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Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness

May 1, 2015 By Emma Seppala

Stanford University neurosurgeon Dr. James Doty tells the story of performing surgery on a little boy’s brain tumor. In the middle of the procedure, the resident who is assisting him gets distracted and accidentally pierces a vein. With blood shedding everywhere, Doty is no longer able to see the delicate brain area he is working on. The boy’s life is at stake. Doty is left with no other choice than to blindly reaching into the affected area in the hopes of locating and clamping the vein. Fortunately, he is successful.

Most of us are not brain surgeons, but we certainly are all confronted with situations in which an employee makes a grave mistake, potentially ruining a critical project.

The question is:  How should we react when an employee is not performing well or makes a mistake?

Frustration is of course the natural response — and one we all can identify with. Especially if the mistake hurts an important project or reflects badly upon us.

The traditional approach is to reprimand the employee in some way. The hope is that some form of punishment will be beneficial: it will teach the employee a lesson. Expressing our frustration also may relieve us of the stress and anger caused by the mistake. Finally, it may help the rest of the team stay on their toes to avoid making future errors.

Some managers, however, choose a different response when confronted by an underperforming employee: compassion and curiosity.  Not that a part of them isn’t frustrated or exasperated — maybe they still worry about how their employee’s mistakes will reflect back on them — but they are somehow able to suspend judgment and may even be able to use the moment to do a bit of coaching.

What does research say is best? The more compassionate response will get you more powerful results.

First, compassion and curiosity increase employee loyalty and trust. Researchhas shown that feelings of warmth and positive relationships at work have a greater say over employee loyalty than the size of their paycheck.  In particular, a study by Jonathan Haidt of New York University shows that the more employees look up to their leaders and are moved by their compassion or kindness (a state he terms elevation), the more loyal they become to him or her. So if you are more compassionate to your employee, not only will he or she be more loyal to you, but anyone else who has witnessed your behavior may also experience elevation and feel more devoted to you.

Conversely, responding with anger or frustration erodes loyalty. As Adam Grant, Professor at the Wharton Business School and best-selling author of Give & Take,points out that, because of the law of reciprocity, if you embarrass or blame an employee too harshly, your reaction may end up coming around to haunt you. “Next time you need to rely on that employee, you may have lost some of the loyalty that was there before,” he told me.

We are especially sensitive to signs of trustworthiness in our leaders, and compassion increases our willingness to trust. Simply put, our brains respond more positively to bosses who have shown us empathy, as neuroimaging research confirms. Employee trust in turn improves performance.

Doty, who is also Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, recalls his first experience in the OR room. He was so nervous that he perspired profusely. Soon enough, a drop of sweat fell into the operation site and contaminated it. The operation was a simple one and the patients’ life was in no way at stake. As for the operation site, it could have been easily irrigated. However, the operating surgeon — one of the biggest names in surgery at the time — was so angry that he kicked Doty out of the OR room. Doty recalls returning home and crying tears of devastation.

Tellingly, Doty explains in an interview how, if the surgeon had acted differently, he would have gained Doty’s undying loyalty. “If the surgeon, instead of raging, had said something like: Listen young man watch what just happened, you contaminated the field. I know you’re nervous. You can’t be nervous if you want to be a surgeon. Why don’t you go outside and take a few minutes to collect yourself. Readjust your cap in such a way that the sweat doesn’t pour down your face. Then come back and I’ll show you something. Well, then he would have been my hero forever.”

Not only does an angry response erode loyalty and trust, it also inhibits creativity by jacking up the employee’s stress levels. As Doty explains, “Creating an environment where there is fear, anxiety and lack of trust makes people shut down. If people have fear and anxiety, we know from neuroscience that their threat response is engaged, their cognitive control is impacted. As a consequence, their productivity and creativity diminish.” For instance, brain imaging studies show that, when we feel safe, our brain’s stress response is lower.

Grant also agrees that “when you respond in a frustrated, furious manner, the employee becomes less likely to take risks in the future because s/he worries about the negative consequences of making mistakes. In other words, you kill the culture of experimentation that is critical to learning and innovation.” Grant refers to research by Fiona Lee at the University of Michigan that shows that promoting a culture of safety — rather than fear of negative consequences – helps encourage the spirit of experimentation so critical for creativity.

There is, of course, a reason we feel anger. Research shows that feelings of anger can have beneficial results – for example, they can give us the energy to stand up against injustice. Moreover, they make us appear more powerful. However, when as a leader you express negative emotions like anger, your employees actually view you as less effective. Conversely, being likable and projecting warmth — not toughness — gives leaders a distinct advantage, as Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School has shown.

So how can you respond with more compassion the next time an employee makes a serious mistake?

1. Take a moment. Doty explains that the first thing is to get a handle on your own emotions — anger, frustration, or whatever the case may be. “You have to take a step back and control your own emotional response because if you act out of emotional engagement, you are not thoughtful about your approach to the problem. By stepping back and taking a period of time to reflect, you enter a mental state that allows for a more thoughtful, reasonable and discerned response.” Practicing meditation can help improve your self-awareness and emotional control.

You don’t want to operate from a place where you are just pretending not to be angry. Research shows that this kind of pretense actually ends up raising both your and your employee’s heart rates. Instead, take some time to cool off so you can see the situation with more detachment.

2. Put yourself in your employees’ shoes.  Taking a step back will help give you the ability to empathize with your employee. Why was Dr. Doty, in the near-tragic OR moment, able to respond compassionately to his resident? As a consequence of recalling his own first experience in the OR room, he could identify and empathize with the resident. This allowed him to curb his frustration, avoid degrading the already horrified resident, and maintain the presence of mind to save a little boy’s life.

The ability to perspective-take is a valuable one. Studies have shown that it helps you see aspects of the situation you may not have noticed and leads to better results in interactions and negotiations. And because positions of power tend to lower our natural inclination for empathy, it is particularly important that managers have the self-awareness to make sure they practice seeing situations form their employee’s perspective.

3. Forgive. Empathy, of course, helps you forgive.

Forgiveness not only strengthens your relationship with your employee by promoting loyalty, it turns out that it is also good for you. Whereas carrying a grudge is bad for your heart (blood pressure and heart rate both go up), forgiveness lowers both your blood pressure and that of the person you’re forgiving. Other studies show that forgiveness makes you happier and more satisfied with life, significantly reducing stress and negative emotions.

When trust, loyalty, and creativity are high, and stress is low, employees are happier and more productive and turnover is lower. Positive interactions even make employees healthier and require fewer sick days. Other studies have shown how compassionate management leads to improvements in customer service and client outcomes and satisfaction.

Doty told me he’s never thrown anyone out of his OR. “It’s not that I let them off the hook, but by choosing a compassionate response when they know they have made a mistake, they are not destroyed, they have learned a lesson, and they want to improve for you because you’ve been kind to them.”

 

Emma Seppala, PhD, is a Stanford University research psychologist and the Associate Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She consults is a corporate well-being consultant as well as a science journalist with Psychology Today, Huffington Post, Scientific American Mind and the e-magazine she founded, Fulfillment Daily. Follow her on Twitter @emmaseppala or her websitewww.emmaseppala.com.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, at https://hbr.org. 

Filed Under: Business, Health, Science

A Compassionate Work Culture Benefits The Bottom Line

May 1, 2015 By Alena Hall

We know that being kind to others feels good, helps us heal, and even makes usappear more attractive. Now there’s evidence that acting with compassion in the workplace can also have a profound effect on both the internal and external success of a business.

While the idea has previous been labeled “touchy-feely” and quickly discarded, creating an emotionally positive work culture can boast big benefits for both customers and employees, according to a new study from researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the George Mason University School of Business. They found a clear, positive correlation between compassionate behavior, work satisfaction and company success. Their results were recently published in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly.

In the study, researchers Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill focused on exploring the idea of a compassionate love culture, which they describe as the following in their report:

To picture a strong culture of companionate love, first imagine a pair of co-workers collaborating side by side, each day expressing caring and affection towards one another, safeguarding each other’s feelings, showing tenderness and compassion when things don’t go well and supporting each other in work and non-work matters. Then expand this image to an entire network of dyadic and group interactions so that this type of caring, affection, tenderness and compassion occurs frequently within most of the dyads and groups throughout the entire social unit: a clear picture emerges of a culture of companionate love.

Specifically looking at long-term care facilities, they observed 13 units of a particular company in the northeastern United States including 185 employees of various healthcare professions. They also gathered survey data from 108 patients and 42 family members to see how work culture impacted the quality of patient care offered. Everyone filled out questionnaires about their work culture, and then 16 months later when the researchers returned, they evaluated their answers.

They found that the units that operated with more compassion experienced less burnout, fewer unplanned absences from work, better team work and a higher job satisfaction. When it came to their patients, they visited the emergency room less, and experienced higher moods, satisfaction and overall quality of life. They were even more likely to recommend the care to other future patients and their families. (It’s important to note that the study revealed a sort of correlation — but not causation — between compassionate love work culture and these benefits.)

Since most healthcare professions naturally rely on a component of compassion to some degree, so seeing how the results fared in different fields would be telling of just how interconnected kindness and these benefits are. Recognizing this limitation, Barsade and O’Neill surveyed approximately 3,200 employees from a variety of industries regarding their work culture, which led to similar findings. The more compassion experienced within a work culture, the higher rates of job satisfaction, accountability, performance and commitment.

“For decades, management scholars have encouraged leaders to take ownership of their cognitive culture,” Barsade and O’Neill said in their report. “Similarly, leaders would do well to think about and take ownership of emotional culture.”

This new data aligns well with previous research that shows just how strong of an impact having good friends at work can have on your happiness levels, for in order to build and maintain such relationships, you must behave with genuine compassion for those around you. Feeling able to express yourself genuinely goes a long way in creating a productive environment and a strong culture — both inside and outside of the workplace.

 

Alena Hall is an Associate Editor of the Huffington Post.

This article was orginally published in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. 

Filed Under: Business

Creating a Compassionate Workplace

February 1, 2015 By Susan Wolbie

Compassion, defined as sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others, is a trait we’ve always valued in our personal relationships. But how often is it discussed in terms of the workplace? Is the workplace meant to be a “dog-eat-dog” kind of experience where everyone is out for himself, never worrying about the woes of colleagues? Or, can compassion be helpful in most, if not all, workplaces?

A 16-month longitudinal study at a long-term health care facility with 185 employees, 108 patients, and 42 of the patients’ family members was conducted to test how the employees treated the patients and families versus their colleagues. The researchers found that there was lower absenteeism and employee burnout, as well as higher levels of employee engagement with their work with greater teamwork and employee satisfaction. In addition, the culture of compassion spread to patients and their families. Then, to see if the same positive results would be found in industries such as real estate, finance, and public utilities, they performed a second study involving 3,201 employees in seven different industries. Again, a greater culture of compassion in the workplace led to greater work satisfaction, commitment, and accountability.

Now that we are learning that a more compassionate workplace results in more positive work relationships, increased cooperation, better customer relations, and reduced stress, the question begs to be asked: What steps can we take to develop or increase a compassionate workplace?

1. Try a morning ritual where you literally set a positive tone for your day.This could be done at the end of a session of mindfulness meditation. I am lucky in this life of mine. I will send positive thoughts to others today, especially those who seem to be sad or suffering. I’m going to avoid all anger, and seek to find that which I can learn from others. My calm attitude will spread from one colleague to the next as I smile at each person I meet today.

2. Look for what you have in common with others today. Recognizing that which is the same about you and others, especially others with whom you are not good friends, helps diminish the things that may tear you apart. You may also come to understand why someone has a certain reaction, and you may be able to more readily relate to his situation.

3. Practice intentional, but random, acts of kindness. They could be small acts, like getting someone else a cup of coffee when you’re getting your own or sending an email to a colleague to thank him for something he did well, or just something he did to help you do your job better. You could also opt for a larger act like helping someone who is overworked or seems overwhelmed with all there is on his “to do” list.

4. Start a gratitude journal where each day you write three new things you are grateful for at work. Before you know it, you will find your brain looking for additional positive things that you can then write about later in the journal.

5. Each night write about your day. Pick one or two of the most positive events that happened that day. Write what happened, what your role was in the event, how the others involved reacted, and exactly how it made you feel.

Giving yourself the gift of a compassionate workplace will change your outlook, improve your moods, and increase your gratitude for this world and your place in it.

 

Susie Wolbie educator and presenter focusing on mindfulness, parenting, stress reduction, building balanced lives, and study-organization skills.

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

Filed Under: Business

BUSINESS: Compassion in the Workplace

June 1, 2014 By Knowledge@Wharton Staff Writers

For some employees, a typical day at the office might begin with a barrage of work-related questions from impatient colleagues who have been awaiting their arrival. For others, it might start off with a series of cheerful greetings from co-workers, questions about how their family members are doing or perhaps an offer to grab a quick cup of coffee before the daily work deluge begins.

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According to Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade, there is reason to believe that the latter scenario — which illustrates what she refers to as “companionate love” in the workplace — is not only more appealing, but also is vital to employee morale, teamwork and customer satisfaction.

Companionate love is shown “when colleagues who are together day in and day out, ask and care about each other’s work and even non-work issues,” Barsade says. “They are careful of each other’s feelings. They show compassion when things don’t go well. And they also show affection and caring — and that can be about bringing somebody a cup of coffee when you go get your own, or just listening when a co-worker needs to talk.”

To demonstrate the value of companionate love in the workplace, Barsade and co-author Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill, Assistant Professor of management at George Mason University, performed a 16-month longitudinal study at a long-term health care facility involving 185 employees, 108 patients and 42 of those patients’ family members. Barsade and O’Neill set out to measure the effect of companionate love on emotional and behavioral outcomes of employees, as well as on health outcomes of patients and the satisfaction of those patients’ family members. The results of their study are included in a paper titled, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in the Long-Term Care Setting,” which will be published in an upcoming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

To conduct their research, Barsade and O’Neill constructed a scale designed to measure tenderness, compassion, affection and caring. But rather than simply asking the participants if they felt or expressed those emotions themselves, the researchers asked to what degree people saw their colleagues expressing them. They also brought in independent raters to observe those four elements of the facility’s culture, as well as asked family members to rate the culture. Last, they added ratings of “cultural artifacts” (how the culture is displayed in the physical environment) that reflect a culture of companionate love — for example, having spaces with a “homey” environment, throwing birthday parties, etc. “We have a very robust measurement consisting of all the possible lenses on the culture of the unit,” Barsade says.

This study was among the few to focus on emotional culture rather than cognitive culture, Barsade notes. “What we’re talking about is shared emotions. Our field tends to focus on shared cognitions of people at work, yet an understanding of shared emotions of people at work can also have important outcomes for organizations.”

When Love Is Infectious

Barsade and O’Neill believed long-term care would be the ideal setting to test their hypothesis that companionate love is a positive force in the workplace. “In these facilities, you have people dealing with residents who are there for a long time. You have employees who have chosen a caring industry,” Barsade says. “So it was a natural first stop for looking at the concept of emotional culture. Even though this has to do with how employees are treating each other, and not necessarily how they are treating their clients, we argue that if they treat each other with caring, compassion, tenderness and affection, that will spill over to residents and their families.”

One of the most significant findings in the study was that a culture of companionate love reduces employees’ withdrawal from work. Barsade and O’Neill measured employee withdrawal by surveying workers about their levels of emotional exhaustion and by studying their rates of absenteeism. They found that units with higher levels of companionate love had lower levels of absenteeism and employee burnout. The researchers also discovered that a culture of companionate love led to higher levels of employee engagement with their work via greater teamwork and employee satisfaction.

This could occur even with employees who don’t necessarily feel the high levels of companionate love that exist in their units. “The view that dominated our field for 20 years was that anytime you engage in emotional labor — meaning you’re changing or regulating your emotions for a wage –that’s going to lead to burnout,” Barsade says. “What we’re suggesting is that it’s more complicated than that. It may well be that even if you don’t start out feeling the culture of love — even if you’re just enacting it — it can lead to these positive outcomes. In addition, there is the possibility that as you enact companionate love, you will begin to feel it over time.”

The study also found that the culture of companionate love rippled out from staff to influence patients and their families. “Certified nursing assistants rated the mood of the residents, and the outside observers rated the culture. Those outside observers could predict that [patients] would be in a better mood if the culture among the staff was more loving,” Barsade says.

Barsade and O’Neill measured patient quality of life based on 11 factors commonly used to assess long-term care facilities, including comfort, dignity, satisfaction with the food and spiritual fulfillment. Across the board, Barsade says, there was a positive correlation between a culture of companionate love and patient quality of life.

Interestingly, however, when the researchers looked at the health outcomes of the patients, they didn’t find as much of an impact of companionate love as they expected. They measured three of the most critical outcomes for patients in long-term care: unnecessary trips to the emergency room, weight gain and incidence of ulcers from spending too much time in bed. They found that while a culture of companionate love did lead to fewer trips to the ER, it didn’t affect weight or ulcers.

“We statistically controlled for factors such as general patient health, physical functioning and degree of cognitive impairment, so it was quite a conservative test,” Barsade says. “But health effects are not always directly seen. I wouldn’t give up on it.”

Beyond Health Care Settings

There is one key question raised by Barsade’s and O’Neill’s research: Does companionate love matter in workplaces that don’t revolve around providing love and compassion to clients? To answer that question, they performed a second study involving 3,201 employees in seven different industries. Using the same scale they employed in the long-term care facility, the researchers found that a culture of companionate love positively correlated with job satisfaction, commitment to the company and accountability for performance.

The relationships they found in the long-term care setting held steady. “What we found is that companionate love does matter across a broad range of industries, including those as diverse as real estate, finance and public utilities,” O’Neill says. “But the interesting thing is that even though the overall baseline of companionate love can differ across industries, there was as much of a difference within industries as between industries. Overall, we found that — regardless of the industry baseline — to the extent that there’s a greater culture of companionate love, that culture is associated with greater satisfaction, commitment and accountability.”

O’Neill and Barsade believe that their initial findings in other industries argue for further investigation. And additional studies are already underway. For example, O’Neill is working with Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard on a study involving firefighters. “What we see is that companionate love acts as a helper for the problems they struggle with at work and outside of work,” O’Neill says. “For example, [firefighters] tend to have high levels of work-family conflict because of the stress that comes from the job. Companionate love actually helps to buffer the effect of job stress and work-family conflict on other outcomes.”

Barsade says her study in the long-term care facility has also inspired her to examine the role of other aspects of emotional culture at work. “We don’t just have one type of emotional culture,” she says. “We happen to be looking at a culture of companionate love here. But you could have a culture of anger. You could have culture of fear. You could have culture of joy. The natural second step is to look at how these factors influence one another, and then to look at the whole picture of how cognitive culture and emotional culture intersect.”

Already, though, the research seems to be pointing to a strong message for managers in all industries, Barsade says: tenderness, compassion, affection and caring matter at work. “Management can do something about this,” she says. “They should be thinking about the emotional culture. It starts with how they are treating their own employees when they see them. Are they showing these kinds of emotions? And it informs what kind of policies they put into place. This is something that can definitely be very purposeful — not just something that rises organically.”

This article is reprinted with revisions from Knowledge@Wharton, the online business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Filed Under: Business

BUSINESS: Perspectives on Philanthropy

December 10, 2013 By James R. Doty

Dan Pallotta’s recent TEDTalk “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong” reminded me of a number of problems that I have witnessed in the common attitude toward funding and philanthropy.

I spend a significant amount of time as director of the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), a center whose work is renowned worldwide. However, funds that would allow me to do this work full-time are currently nonexistent. A great amount of my CCARE time needs to be spent on fundraising, which takes away from a complete focus on the center’s mission. Our present method of philanthropy is at the root cause of this type of problem.

It seems to be an all too common perception among philanthropists that if one has chosen to work in a nonprofit environment, one has concurrently accepted a vow of poverty. Asking for a wage comparable to a for-profit equivalent position somehow seems sinful or “signifies a lack of commitment,” as one billionaire remarked to me. Why is this? Many of these same individuals have no problem spending immense amounts to recruit a talented executive for a for-profit company. In fact, it would seem nonsensical to even debate salary in that situation. Can the best and the brightest be blamed for not choosing to dedicate their lives to charitable or nonprofit causes because they don’t want to live at the poverty level? Don’t get me wrong, many dedicated individuals have accepted this present reality at extraordinary sacrifice, but is it fair and is it not too much to ask? I know of one very dedicated individual with a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university working for a significant non-profit as executive director who must work a second job just to cover rent, food, and childcare. In no way does she live an extravagant lifestyle.

Another too common reality that I have run across again and again is that philanthropists who consider providing funding don’t want any of their money to go to overhead costs. At major academic institutions such as Stanford there is a dean’s tax for overhead that oftentimes is 13 percent or more. Every organization has some amount of administration or overhead costs. Again, in the private sector would anyone dismiss the need for such costs? Where would this money be found?

I was recently talking to a potential donor worth hundreds of millions of dollars who spent the greater part of our meeting denigrating organizations that spent any funds on overhead. I am not aware (nor was he) of any funding organization of non-profits that explicitly states they wish to only fund overhead costs. Such thinking creates another onerous and distracting burden on non-profit organizations and those that run them.

An issue that Pallotta points out eloquently in his TEDTalk is the reality that it costs money to make money. Yet, it is heresy in the non-profit world if an organization reports in their financials that $100 million was raised but it cost $25 million to do so. Again, the immediate response would be that something unseemly is going on. However, it would not have been possible to raise such a sum without paying a fundraising or marketing professional appropriate compensation. As any successful professional knows, you get what you pay for.

One of my entrepreneurial activities was founding a company that created centers that provided a form of cancer therapy. That experience confirmed that if money weren’t spent on advertising to attract patients, it had a profound effect on the number of patients who were referred. If money is not spent on getting the message out, how can you expect the message to resonate? Simply looking at the movie industry demonstrates this reality. The difference between a good movie and a blockbuster often depends on how much is spent upfront on marketing. This is a reality not only in the for-profit world but in the nonprofit world as well.

My point is not to denigrate philanthropists, nor to ignore the fact that the U.S. is the largest donor per capita of any country. Rather, it is to highlight that for charities to reach their full potential, donors must look at their giving in a different way. By applying those principles that have been so successful in the for-profit world, one’s contribution has the potential to go exponentially further and inspire the best and the brightest to chase their passion to serve others.

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About the Author

James R. Doty, MD, is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University School of Medicine. As Director of CCARE, Dr. Doty has collaborated on a number of research projects focused on compassion and altruism including the use of neuro-economic models to assess altruism, use of the CCARE developed compassion cultivation training in individuals and its effect, assessment of compassionate and altruistic judgment utilizing implanted brain electrodes and the use of optogenetic techniques to assess nurturing pathways in rodents. Dr. Doty is also an inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist having given support to a number of charitable organizations including Children as the Peacemakers, Global Healing and Family & Children Services. 

Filed Under: Business

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