Harvard Business Review quotes Jane Dutton on managing with compassion, accountability

August 23, 2021


Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) co-founder Jane Dutton is quoted in the Harvard Business Review article “Managers: Compassion and Accountability Aren’t Mutually Exclusive.”

The article explores how managers can balance the compassion they’ve been encouraged to show employees during the COVID-19 pandemic with accountability as restrictions begin to lift. It includes eight practical steps managers can take to meet goals while also being caring.

“As Jane Dutton, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and coauthor of Awakening Compassion at Work, puts it, ‘Being compassionate doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards,’” the article says. “Rather than thinking of it as a trade-off between compassion and accountability, think about how you can combine the two.”

Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan.