Rasmus Hougaard - Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way

1. Introduction:
   How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way
2. Afterword:
   Your Transformation Makes for a More Human World of Work

The greatest challenge for most leaders is doing hard things in a human way.

Leaders need to make decisions that impact peoples lives. They need to tell someone they did not get the promotion. They need to close an office, cancel a project, or manage an unpopular change. They need to give people tough feedback or let someone know they no longer have a job.

All leaders have to do these things that negatively impact other people. And that is hard. It is hard because we as humans are good. By nature, we want to do good, and we dont like to hurt others.

The need for doing hard things in a human way is not new. But the need for it has recently increased. Today, people in companies expect a great work experience. They expect to feel connected, to feel valued, to feel cared for and cared about. This requires leaders who are able to create a more human world of work. When leaders manage to create this experience, people thrive and perform better.

This raises an important question: As a leader, how do you do the hard things that come with taking on the responsibility of leadership while remaining a good human being and bringing out the best in other humans? In other words, how do you do hard things in a human way?

This is an eternal conundrum for all leaders. And most think they have to make the difficult, binary choice between being a good person or being a hard leader. But this is a false dichotomy. It is a terrible choice that no leader ever needs to make. Being hard and being human are not mutually exclusive. In truth, they are aligned: doing hard things is often the most human thing to do. The ability to combine these two seeming opposites comes down to one thing: wise compassion.

Wisdom is to see reality clearly and act appropriately. It is the foresightedness that comes with experience, and it helps us to deal with hard things upfront rather than beating around the bush. To have wisdom means to have good judgment in how to lead others and how to run a business in a purposeful and sustainable way. As part of our research for this book, we looked at how leaders struggle most in this regard. The answer was clear: the hardest thing for most leaders is to find the courage to enter into difficult situations with other people. Most leaders find it harder to make a decision that impacts people than to make large, strategic, and potentially risky decisions. In this regard, wisdom in leadership is about having the courage to be candid and transparent with other people and do the things that need to be doneeven when it is uncomfortable. Wisdom is to see clearly that if you dont do the hard things today, they will become even harder tomorrow.

Compassion is the intention to be of benefit to others. Compassion is not about pleasing others and giving them what they want. Rather, compassion can be tough and direct, such as addressing another persons behavior if it is out of line. But it is done with the intention that helping them change will ultimately lead to better outcomes for everyone.

As a research and consulting firm that facilitates leadership development for large companies, we at Potential Project work to create a more human world of work. As part of this mission, we have done extensive research on wise compassion over the past decade.

Specifically for this book, we have interviewed 350 executives. These have mainly been chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief human resource officers (CHROs). We focused on these two roles for a specific reason: CEOs are responsible for the most difficult decisions in an organization, and CHROs are the ones often tasked with executing them in a human way. The balance between these two is the intersection of being able to do hard things in a human way.

In addition to the qualitative interviews, we have collected quantitative data from fifteen thousand leaders and one hundred fifty thousand employees from more than five thousand companies in nearly one hundred countries. This includes two separate long-term studies in collaboration with Harvard Business Review and four leading business schools. A particular strength of the research for this book is that we collected data from both leaders and their direct reports. This allows us to have a unique insight into how direct reports rate their leaders, rather than relying only on leaders self-reported data.

The findings offer a strong case for wise compassionate leadership. First of all, leading with wise compassion greatly benefits yourself as a leader. Our data shows that there is a direct correlation between your own level of wise compassion and your rank in your company. In other words, wise compassion is great for your career, as it makes you rise through promotions faster. The data also found that leaders who rate themselves high on compassion have 66 percent lower stress than their less compassionate counterparts, a 200 percent lower intention to quit, and 14 percent higher efficacy.