In 2025, strive for compassion

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In 1800, there were 1 billion people on the planet Earth. A century later, 2 billion. Today, me and you, your mama and your cousin too, we are all part of the over 8 billion people who share land and sea, night and day. I am not so old that I can’t viscerally recall the battles my brother and I had when we were kids — “your leg is on MY side!” —

and that was just over the back seat territory of a 1985 Chevy Celebrity station wagon. Living amongst the 8 billion of us, it is easy to take on a scarcity-driven, zero-sum mindset. And that mindset may lead to short-term gains. Listen, it did get my brother to get his leg over to HIS side.

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In an age where the speed of technological change is accelerating exponentially, those who drive that change, or feel at ease in its tumult, can actively choose to horde its gains for themselves, first movers on the world as it is now while everyone else is trying to catch up to the world as it was yesterday. Short-term gains, though, most often lead to long-term loss. The infamous biblical character Cain, through the pain he sowed and then reaped, taught us that we are indeed our brother’s keeper. And Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

A shared sense of humanity isn’t just something to consider for our own hearth, or homes of faith or affinity. We must also bring that shared sense of humanity to our places of work. A core power skill in which to gain competence is social and emotional intelligence.  When focusing on social/emotional intelligence, the term empathy often comes up as a core skill. But if you fully want to actualize the American Society for Health Care Engineering’s mission to optimize the health care physical environment, empathy is not enough. Compassion is the tool to get that job done.

A journey of the heart from pity to compassion

Lao Tzu reminds us that, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The first step on the way to compassion is pity. What is pity, then? Nick Wignall, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and cofounder of the workplace consulting firm Loom, describes pity as an emotion when “you feel sad for someone else.” For example, you feel pity when you see a colleague spill coffee on their blouse during the morning touch base. One could also feel self-pity when you are sad that a project you were working on forced you to be off-site, and now everyone got to the birthday cake in the break room before you had a chance to. And while pity can be the start of gaining expertise in social/emotional intelligence, pity alone can be detrimental in the workplace.

Stefan Zweig, author of “Beware of Pity,” makes this distinction, as referenced in this 2023 Sydney Morning Herald article. “There are two kinds of pity,” Zweig says. “One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

After pity, comes sympathy. Amanda Furness, writing for In Equilibrium, a UK consulting firm focused on resilience, health and well-being in the workplace, describes sympathy as “sharing another’s emotions, especially of sorrow or anguish.” Perhaps you commiserate with a team member who got in trouble for forgetting to properly document an inspection. Or you hug your supervisor when their beloved pet passes away. While pity often has an us/them frame to it (you feel pity for), sympathy begins to frame this feeling with more of a “we” mentality (you feel sympathy with). But Furness warns that “depending on the delivery, regularly expressing sympathy at work can come across as impersonal or superficial and have an impact on trust.” How you express that emotional connection matters just as much as the emotional connection itself, in that the expression will be interpreted by others, and impact always matters more than intention when it comes to matters of the heart.

Between sympathy and compassion is empathy. The Center for Creative Leadership describes empathy as “the ability to perceive and relate to the thoughts, emotions or experiences of others” in its 2024 article “The Importance of Empathy in the Workplace.”   You can express sympathy for your supervisor’s loss of their pet because you perceive they are in anguish because of the death, even though you’ve never had a pet. But you empathize with that colleague when you compare their loss to the loss of a beloved family member in your own life, relating their emotions with your own.

Empathy is very powerful in the workplace. It can help you recognize signs of burnout in your team members when you see its early signs and relate it to when you felt burnt out yourself. It can also lead you to demonstrate genuine interest in supporting career advancement for those that you mentor, knowing what it felt like when you first began your career and sought the reassurance of guidance from someone who was farther along in the profession. But sometimes empathy can lead to negative outcomes in a work setting. Empathizing exclusively with the personal circumstances that are impacting an employee’s ability to complete their work tasks ignores the way those missed work assignments are impacting others on the team or the organization’s goals.

The place to strive toward is compassion. Compassion is empathy plus taking action to help. It’s moving beyond feeling pity for the spilled coffee and covering for your colleague for a short period of time while they run home to change. To move beyond sympathy for the colleague who didn’t document the inspection properly and show them a method you use to double-check that you’ve completed that inspection correctly. To expand from empathy for the employee who isn’t completing their job tasks due to personal circumstances and to show them the impact their missed assignments are having on others, or to help them resolve some of the personal circumstances that are impacting their work.

As the Center for Creative Leadership describes it, compassionate leadership is “supporting team members as they work through challenges and looking for systemic ways to reduce friction, making it easier for good people to do great work.” It is about “being willing to apply your influence and power to help create a more even playing field for others.”

Compassion's impact on the bottom line

Listen, I get it. I’m sympathetic to all this uncomfortable talk about emotions. This is a society with engineering in its name, for goodness' sake. You need an analytical argument for compassion? Fine, I’ll give you one.

Harvard University researchers Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter surveyed over 1,000 business leaders across more than 800 organizations and found that leaders who exhibited high levels of compassion had teams who scored higher on critical performance dynamics within their organizations. As a 2018 article in Inc. magazine highlighted, those organizations with leaders exhibiting high levels of compassion inspired high levels of trust among team members, leading to improved collaboration and increased likelihood of sharing important information between team members and others within the organization. High levels of compassion among leaders also led to a stronger commitment between employers and employees. As the Inc. article describes, when a “leader demonstrates empathy, shows situational awareness, and is perceived to act fairly, employees become more committed to the cause and are therefore more apt to go the extra mile when such a moment presents itself.”

Hougaard and Carter also found that a higher level of compassion from leaders led to an improvement in employee retention, with a 15% increase in likelihood that an employee would stay with an organization. As the Inc. article conveys, “For a 50-employee company, a 15% improvement in employee retention can translate to nearly $400,000 in additional profit per year.”

So, “A” (compassion) plus “B” (expressing compassion to your colleagues, team members and employees) equals “C” (improved collaboration, a stronger commitment to the organization, and improved employee retention). The math seems to math pretty easily on this one.

There’s much in our lives that is out of our control. Most things, actually. But one of the things that is within our control is having the courage to act with compassion when interacting with the people in our lives, of our hearth, homes of faith and affinity, as well as the places we work. And perhaps those other 8 billion people with which we share this ever-shrinking planet. Because our moms taught us that “sharing is caring,” even if it means I have to let my brother put his leg on my side. He’s dreaming, though, if he thinks he’s getting his hands on my Millennium Falcon.