“Rising to the Moment: Leading and Working with Compassion Now”
September 24, 2020
A gift from Rising to the Moment
This gift of ideas was co-created by the contributors to Rising to the Moment. Each contributor offered a story to illuminate what compassion looks like in 2020. These stories are fuel for the imagination, just as they are active ingredient for change.
Each contributor also used a story to illustrate small moves that awaken compassion now. They are captured here, available to anyone, and ready to be put to use. While easy to underestimate, the power of small moves is in their ability to adapt to any context, expanding our repertoire of possibility. Naming these small moves helps elaborate the deep skills involved in rehumanizing one another as we face such widespread and unprecedented suffering.
As the global pandemic drags on and people around the world struggle to find a “new normal,” so many of us find illness, disease, and loss piling on top of natural disasters, financial ruin, and the long-term suffering wrought by systemic racism and injustice. While we feel called to rise to the moment, it’s no wonder that many of us begin to feel hopeless or helpless to do so. This event is designed to renew our capacity to imagine and enact compassion in the face of the widespread suffering we find all around us.
Join us for an exploration of a science-based view of compassion that meets this moment. We bring together a number of experts who study compassion in organizations with practitioners who are leading for compassion now. Each of our panelists will feed our imagination with stories and fuel our capacity for action with small, actionable strategies that you can use right now. Focused on building our capacity for action, this unique panel structure will leave you with a replenished toolkit full of small moves that will help you find ways to rise to the challenges of leading, learning, and teaching with compassion now.
Curators
Jane Dutton
Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology
University of Michigan
Senior Director of Organizational Culture and Strategy for the Office of the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
University of Michigan
The Positive Links Speaker Series, presented by Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, offers inspiring and practical science-based strategies to build and bolster thriving organizations. Attendees learn from leading positive organizational scholars and connect with our community of academics, students, staff, and leaders.
About the panel
As the global pandemic drags on and people around the world struggle to find a “new normal,” so many of us find illness, disease, and loss piling on top of natural disasters, financial ruin, and the long-term suffering wrought by systemic racism and injustice. While we feel called to rise to the moment, it’s no wonder that many of us begin to feel hopeless or helpless to do so. This event is designed to renew our capacity to imagine and enact compassion in the face of the widespread suffering we find all around us.
Join us for an exploration of a science-based view of compassion that meets this moment. We bring together a number of experts who study compassion in organizations with practitioners who are leading for compassion now. Each of our panelists will feed our imagination with stories and fuel our capacity for action with small, actionable strategies that you can use right now. Focused on building our capacity for action, this unique panel structure will leave you with a replenished toolkit full of small moves that will help you find ways to rise to the challenges of leading, learning, and teaching with compassion now.
Curators
Jane Dutton
Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emerita Professor of Business Administration and Psychology
University of Michigan
Senior Director of Organizational Culture and Strategy for the Office of the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
University of Michigan
This gift of ideas was co-created by the contributors to Rising to the Moment. Each contributor offered a story to illuminate what compassion looks like in 2020. These stories are fuel for the imagination, just as they are active ingredient for change.
Each contributor also used a story to illustrate small moves that awaken compassion now. They are captured here, available to anyone, and ready to be put to use. While easy to underestimate, the power of small moves is in their ability to adapt to any context, expanding our repertoire of possibility. Naming these small moves helps elaborate the deep skills involved in rehumanizing one another as we face such widespread and unprecedented suffering.
This Positive Links is presented by the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division of the Academy of Management.
Managers need to adapt to coronavirus conditions. Here are some ideas for how to do that.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have received hundreds of emails offering advice, tips, and tools for managers leading teams in this new era of work. One thing is clear: Now is an important time to be extra mindful and intentional as leaders. And there has never been a better time to enact practices that support a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.
Among all the advice streaming through my inbox, five particular practices stood out. They have always been essential management skills, but their interwoven practice now holds outsized potential for impact: support of emotional expression, presence, inquiry, listening, and self-care. I offer them as an opportunity to expand our mindset of leadership as we learn to grow, respond, and improvise with and beyond the coronavirus into our new future of work.
1. Support emotional expression
The experience of the pandemic will reverberate in different ways for each employee. You will observe grief, overwhelm, fear, anxiety, hypersensitivity, and much more. These emotions will change from day to day, week to week, or even hour to hour! I know mine have these past many weeks.
Expressing emotions at work has always been a challenge. Many employees fear being overly vulnerable and sharing too much information, only to have it backfire, leaving them embarrassed and perhaps even the target of judgment. But in this time, when the usual lines between work and life have been greatly blurred, emotions are so obviously present. They’re in need of acknowledgment and support.
Emotions are natural human responses to one’s environment and the expression of emotion is a natural, healthy, and even vital practice. “Our emotional responses shape our experience of the world,” says Eve Ekman, senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center and creator of a popular workshop titled Cultivating Emotional Balance. “Emotions can feel profoundly enriching and painfully unbearable.” In both cases, these divergent emotions may be masked in the workplace with a quietude, a weak smile, or even laughter.
Thus, our role as managers is to discover the emotions within our teams and give them a safe place to be expressed. Most emotions can be fully expressed within seconds. Unexpressed, they remain lodged in our bodies and can cause long-term harm to ourselves and others.
Providing emotional support does not mean that you need to become a therapist or counselor. It does, however, mean moving beyond the polite “How are you?” to a more meaningful exchange and opening that may ignite their sense of belonging and hopefulness. If more emotional support seems prudent, professional resources are readily available.
2. Be exquisitely present
In a recent LinkedIn post, researcher and writer Adam Grant reminds us that loneliness is widespread, especially in American culture. “Americans have fewer friends at work than we did in the past—and we’re less likely to have them over for dinner and go on vacation with them than people in many other countries.”
Social distancing can easily amplify already-widespread feelings of loneliness. Thus, connection is more imperative now than ever, even as it becomes a creative but constrained endeavor. Freelancers and contract employees know how easy it is to feel disconnected from the workplace—and now, almost all of us who once worked every day in an office know what it feels like to not have a water cooler.
This requires leaders to be even more mindful of our employees—pay closer attention, notice more, build high-quality connection. We must be exquisitely present and create the space for our employees to feel fully seen, heard, and appreciated during these challenging and unusual times.
3. Practice embodied inquiry
Being present with our teams is just one ingredient in supporting their thriving. We must also inquire to understand what they value and what they need. This requires skillful inquiry.
Many years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Melissa Peet. At the time, she was the director of integrative learning and knowledge management at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She now runs an organization called the Generative Knowledge Institute.
When I met Melissa, I was intrigued by materials she was creating around generative practices, and particularly a practice she called embodied inquiry. This is the notion that each of us has within us a wealth of resources to successfully navigate change. By asking the right questions, we support and “allow the hidden knowledge, aliveness, and intelligence that is embedded in people’s lived experience to come forward.”
Asking questions from the heart gets below the surface level, provoking answers that are energy-producing and intrinsically self-motivating. So, for example, instead of asking for a stale report on work they’ve done, you could ask employees to describe recent accomplishments they are particularly proud of. Or, rather than asking about goals and objectives, you can ask, “What are you most looking forward to learning during the quarantine period?”
You can tell if you are in embodied inquiry when the employee lights up in front of you and you can see the discovery process unfolding before you. In those moments, it is easy to see how important our questions are. “We live in worlds our questions create,” says David Cooperider, one of the founders of Appreciative Inquiry.
4. Listen generatively
The necessary partner to inquiry is listening, and both practices flourish under exquisite presence. In tandem, inquiry and listening work to bring out the highest and best potential future for our teams.
When an embodied question is asked, we need to be fully present to hear and support the answer. This is an unordinary kind of listening. Otto Scharmer, author, MIT researcher, and founder of the Presencing Institute, divides listening in four levels:
Downloading: Transferring information that is already largely familiar, listening only to reconfirm what you already know.
Factual listening: Paying attention only when the information is different from what you know. This new information is added to what is already known.
Empathic listening: Hearing with an open heart. Empathizing and seeing through someone else’s eyes; able to understand and respect the other person from where they are.
Generative listening: This means listening to create, without your personality getting in the way of results. By connecting to your own intuition, you are able to see and support the other person’s highest future possibility.
From Scharmer’s model, it is easy to see how everyday listening does not provide the necessary conditions for another person to become more alive. Empathic and generative listening are high-order practices, a kind of bespoke listening, attuning so well to another that you lose yourself in their experience, what they are living and struggling with, and able to imagine what is possible for them.
5. Take care of yourself
Finally, we managers are not immune to this crisis and cannot support those who work with us without ensuring our own cups are full.
Being present to our teams during times like this takes a certain energy, and we must be mindful to regularly fill our own cups so we can sustain our presence over time. Tend to yourself by being honest about what you are feeling and experiencing; being vulnerable and modeling emotional expression; setting boundaries when needed; seeking out your own support; and practicing compassion.
I am also a big proponent of self-awareness and self-care. Take as much notice of yourself as you do of others, and be sure to reward yourself with activity that nourishes you.
As we look to continue our lives in quarantine or lockdown, and eventually return to social activity and to work, new waves of experience and emotion will capture us and require attention. Being a remarkable boss means being poised for these waves and ready to respond with aplomb. You’ve got this.
Last year I facilitated a conversation with a group of business executives about onboarding. We began with stories about positive experiences, but as we went around the table something interesting happened. Negative examples quickly surfaced, and with surprising energy. Our negative experiences were far more memorable than the positive ones. Clearly, they had left an indelible mark on each of us.
As a CEO in our group remarked, “We spend so much energy recruiting talent, why don’t we make the same investment in their onboarding?”
Sink or swim?
After the thrill of being offered the job, new employees are often dropped into their roles with immediate deliverables and pressure to produce. This plunge can be a thrilling challenge and dopamine rush for some, but many find it stressful. In fact, the anxiety can drive 17% of new hires to leave their jobs within 3 months of their start date, citing non-existent or insufficient onboarding as the top reason. The fiscal impact of such early attrition is significant; between 100% and 300% of the employee’s salary which is quite a poor return on investment.
The human cost of poor onboarding is also significant. Low confidence, impostor syndrome, and a lack of belonging are common consequences, resulting in decreased productivity, creativity, and commitment.
In spite of all this evidence, almost a quarter of companies don’t have a formal onboarding program!
A better beginning
A well-planned onboarding experience brings out the best in new hires, reinforces an organization’s purpose and values, and enacts important cultural practices and rituals. A win, win, win!
Research shows that thoughtful onboarding programs have a proven ROI:
New employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years.
Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50% greater new hire retention.
Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50% greater new hire productivity and employees whose companies have longer onboarding programs gain full proficiency 34% faster than those in the shortest programs.
Manager satisfaction increases by 20% when their direct reports have formal onboarding training.
What to do?
Rapid growth, busyness, and lack of funding are poor excuses for not paying attention to this important moment. What can organizations do right now to elevate their onboarding practices? Re-think the purpose and meaning of onboarding and experiment with some new approaches to transform the experience.
1. Remember, there is only one first day.
A colleague once shared a story of a Vice President courted and eventually lured from a competitor. It was a clear win for this organization. However, when she showed up on her first day she was taken to her new office where she sat for several hours. Her manager was traveling, and her new colleagues were not even aware of her arrival. It was a bad beginning and did not get much better. She left after only three months on the job. After winning her, the organization quickly lost her, and this could have easily been avoided.
There is only one first day – make it matter.
There is only one first day, first week, and first month for a new employee. The experience of these moments sets the tone of your relationship. Make them matter.
Try this. Be an exceptional host and make the first day a positively memorable one. Within the first few weeks, ask new employees how the expectations they had match up against their lived experience in the organization. Where there is mis-alignment leverage that as an opportunity to rethink your onboarding strategy.
2. Emphasize people and performance over paperwork.
Every onboarding process requires some paperwork. However, during a recent onboarding experience, I was buried in so many demands and documents that my enthusiasm fell under the weight of it all. The process was soul sucking – burdensome, unnecessarily urgent, full of legalese, and communicated in a cold manner.
New hire paperwork doesn’t have to induce such horror! There is latent beauty and elegance in the way documents are formatted, presented, and experienced.
Try this. Redesign onboarding paperwork from the perspective of the new hire. Design to delight rather than defaulting to impersonal and administrative boxes to check. Brand the process, make it intuitive and easy to navigate, and even fun to complete.
3. Tailor onboarding to the individual.
Onboarding should not be “one-size-fits-all.” New employee’s needs will vary based on the level and type of new role.
Individuals also vary in how they learn, how they manage transitions, and how they enter into new environments. What works for one person might be totally ineffective for another. A common misalignment here is between introverted and extraverted employees. An extraverted manager might blindly craft an onboarding experience that they would prefer, which will completely overwhelm a more introverted colleague.
Try this. Before a new hire begins ask them how they prefer to learn and what support they need to successfully transition into their new role and your organization. Then customize their schedule to support those needs and amplify their success.
4. Focus more on the employee, than the organization.
The default assumption for most onboarding programs is that they must orient new hires to the organization’s identity, its mission and values, history, structure and strategy, and more. Leaders and department heads are marched in and new hires presented to, sometimes for hours on end. While these presentations can be beautifully crafted, they are often a one-way communication.
Use onboarding to focus on the employee, more than the organization.
Research conducted in India with an organization called WyPro turns this assumption on its head. The study showed that when a new hire’s identity is emphasized over the organization’s, employee engagement and retention increased by 250%.
Try this. Identify a place in your onboarding process where you can elevate the new hire’s experience and help them reflect on this career transition. What excites them about this new opportunity? What challenges do they anticipate? What do they hope to learn and contribute? Who do they want to become? This could be achieved through an assessment tool, reflective exercises, generative conversations with their new manager or an assigned buddy or mentor, and more.
5. Leverage connection; build belonging.
Set your new hires up for success by meaningfully connecting them to their manager, their new team, an assigned buddy or mentor, and others they will work with throughout the organization. These connections should be made immediately, particularly with the new employee’s manager. If the manager cannot be on-site, delay the start date! This relationship is so crucial that you should not proceed without this important connection.
Try this. Introduce new hires to colleagues who might share similar hobbies or backgrounds, people that might become new friends. Doing this welcomes the whole person to your organization and supports engagement and belonging.
6. Catalyze individual and organizational learning.
Transitions between jobs are big deals, and these moments are huge opportunities for dynamic learning. At the start of a new career chapter, we’re often most open for reflection and learning. Capitalize on this by creating space in onboarding to help new hires articulate what they bring to the organization and what they hope to learn. Incorporate this into development planning and manager support.
New hires bring a beginner’s mind to your existing procedures, practices, systems, and culture. Mine their early observations to improve organization learning and effectiveness.
Try this. Check-in with new hires at the end of 30 days. Ask what they are learning and what would support their continued learning? Ask for their feedback on the organization culture and the systems and process they’ve encountered. Organize and feed these reflections to management for process improvement.
7. View onboarding as an organization ritual.
How can your onboarding be legendary – the kind of experience that becomes a part of your organization’s oral history? Rituals can achieve this.
Onboarding is a living artifact.
Onboarding is a living artifact that you can positively influence. Infusing onboarding with thoughtful and creative rituals will elevate it from a check-list to a deeply meaningful experience that reverberates throughout your organization; amplifying and strengthening your values and culture.
Try this. Ask yourself what experience you want employees to carry with them into your organization that would positively steward your culture. Create routines that will deliver this experience.
Onboarding Pays Off
We all deserve better beginnings. My former boss, Pat Christen, once said, “We give disproportionate weight to what happens to us at the start of relationships. If you pay a lot of attention to those early days of engagement, you get a lot of leverage and mileage out of the way people end up feeling about themselves and about the environment they’re working in…” I could not agree more.
Your onboarding practice is a microcosm of your organization’s culture. How you treat those entering your organization signals what is important. Are you sending the signals you want? Pay attention to your beginnings and they will pay back in spades.
Why do expressions of gratitude matter in the workplace? Here, Murchison outlines several examples of gratitude that have positively impacted an organization and workers directly. From rituals, to an inspiring heartfelt haiku from a manager, and evolving “Annual Reviews” into “Annual Conversations,” to help employees flourish and grow.
His presentation also includes a powerful video documenting his team at HopeLab where they demonstrate the impact of genuine gratitude through caring and compassion.
Murchison is a Leader in Residence at the Center for Positive Organizations and the former vice president for staff development and culture at HopeLab.
Chris Murchison blogged for Whil, “Suffering from busyness? Create more Yutori in your work,” about how chronic busyness creates stress and reduces productivity. People have a need for spaciousness and time to reflect, according to Murchison. “Our bodies and minds need rest to renew, refresh, reflect, and focus.” This need for “unexpected spaciousness” has a term, Yutori. Murchison also shared strategies for creating Yutori in life.
Murchison is a passionate advocate for positive workplace cultures. In his broad career spanning the higher education, for-profit and not-for-profit fields he has focused his energy on developing creative means to building community at work and practices that support an employee experience of deep respect, connection, joy, and generative learning.
Sometimes it can be hard to find the words to describe how exactly we feel. The words may be deep inside, under layers of emotion and locked up in our bodies. Or the words are swirling around inside and need time to be processed. Or we may fear using the wrong words, saying something that will incite judgment or exact unintentional pain. Or words just seem inadequate… This year, following the highly covered police shootings, and now following the presidential election, I’ve heard many usually articulate friends and colleagues struggle with their words.
I had many colleagues struggle with how to talk about the police shootings. They struggled with what to say so many of them chose to say nothing. And post-election, I have had my own struggles, particularly when it comes to engaging with family members. The correspondence or conversations feel heavy and fraught. I fear speaking and also fear what I will hear.
Intentionally using silence can be a useful first step in coming to terms with our own feelings during difficult times. “Alone in silence, we create space to listen to our emotions, to hear our inner dialogue, and hopefully find some truth. Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves,“ writes poet Gunilla Norris. Silence helps us to locate ourselves and hopefully from there discover the courage to speak and to listen.
As we gather together at work, we often find ourselves facing colleagues who hold beliefs we don’t comprehend. We fear saying the wrong thing, fear what we will hear or worry about how to respond when we, or they, get triggered. What can one do with this awkwardness? Silence offers an unusual solution here as well.
You might consider intentionally using silence in these ways at the office:
Start your next meeting with a moment of silence. Beginning in this way can set an intention for slowing down and offers the chance to invite others to pay attention to each other in a different way.
Pause before reacting to others, particularly if you feel hooked. Pausing creates the space for you to feel your own reaction and the opportunity to listen to others. You may even ask for a time out for some silent space as a way of self-care or compassion.
Experiment with sitting together in silence. Present a question, dilemma or hope to your team and ask the group to sit in silence and reflect quietly for 5-10 minutes. You can end the silence with some discussion if you like, but encourage people to speak only if they can improve upon the silence (an old Quaker saying).
Reflecting on collective silence, Gunilla Norris writes, “Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced.” Sitting together, in the absence of words allows undercover emotions to surface and creates the opportunity for greater connection and compassion in the office which is much needed in times like these.
Words are powerful, but in our word-heavy world, silence may in fact be even more impactful.
Chris Murchison is a passionate advocate for positive workplace cultures. In his broad career spanning the higher education, for-profit and not-for-profit fields he has focused his energy on developing creative means to building community at work and practices that support an employee experience of deep respect, connection, joy, and generative learning. He is the former VP of Staff Development and Culture at HopeLab and a Visiting Leader at the Center for Positive Organizations.
According to Murchison, an intentional break from the normal routine—a sabbatical—is a way to rejuvenate and return to work revitalized. While taking a sabbatical is a common practice in higher education, Murchison explains that people in the business world are creating their own sabbatical experiences. He shares his own experiences as well as goals and habits to practice in this time of rest and reflection.
In “The Mindful Perfectionist,” Murchison explains that accepting his own inwardly focused perfectionism was “key to unlocking [his] leadership potential.” Sharing his own story, he writes that perfectionism’s positives include creativity and results. He also describes the challenges of perfectionism, the importance of avoiding a negative downward spiral, and offers ten mindful practices to manage perfectionism on negative days.
“Why write a letter when you could more efficiently communicate the same sentiment via technology?” Chris Murchison asks and explores the question in a new blog posted for Whil, an organization that aims to create happier, healthier, and high-performing workforces.
Combining research from the Templeton Foundation on workplace gratitude and his own personal experience, Murchison shows how the outwardly simple act of handwriting has inwardly resounding effects on feelings of gratitude and connection.
Chris Murchison is a visiting leader at the Center for Positive Organizations and the former vice president for staff development and culture at HopeLab, a member of the Positive Organizations Consortium.
