recommended being kind to yourself as a practical strategy, sighting self-compassion as the starting point for compassion. This absolutely resonates with the themes from hundreds of coaching conversations with my clients over the last few years.

My two-fold response to the opening question “Can you be too compassionate as a leader?” probably remains the same: my silent answer is no, provided it includes providing meaningful clear feedback, and my conversational response is “Can you share with me where your question is coming from?”.

I’m interested to know what your responses to the question are and how you would evolve the question itself. Perhaps it’s something along the lines of “How might I ensure that my compassionate leadership enables the performance of my teams?”. That inquiry is less binary and makes room for care and candour to co-exist.