Compassionate Action in Loving Leadership: Here’s How It Works
All Loving Leadership begins with empathy and proceeds to compassionate actions that create love…the kinds of uplift and connection by individuals and the organization that we've been looking at in the last few emails.
Let's break it down the steps so we can be sure to complete the cycle of love - and not fear!
Here's how this rolls…
When working with others, and something happens, empathy will cause us to sense and notice their experience and the feelings that accompany it. Our mirror neurons help us to feel what they are feeling.
If their experience is positive, we feel their good feelings. If their experience is negative, we feel their difficult feelings. Our neurophysiology does this for us. It's how we are built. This feature helps us to know and care about what someone else is experiencing. Yes, this is a feature, not a bug! Empathy is an asset, an incredible power we have as humans.
When we feel empathy, it is meant to be followed by compassion.
Our empathy informs and motivates us to take compassionate action appropriate to the needs of the person or group. That action can take many different forms as we discovered last week. My research confirms that these actions sort into uplifting and connecting behaviors by individuals as well as uplifting and connecting organizational components like systems, processes, practices, and culture.
Both compassionate human response in the moment or over time as well as compassionate organizational systems and programs are crucial. These all help team members experience loving uplift and connection that leads to feelings of safety, acceptance, and belonging followed by the ability to contribute their best and ultimately a gratifying workplace experience.
On the generative path of Loving Leadership, your empathy leads step by step to performance and meaning.
All this can happen if we welcome and practice empathy.
But if we don't embrace empathy, then we are impared in our leadership.
Why might we not have empathy, you might ask, if it is a natural part of our human makeup? Well, if we are taught emotions are weak, dangerous, or inappropriate, then we will habitually suppress and ignore the feelings empathy evokes.
When we numb ourselves in this way, we won't or can't mirror and feel with our team members. And they will notice. We will seem oblivious, cold, and uncaring. This creates fear and stress.
Without the data provided by empathy, we won't have the insight to respond appropriately. Our actions and words will be out of alignment with or even contrary to their needs. We won't know how to build systems that are loving.
This is why, Loving Leaders, we must cultivate our ability to be whole and present in body, mind and emotions, to feel as well as think and sense.
To complete the cycle of love, not fear, our whole human capacity is essential so we can empathize and then act with compassion to create loving uplift and connection.
