Monica C. Worline

Organizations should make compassion one of their key competencies. Although compassion is often considered irrelevant in the workplace, it provides the foundation well-being that helps employees perform at their best. It also is at the heart of psychological safety which is critical to helping groups learn, adapt, and create.

One worry you might have going into a book like this is whether or not it will be just fluffy feel good statements. Fortunately, the authors have a solid framework for thinking about compassion in the workplace.

To have a high compassion competence, the organization's individuals should invest in improving their compassion competence. This means looking at how we can improve in each of the four steps of compassionate response: noticing the suffering, interpreting the suffering, feeling empathetic concern, and taking action to alleviate the suffering. Near the end the book, the authors include a self assessment to help you understand your strengths and weaknesses along with questions to help guide improvement in each of the four areas.

Individual competence is not enough. The organization as a whole must build compassion competence to help recognize and alleviate suffering within the organization. This is even more necessary when the organization itself is the source of suffering. The key measures of an organization's compassion competence are the speed with which a compassion response to suffering gets started, how sustained the response is, the scope of resources mobilized to alleviate suffering (utilizing many different types of resources), the magnitude of the resources mobilized (too little, too much, or just right?), and the degree to which the resources are customized to fit the needs of the current situation.

These measure can be improved by improving the compassion competence of different elements of the organization's social architecture. Build formal and informal social networks which connect people to others to allow compassion responses to activate more quickly. Integrate the validity of suffering and the fundamental dignity of all individuals into the work culture. Make compassion a part of all work roles, especially those that traditionally focus on taking a defensive stance toward suffering (such as legal and HR). Find ways to make compassion and acknowledging suffering a part of everyday work routines, such as team meetings. Make sure that leaders are leading with compassion by building individual compassion competence. Make sure they are also leading for compassion by creating a social architecture that integrates compassion. Finally, encourage the sharing of stories of effective compassion responses in the organization to normalize and encourage compassion.

Like with the personal factors, the authors include a list of concrete questions and assessments for these measures and social architecture factors. They also describe social architecture design patterns. These provide clear next steps for creating a plan to improve the compassion competence of an organization.

So... why a 3 star review then? Even by the standards of business books, this book was a slog to read. I frequently got distracted while reading it. This was largely due to the use of too many small case studies to illustrate the principles discussed, leading to a fragmented narrative. The chapters where the authors chose to primarily follow one case study were much more compelling.

I also found that the model did not shine through as well as it could have. When I got to the last chapters, with the assessments and questions, I was able to look back at the rest of the book and see that it had been structured around a tightly structured core model. However, while I was reading the book, the model was muddled.

Overall, this is a book on an important subject which hasn't gotten much attention, so if this is an area of interest for you, I recommend it. Just don't be surprised when it feels longer than it actually is.… (plus d'informations)