Compassion in a manager is understanding and addressing the needs and wellbeing of the team. It’s not just showing empathy and actively listening to the team, but goes one step further. It’s taking action to support each individual to thrive, taking into account their perspectives and individual challenges.
That ‘being compassionate as a manager makes you a soft touch’. Not so. Compassion is misunderstood to imply leniency, weakness and a lack of control or structure. It suggests compassionate managers struggle to enforce rules, make tough decisions or drive performance. They may be passive rather than taking action, for example, excusing poor performance, avoiding making difficult decisions that may upset the team or shying away from giving feedback.
Compassion is necessary for managers. It requires emotional intelligence and courage. By creating a supportive environment through your empathy, understanding and kindness, you will ensure people feel valued and motivated to perform at their best.
Being compassionate doesn’t mean avoiding the difficult conversations or lowering expectations. Instead, it means balancing empathy with accountability – being understanding without compromising on standards and expectations. Here are some top tips to ensure that you can maintain this balance:
1. Setting and maintaining clear expectations: Clearly articulating the expectations and goals of the team is one of the most important things you can do as a manager for lots of reasons. It ensures that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities and how they feed into the wider objectives of the organisation. This creates a fair and equitable environment where everyone has the same information. It gives the team the confidence that they are working on the right things in the right way by providing the structure and framework to be autonomous within. It demonstrates belief in the potential of your team. They know that while you are setting high standards for them to aim for, that you are also there to provide both the support to help get them there.
Once these expectations and goals are set, it doesn’t mean they are fixed. Being compassionate as leaders, our role is to continually check in with our teams, find out what is happening for them and check what they need now. Sometimes, this could be changing the way that you work together and providing more support by increasing the number of catch-ups. Other times, it could be providing additional resources to deliver a task. What’s important is that we maintain clear expectations throughout. This provides the consistency and accountability our teams look to their managers for.
2. Providing regular effective feedback: Where someone might be struggling to meet these standards, a compassionate manager will address this head on. Being compassionate is not avoiding the difficult feedback but instead presenting it in a sensitive way. Compassionate managers also embed giving and receiving feedback into the culture of the team so it is always seen as an opportunity for growth and learning, being clear on both what is working and what needs to change. This includes approaching feedback conversations with kindness and curiosity, whilst still ensuring the message is clear – what is the learning, what is the action and what support is needed?
3. Open communication: All of this requires clear communication. The key to being a compassionate and effective manager is having open conversations with our team. Building a relationship of trust and respect, where our teams feel safe to share what’s happening for them with us and what they need. One-to-ones are a great way to build these relationships. By adapting these to what is happening for the individual is a great way of acting on empathy.
Being open is not just needed at an individual level though. It’s important that everyone feels safe to share their thoughts and opinions, not just with their manager but their wider team too. Creating space for the team to openly discuss their challenges and successes with each other can be powerful. This could be team meetings or informal catch ups to enable the team to connect with each other (particularly important if they work at a distance or in a hybrid way for some or all of the time). Building and encouraging a compassionate and supportive culture across the whole team means not only do individuals know they have the manager’s support, but they can go to each other for support too. This can create a sense of belonging and inclusion for each person, which in turn invites creativity and innovation both of which are essential when it comes to problem solving, as and when new challenges or situations arise. All of this contributes to a productive and supported team, who are ready to face the next challenge with compassion for and commitment to each other.
Management is all about effective balance that delivers the mission whilst enabling people to be their best. Management needs us to be objective, yes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be compassionate. Everyone is different, and we need compassion to recognise and understand those differences and offer the support that they need. This support doesn’t mean leaving our team to do what they want, but instead providing the right support and direction they need to feel valued and supported and ultimately thrive.
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