How often do you stop and think about compassion at work? With busy deadlines, stakeholders to manage and team members to motivate, when do leaders and managers find time to pause, compassionately?
The more useful question may be the reverse: when did you not apply compassion to those around you? Did you feel frustrated with colleagues, friends or family? Did you look for someone to blame when something went wrong? Did you feel you had to swoop in and rescue or solve?
The evidence is consistent. When compassion is role-modelled by senior leaders, it changes the people around them, how they treat themselves and, dare we say it, the bottom line. In Catalyst’s study of nearly 900 US employees, 76% of those with highly empathic senior leaders reported being engaged at work, against 32% of those without.
Mary Portas, in her work on the Kindness Economy, and James Timpson, in The Happiness Index, both make the moral and commercial case for kindness and compassion at work, and their lessons apply well beyond retail. But on an ordinary Tuesday, leading a team that is already behind, why is compassion worth attending to?
What compassion actually is
Kristin Neff, the self-compassion researcher, takes the word back to its Latin roots, where it means to be ‘with suffering’. It is not pity, and it is not sympathy from a safe distance. Kirstie Drummond Papworth, in her book on Compassionate Leadership, describes it in four parts:
Aware. Noticing the suffering, which is easily missed when we are busy.
Feeling. Being moved by it rather than stepping around it.
Appraising. Judging what would actually help, and what is ours to do.
Responding. Taking the action.
The model is helpful because it shows where compassion can get stuck, and it is rarely at the feeling stage. Most of us care a great deal. But when we are busy we can miss what is in front of us, and the more senior we become, the less tends to reach us. Or we notice, and feel it, but hold back, unsure what would help or whether it is our place. That is very human.
Appraising is perhaps the hardest part, and one we are rarely taught. Working out what would genuinely help, without taking over or prying, is a difficult judgement.
Starting closer to home
We get up, go to work, hopefully do our best, return home and support our loved ones, and again, try our best. But despite best intentions, things don’t always turn out as we hoped. Think back over the last few weeks. Did you make a mistake, miss a deadline, or disappoint someone? And how did you speak to yourself about it?
Most of us speak to ourselves in those moments in a way we would never speak to a colleague. Neff’s answer to that inner voice has three parts: meeting your own shortfall with the warmth you would offer someone else; remembering that falling short is part of being human; and holding the feeling steadily, neither suppressing it nor being swept away by it.
This matters at work too. When we are hard on ourselves, it is difficult not to be hard on others, and the inner critic can leak out as impatience in a meeting or a clipped reply.
So what does it look like on a Tuesday?
Compassion is small, specific and mostly unglamorous:
Noticing that someone who always replies within the hour has gone quiet and checking in with them.
Asking what happened rather than asking what went wrong and who did it.
Saying out loud that a deadline was unreasonable, rather than letting the team conclude they were too slow.
Checking whether someone needs help, rather than taking the work off them.
Compassion is not lowering the bar, and it is not swooping in to rescue. It is being honest about what is going wrong while making it safe to say so. A hard conversation delivered with care is often kinder than a silence that leaves someone to struggle alone.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety found that the teams willing to admit mistakes were the ones that improved fastest, because errors surfaced early enough to learn from. People who are not braced for blame raise problems while they are still small, and they are more likely to stay.
So perhaps the question is not whether we have time to be compassionate, but what it costs us, and those around us, when we are not.
The leaders who do this well tend to be those who have had space to reflect honestly on how they respond under pressure, and someone they trust to tell them how they come across. That kind of space is worth seeking out. In the meantime, a good place to start is the next time something goes wrong, with a pause before the blame.
References
https://amycedmondson.com/category/psychological-safety/ Amy Edmondson
Compassionate Leadership by Kirstie Drummond Papworth
https://self-compassion.org/ Kristin Neff
Rebuild, How to thrive in the new Kindness Economy - Mary Portas
The Happiness Index by James Timpson
https://www.catalyst.org/insights/2025/empathy-work-strategy-crisis Catalyst