Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

innovation

Three Ways Compassion Makes Your Business Better

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Three Ways Compassion Makes Your Business Better
Image Credit: Shutterstock

In a recent CBS This Morning interview, Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, expressed the importance of compassion in the workplace.

Regarding the organization of the future, Jeff said, “It’s about walking the walk… It’s about looking at different perspectives…it’s about those interpersonal or soft skills…that will set yourself, your team, and the organization up for success.”

To some people, this may sound like fluff.

After all, what’s love got to do with it?

How do you link compassion with success in a way that makes business sense?

First, let’s define what compassion is – and what it isn’t. A short definition of compassion is to have concern for the well-being of others. For more on this – and to learn what it isn’t – see my article on compassion and boundaries.

How does having concern for the well-being of others increase the bottom line?

Here are three ways compassion directly impacts your revenues.

1. Communication.

When compassion is absent from communication, it reflects a lack of willingness to walk in the other person’s shoes.

It is evidenced by little or no interest in hearing the perspectives of others, or in seeking to understand. It is also evidenced by a heightened tendency for reactive and judgmental thinking.

Poor communication can actually cost your company an average of $26,041 in productivity per employee per year. It can cost your managers the ability to perform the work and manage others; and it can cost you your leadership reputation.

2. Team and organizational alignment.

When compassion is absent from a company, teams and team members within teams work in silos.

Silos are responsible for missed deadlines, arguments over who is responsible for what, distrust, poor assumptions about others, conflict – the list goes on. The energy in such a business is negative and draining to the soul, and productivity is low as a result of it.

Do you consider yourself a compassionate leader? Be careful. Hubris Syndrome can creep up quickly, and you may discover you have actually compromised your leadership. For more on this, see my article: “Can You Lead with Heart and Get Results?”

3. Competitive advantage.

Caring for others gives you a corporate edge. But when compassion is absent, it has been proven to compromise your employees’ feelings of safety and loyalty.

They doubt that learning, collaboration, and innovation are possible at your company and can shut down, which impacts the bottom line. Service quality suffers without compassion, and the employee’s desire to empathize with others and move beyond personal bias to form a team suffers as well.

It is time to identify and take action on strategies for the workplace that ignite compassion, because, as you see, love and results do, indeed, go hand in hand.

Inspired by the book, Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates People and Organizations (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017, 272 pages)

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Why Downsizing May Not Be the Answer

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The Hidden Costs of Downsizing
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Tom S., CEO of the Jansen Company (fictitious individual and company names, real client), called me a short time after downsizing.

The company had lost quite a few customers due to the bad press it had received for this.

Employee morale and engagement were rapidly sinking.

There was a loss in productivity due not only to the occurrence itself, but also because the remaining employees had to absorb the work previously done by those having lost their jobs.

The cost in dollars to Jansen was significant and surprising.

The move to restructure had been a move to stop profit bleed. But just totaling money spent on loss of market share due to bad press, severance packages for those laid off, and current training costs for those who needed to absorb the work left behind, was more than the company had projected.

Additionally, employee turnover was on the rise, as people didn’t trust what the company might do next. The search for replacements was also costing Jansen money, time, and effort, as well as the onboarding and training to get the new people up to speed.

Things were a mess as a result of the downsizing.

It appeared that Jansen’s downsizing had been an incredibly poor idea that did not pay off.

It’s a fact that a majority of layoffs do not turn out well. Downsizing has become a default response to an ambiguous future marked by swift advances in technology, volatile markets, and growing competition (for more on this, see “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company” by Sucher and Gupta, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2018 issue).

There are new and more successful alternatives emerging – but in Jansen’s case, this was now water under the bridge.

The CEO had called me in because the executive team members were under extreme stress. A couple of them who had never worked well together were simply not talking to one another. He was afraid that some of these executives might secretly be job hunting, and the company couldn’t afford such a final blow.

He wondered if executive coaching might be the answer to supporting his team with the agility they needed as they faced managing this unexpected situation.

I agreed to meet with each one of the executives individually to get a sense of where they were vis-à-vis their commitment to the company and to assess their ability to manage change.

As I did so, I learned that their effectiveness as team members and as team itself had been compromised long before the decision to downsize took place.

And I wished I could have coached them sooner – before they found themselves in such a difficult situation. Because what I identified were some areas in their leadership that, had these been strengthened, might have circumvented the downsizing and what led up to it.

Here were the chief team and individual behaviors I uncovered. These led to high COI (costs of inaction).

  • Poor communication and conflict management (by the way, this one area account for around 67% of all productivity loss in any enterprise)
  • Slow and poor decision-making processes leading to less-than-optimal outcomes
  • Ineffective approaches to bring others along in the process for buy-in and commitment
  • Poor ability to keep eyes on the horizon for trends and shifts while managing the present
  • Poor stress management from high productivity and little return
  • Unwillingness to consider multiple perspectives leading to better creativity and innovation

I believe Jansen would not have had to consider downsizing, had decision-makers recognized the value of intentional and consistent leadership development.

Leadership directly affects all levels of the organization’s success.

Is your leadership producing a great ROI? Here are some questions to help you gauge this:

  1. Are people clamoring to work for your company? Are your employees highly engaged and productive?
  2. Is your business consistently increasing revenue and profitability? Or are there areas that need help?
  3. Are you retaining your current market share and capturing more? Or are you stalled at a certain point?
  4. Where do you stand vis-à-vis the competition? How well are your products and services reflecting the innovation you need to be on top?
  5. What does overall performance look like for your enterprise? Are there any silos or broken parts needing your attention?

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The Difference Between Leading and Managing

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The Difference Between Leading and Managing

Why You Need to Do Both

There’s a lot of noise out there about how you should stop managing and start leading in order to be successful.

Big misconception. No matter what role you hold in your work, you are always going to need both skillsets.

Managing means facilitating process and/or entities to accomplish a goal. And leading, according to the dictionary, is to “go before, show the way; influence, inspire.”

Here are some differences between leading and managing:

Chart

If you are in charge of an area of responsibility, you need to know how to lead – and how to manage.

Here’s an easy way to think about it:  Lead people, manage work.

It’s tough to survive without the ability to wear these two hats. In an age of the flattened organizational model, with more shared responsibility and less authority, influence and inspiration rule supreme in order to bring team and other stakeholders along…and we still need to tend to our personal piece of the work pie to reach goals.

How does this play out in your work?