A large-scale disaster, such as the Covid-19 outbreak, forces leaders to return to their roots: leading their entire team staying in the front to make a positive difference in the lives of their people, through compassionate leadership. In such times of crisis, compassionate leadership is critical for leaders to be prepared to deal with human difficulties as a top priority.
Various studies reveal that empathetic leaders outperform others and foster a higher level of engagement and loyalty among their teams even when things are going pretty well. Compassionate leadership provides numerous advantages in the workplace, particularly for remote teams in difficult circumstances.
While it may be easy to keep your head down and focus on maintaining authority amid a crisis, it is actually critical to focus inwards on own anxieties and worries.
Four Essential Traits of Compassionate Leaderships
Here are five important characteristics of compassionate leadership. Chief Magazine offers advice on how to guide your team through the pandemic’s obstacles by building self-awareness and compassion.
- Allow Open Communication
A platform for open discussion based on self-awareness is a way to foster solidarity via shared experiences. It’s a strategy to establish vital connections and relationships with your employees.
Compassion is the polar opposite of indifference when it comes to communication. Compassionate communication is essential for developing a powerful leadership style. This is true not only for what you say, but also for how you listen. Allow people to speak freely and resist the urge to dominate talks or meetings. You don’t have to know everything just because you’re a good leader! Ask thoughtful inquiries and remain present to get responses.
- Seek Honest & Constructive Feedback
As a skilled and successful leader, learning to take and request feedback is an important part of listening. “When leaders act as if they know everything, they harden their hearts to new ideas by insisting that they don’t need to learn anything else in order to be effective in their roles.”
On the other hand, as a compassionate leader, you seek criticism on a regular basis, based on the assumption that you can only grow your team as much as you grow yourself. With regular check-ins, not only as part of a protocol in annual evaluations, make a point of collecting feedback on what you can do differently.
When offered compassionately, all forms of feedback provide reassurance and are essential for a well motivated and engaged workforce. Your staff will be equipped to learn, grow, and move on with your business goals if you provide feedback or news in a courteous and honest manner.
- Integrating your Feelings
Although it may appear to be woo-woo, integrating your own feelings is critical to building compassionate leadership skills. Integrating your felt responses entails normalizing, accepting, and communicating your feelings.
Intentional deep breathing, meditation, and yoga are examples of basic, well-established, and scientifically proved activities for uncovering and integrating feelings (with a continuous focus on your own breathing and self awareness of your body).
Read this nice post on how the future of leadership is based on kindness.
- Lead with Courage, Be at the Front
Compassionate leadership requires a combination of vulnerability and courage: the courage to offer your employees what they need while avoiding supporting bad behavior by giving them exactly what they want. Plus, the vulnerability allows you to let down your guard and connect with your colleagues in a genuine way.
Compassionate leadership is characterized by encouraging and leading from the front by example rather than by command. As a result, you’ll bring your team members together to work as a unit. After all, good leaders understand that no single person can achieve great things in life or business. It is always a team effort to achieve success.
Compassionate leadership entails being able to gauge, appreciate, and recognize how your team is feeling and leading from there by communicating with empathy and leading with bravery from the front. When you start empathizing, acknowledging, and are taking the time to listen and understand your people, it will help you cultivate meaningful, motivating, and productive working connections at all levels.
