You’ve probably seen it or something like it, but this is one of my favorite quotes:
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
We often want to show how smart we are, but what we should be showing is that we can listen, understand, and act with empathy and compassion.
Turns out that caring and being compassionate can actually deliver real personal, professional, and physical health benefits.
In fact, the Stanford School of Medicine has even created The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) which studies the mental and health benefits of cultivating compassion in all areas of our lives.
A recent article at CCARE’s blog jumped out at me on how compassion can help make any situation – personal or professional – better and more productive. Here are the five key benefits of cultivating compassion at work:
- Compassion provides the lynchpin in high-quality service and brand loyalty. Research by the Gallup organization shows that genuine expressions of compassion in service interactions create brand loyalty, drive customer engagement with a service or experience provider, and forge lasting bonds with customers.
- Compassion heightens employee engagement and commitment. Customer engagement goes hand-in-hand with employee engagement. Research indicates that commitment also increases when people have significant opportunities to express compassion at work.
- Compassion helps recruit talented people. Compassion attracts talented people when it’s incorporated into the hiring process. In one organization that designed a group hiring process that asked candidates to respond to scenarios related to the suffering of colleagues and customers, a culture of compassion grew and ultimately the group had waiting lists of hundreds of applicants for each job opening. One member of the group told said that the interview itself was so interesting and powerful that she was willing to turn down a position with slightly higher pay and benefits to take a job with the group because “it was the most interesting interview I had ever been to.”
- Compassion fuels learning and innovation. Creating new products, services, and experiences drives competitive advantage, but many leaders ignore how compassion fuels this strategic goal. Compassion is also a key ingredient in learning from failure, because it increases what researchers call ‘psychological safety‘ in sharing information. Because innovation rests on learning from failure, compassion is an easily overlooked but surprisingly important aspect of harvesting new ideas.
- Compassion fosters adaptability and change.Compassion often provides a spark for the actions that create organizational change. One leader facing staff cutbacks and large-scale reorganization stopped a meeting and asked, “What would it mean to do this with compassion?” Following that discussion, the change process shifted. Staff cutbacks were done with respect and care.
Compassion in the workplace can create powerful benefits in culture, innovation and performance.
Care more to grow more.
Have a great week.
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