Compassionate Leadership model

Background

Compassion is a principle which all of us would hope to see demonstrated within health and social care services. As a concept it is similar to ‘empathy’ in that they both describe sensitivity to the suffering of others but compassion also contains an expectation of behaviour, i.e. that our emotions will lead to practical actions (Tanner, 2020). Barriers to compassion include staff feeling overwhelmed by demands and time pressures, bureaucratic processes and performance management, perceived conflicts with acting as objective professionals, and a lack of recognition of the emotional labour involved in such work (de Zulueta, 2015). Compassionate leadership has been proposed as one means to develop the organisational culture to encourage compassion.

Main principles

Working with The King’s Fund, Michael West et al (2017) have developed a model of leadership based on four core components of compassion:

• Attending – leaders must pay attention to the views, interests and needs of individual colleagues and their teams in order to recognise their challenges and problems.
• Understanding – leaders should facilitate their colleagues and teams to explore what has led to their distress so that they can make sense of their experiences and better understand what has caused their difficulties.
• Empathising – leaders should engage emotionally with what people are experiencing and so demonstrate that they value, respect and care about the individuals and their teams.
• Helping – leaders should then work with their colleagues to identify thoughtful and appropriate actions which can be taken to address the causes and relieve the symptoms of people’s distress.

The emphasis throughout therefore is not on sorting out people’s problems for them, but recognising their challenges and supporting them to find long-term solutions to these difficulties. West et al (2017) believe that compassionate leadership behaviours will develop a culture of innovation. This will be achieved through professionals feeling that they are trusted and have agency to act, that they are positively included and encouraged to participate, and that they have supportive and enabling teams (see table 1).

Implications for strengths-based leadership

Introducing a new way of working can lead to professionals experiencing stress if they are already under considerable pressure and do not believe that they have the time, energy or resolve to move away from the practices with which they are familiar. Compassionate leadership does not suggest that we should not look to innovate but does require us to be sensitive to the emotional impacts that this can have on others and to work with them to understand their concerns and identify potential solutions.

Professor Michael West on the connection between compassionate leadership and innovation (video by The King’s Fund):

For more information:

• Caring to change: how compassionate leadership can stimulate innovation in health care (The King’s Fund, 2017)

Compassionate leadership and innovation