Article - Leaders Don’t Have to Choose Between Compassion and Performance

We found this part of the article insightful.

Prioritization: Make Time for Compassion

The fact that holding compassionate conversations takes time highlights what is, at its core, a capacity issue: For managers to spend time showing compassion, their organizations need to take away the work that doesn’t matter. This is easy to say, but challenging in practice. In a conversation with a pharma executive, she stressed that, “We always get hung up on prioritization. There is a real tension in determining where we can let go, particularly with respect to short-term performance.” To differentiate critical aspects of performance from those that are simply nice to have, leaders should ask questions like, “How much reporting goes on that’s time consuming and stressful without real value add?” Or, more pointedly, “What are two deliverables you receive but don’t actually read?"

Line managers are in the best position to think about prioritization. They have direct knowledge of both the work being done and the people doing it, but they need help. Leaders need to help managers remember that this isn’t about trading off between performance and compassion, but rather about trading off between different elements within each so that they can free up time to focus on what creates the most value. Senior leaders need to accept that their line managers have more and better data than they do, and therefore trust and support their prioritization efforts and requests as those managers work to support employees who need it.

Leaders Don’t Have to Choose Between Compassion and PerformanceLeaders are experiencing extreme demands for compassion at a time when there’s no room for compromising on outcomes. As a result, many leaders have fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of a binary choice between compassion or performance. They know that both are essential but are finding it ...hbr.org