Awakening Compassion at Work

Awakening Compassion at Work Plot Summary

Introduction

The conference room fell silent as Sarah, a middle manager, shared how her team rallied around Mark when his house burned down. They organized meals, donated clothes, and created a rotating schedule to help him rebuild. As she finished her story, she paused and reflected, "What surprised me wasn't just how much the team helped Mark, but how much it changed us. We became more cohesive, more creative, and more committed to our work. Somehow, responding to suffering made us all better." This transformative power of compassion in workplaces is at the heart of what organizational researchers have discovered through decades of studying workplace suffering and response. Compassion isn't just a nice human quality; it's a dynamic force that profoundly impacts organizational performance, innovation, collaboration, and adaptability. When suffering inevitably enters our work lives—whether through personal tragedy, organizational change, or everyday distress—the way colleagues and leaders respond makes all the difference. This book illuminates the quiet yet profound power of compassion at work, revealing how noticing others' pain, interpreting it generously, feeling concern, and taking action creates ripples that elevate not just individuals, but entire organizations.

Chapter 1: Understanding Suffering and Compassion in the Workplace

Dorothy, a clerk at an insurance company, found herself in a desperate situation when her husband was diagnosed with kidney failure. She needed time off to be with him in the hospital, but thinking it would be just a few days, she didn't explain why. Three weeks later, Dorothy was on the edge of being terminated for too many absences and late arrivals. The company's strict attendance policy meant that after five points in a year, dismissal was mandatory. She had quickly accumulated four and a half points before deciding to talk to her manager. She felt ashamed and didn't want to lose her job. Sandeep, Dorothy's manager, invited her into his office. "I don't know what to do," Dorothy blurted out, flushed with embarrassment. Sandeep had already noticed her unusual absences, and his attention was heightened because the organizational system had flagged her attendance issues. "You haven't been acting like yourself," Sandeep observed kindly but directly. When Dorothy stayed quiet, he gently asked, "It might help us both if I could understand why." When Sandeep learned that Dorothy's husband had kidney failure and was awaiting a possible transplant organ that could arrive at any moment, her absences made sense to him. Her need for greater flexibility than the attendance policy allowed became obvious. Sandeep called human resources and obtained a waiver for the points Dorothy had accumulated on days when her husband was hospitalized. With the burden of imminent termination lifted, Dorothy felt flooded with gratitude, and her commitment to her work deepened. Sandeep then asked Dorothy if he could tell others about her situation. Though reluctant at first, Dorothy agreed, realizing that revealing her circumstances would make it easier for others to help if she needed to be absent again. With her permission, Sandeep began to mention Dorothy's husband's illness to others, inviting those with ideas to support Dorothy to meet with him. As word spread, coworkers found clarity about why Dorothy had been acting differently, spurring them toward compassion. This story illustrates how suffering at work is often harder to notice than we might expect. When suffering goes unnoticed, compassion fails. Even when we think of ourselves as caring people, organizations can make it difficult to notice suffering through strict policies, time pressure, and norms that emphasize putting on a brave face. The path to compassion begins with creating space for suffering to be seen and acknowledged, allowing the river of human connection to flow.

Chapter 2: The Hidden Value of Compassion for Business Performance

When a massive flood hit Austin, Texas in 1980, the sole Whole Foods Market store was devastated. All equipment and inventory were destroyed, leaving the company nearly half a million dollars in debt with no credit and essentially bankrupt. What rescued the business and set it on its path to becoming a $14 billion company with transformative impact on the food industry? It was compassion from stakeholders that emerged in response to suffering. Customers and neighbors appeared at the store to help clean up, working shoulder to shoulder with employees for weeks. Employees worked without guarantee of payment since the company's leaders had no idea how they could restart. Seeing this outpouring of support, many suppliers offered to absorb much of the losses and restock the store on credit. Bankers extended more credit despite the lack of logical justification. Original investors decided to reinvest additional money. Community groups organized fundraising concerts and events—for a business! Within weeks, the store reopened, and the company was on its way to extraordinary success. When executives at American organizations were surveyed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, researchers discovered a striking pattern: employees who rated their workplaces as excellent at offering compassion in the wake of the crisis became far more engaged in their work. Conversely, when people felt their organizations did not value compassion following the attacks, more than a third became actively disengaged, meaning they were likely causing harm to their workplaces. This finding led Gallup researchers to caution top leaders: "When compassion is called for, know that your bottom line is at stake." In study after study, organizations that demonstrate compassion show higher productivity, profitability, innovation, collaboration, and adaptability to change. For instance, when compassion is part of the values of a business unit, these units exhibit better financial performance, executives perceive them as more effective, and they realize higher employee and customer retention. The hospitality industry has learned that employees who experience compassion in their own work teams can more easily build high-quality connections with customers, leading to sustainable competitive service advantage. Compassion fuels human creativity and innovation in two ways: by motivating new ideas, and by creating psychological safety that enhances learning. When an organization's purpose is linked to alleviating suffering, the call for compassion stimulates creativity. Furthermore, compassion helps people greet errors and failures with open-mindedness that fosters learning rather than blame—a critical factor for innovation. This connection between compassion and the fundamental drivers of business success reveals why compassion belongs on every leader's strategic agenda.

Chapter 3: Noticing and Interpreting Suffering at Work

Zeke was enjoying a rare moment of solitude as he biked through the park on a bright autumn day. He didn't have many opportunities to take his mountain bike out now, since he traveled almost every week for his job as a sales representative at TechCo. Rounding a bend and riding downhill toward home, Zeke felt a strange stiffening in his leg. He lost control of the bike as it gathered speed, tumbling over and over. The bright autumn day melted around him as his consciousness seeped away. Zeke's wife, Geet, happened to be looking out the window at that moment and saw the bike flip. She called out, and Zeke's father and brother raced from the apartment toward the park. They performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. Little did Zeke know that this terrible accident would launch him, his family, and his workplace into an extraordinary story of organizational compassion. Zeke's work community shared strong bonds. They responded almost immediately when they found out about his accident. Ezra phoned Avi, Zeke's manager, who let the rest of his team know that Zeke had been taken to the emergency room. Although it was a weekend, members of Zeke's work team arrived at the hospital right away, filling the waiting room even before Zeke regained consciousness. One of Zeke's team members brought an extra prepaid cell phone and gave it to Geet for the family's use. Others brought food for those in the waiting room. As they waited to understand Zeke's condition, Geet received a call from Raoul, the vice president of TechCo's European and Middle Eastern operations. After the call from Ezra, Zeke's manager Avi had issued an immediate alert to executives across TechCo, which was standard practice after a major injury of an employee. This alert allowed Raoul to quickly tap into resources across a broader network within the organization. The call included reassurances to the family that Zeke's job was secure and that TechCo would support them. TechCo's capacity to notice suffering across organizational boundaries and interpret it generously was extraordinary. In many organizations, the fact that someone suffered a sudden illness that contributed to a debilitating bicycle accident outside of work on a weekend would not be an organizational event at all—no one would notice or respond. But at TechCo, noticing suffering was built into their social architecture through alert systems, interconnected networks of people, and cultural values that emphasized care and respect for each other. What makes this story remarkable is not just the initial response but the sustained attention. TechCo's employees coordinated a schedule for hospital visiting that spanned months, ensuring someone was almost always on hand to run errands, hold the baby, or just listen. As Zeke's condition changed, they remained attuned to the family's needs, continuously reinterpreting what would be most helpful. This is the essence of compassion competence—a system's ability to notice suffering, interpret it generously, and respond in ways that truly alleviate pain.

Chapter 4: Empathy as a Bridge to Compassionate Action

Rosita, a paralegal, had grown irritated with Juana, a copy clerk, whose work had recently become error-prone. When Veronica, the staff manager, overheard Rosita saying harshly to Juana, "You only made four copies of this SEC filing, but I asked you for five. How many times do I have to ask you before you get it right?" she knew she needed to intervene. Veronica asked Rosita to stop by her office. "I wanted to ask you about Juana's work. I overhead you correcting an error today, and I've noticed that her work seems a bit off this week. I know this is frustrating. But I also know that you value supporting your coworkers. You and Juana usually work together well. I wonder, do you know whether something else is behind this pattern?" Veronica continued, "Of course, we can't afford a continual stream of mistakes. But I don't think everything's quite right. So I wanted your perspective." After this conversation, Rosita stopped by the copy room to see Juana. She didn't know that Juana's worries about her life outside of work were nearly overwhelming her. There was just enough gas in her car to get home that night, but not enough to get back tomorrow. There was no formula in the refrigerator for the baby. Her former husband hadn't stopped by with the child support check he had promised. When Rosita tapped her shoulder, Juana jumped. Rosita began to apologize for losing her temper, which took Juana by surprise. Tears that had been on the edge of her eyelids all afternoon rose into her eyes again. "Wait. This isn't like you, and I'm sorry I snapped before. Why don't you tell me, is something else going on?" Rosita asked gently. Rosita remained attentive, watching Juana closely but kindly as she listened to the description of worries about affording gas and groceries and the difficulty of relying on her ex-husband for financial support. Rosita did not interrupt or try to make suggestions. She simply sat with Juana and listened. After their conversation, Rosita left work a little early, purchased a bag of groceries with milk, bread, cereal, and fruit, and left it at Juana's locker. She also tucked a plain white envelope containing enough money for gas into Juana's locker door. When she got to her locker, Juana found the food bag and envelope. She knew it must have been Rosita who had left this for her. Rosita's understanding and expression of genuine concern made this seem like a gift rather than demeaning pity. Juana vowed to work even harder to demonstrate that she deserved Rosita's compassion. This story illustrates how empathy serves as a bridge to compassionate action. Research shows that empathy is both a feeling that can happen instantly and automatically, and a choice we make through effort. When work conditions make empathy seem costly—for instance, if expressing concern for someone who made a mistake might make us seem equally to blame—we might shut down our feelings. This is why skills like perceptive engagement (taking another's perspective), attunement (being aware of another while simultaneously staying in touch with our own experiences), empathic listening, and mindfulness are so valuable at work. The story also reveals how identification with others fuels empathy. When Rosita reflected on Juana's situation, her mind flashed to the pride of her own mother, who'd worked two jobs to feed her children and support their education. This identification helped Rosita shift from seeing Juana as someone making errors to someone with dignity facing tough circumstances. Through this bridge of empathy, compassion transformed their working relationship and heightened Juana's engagement and commitment in powerful but invisible ways.

Chapter 5: Building Organizations with Compassion Competence

"When I think of compassion and the workplace, I'm not sure there's a day that goes by that I don't think about it," said Fred Keller, founder and retired CEO of Cascade Engineering, a leader in large-scale plastic injection molding with sixteen hundred employees. "Almost consciously," he added with a grin of humility. Fred dedicated his career to building an organization with extraordinary compassion competence—the ability to collectively notice suffering, interpret it generously, feel concern, and act effectively to alleviate it. Cascade, a global company and one of the largest certified B Corporations in the world, is dedicated to managing a "triple bottom line" that measures not only financial results but also social impact on people and communities and environmental impacts. At Cascade, "we don't talk about it in compassion terms," Fred explained. "Compassion is something to be demonstrated. Talking about compassion is quite different than practicing it." One of Fred's most significant initiatives was Cascade's "welfare-to-career track." Fred and other leaders at Cascade engaged in a series of corporate experiments to establish this track, spending more than ten years shifting the social architecture toward greater compassion for those coming into the workforce from poverty. First, they provided a van service between the company's site and a local homeless shelter, hiring eight people who tried working at Cascade. Next, they partnered with another business to offer low-wage workers a chance to progress to higher-paying manufacturing jobs. Learning they needed even more transformative change, Fred and others changed the training routines at Cascade to involve a poverty simulation where employees virtually performed the life tasks required to hold a job while navigating obstacles facing people in poverty. A Cascade director who completed the training called it life-changing: "I'm a pretty successful, together kind of person. And I got through that week thinking to myself, 'This wasn't so bad.' But when I got my simulation results back, I learned that I'd forgotten to feed my children! I'd been so focused on paying for the bus and getting places on time. I kept my job, but I didn't feed my children. I think I used to have the sense that people who were poor were lazy. But I will never again underestimate what people are going through." Cascade made more changes as the program evolved. They partnered with other organizations to help with transportation and child care. They invented a new role when the state of Michigan offered a social worker to be on-site, integrating her into a team that provided case-management services to enable people to keep working even while handling life demands. They changed the networks by creating smaller integration teams to help current employees and welfare-to-career newcomers identify with each other. Cascade now runs a successful program with a turnover rate of 3 percent or less per month, alleviating significant financial suffering in the community. Fred's story illustrates how creating organizational compassion competence requires a sophisticated approach to designing social architecture. Network structures, cultural values, roles, routines, and leadership all matter in developing a system's capacity for compassion. Organizations with extraordinary compassion competence don't just depend on individual kindness—they build structures and processes that make compassion reliable, sustainable, and embedded in how work gets done.

Chapter 6: Leading with and for Compassion in Times of Crisis

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Phil Lynch, president of Reuters America, was attending a meeting at Compaq Computer headquarters when someone burst into the conference room to tell the executives that planes had flown into the World Trade Center. Phil literally ran from the meeting to the Reuters building at 3 Times Square. When he arrived, he watched with others in disbelief as the towers burned. Recognizing the extent of the crisis, Phil established a command center in the boardroom on the 22nd floor. In the command center, Phil and his team opened a direct line with the CEO of Reuters Group and other top management team members in London. While pandemonium reigned for the first few hours as everyone attempted to gather information, the message that the leaders conveyed from the onset was clear: "People first, then customers, then the business." Leaders from across the organization worked to find and ensure the safety of all Reuters staff, because Reuters had a data center in the World Trade Center and employees all around the city and worldwide. As this work proceeded, others took on the task of learning about the condition of Reuters's clients. These improvisational actions weren't the result of a plan. As one Reuters employee commented, "No one has a plan for what to do when the world falls apart." Phil and other Reuters leaders had to find ways to lead with and for compassion as conditions changed hour by hour. Phil established an hourly report to employees, conveying the status of public transit and relaying information about what was happening in the city. He encouraged them to stay in the building until it was safe to go home, making sure that Reuters was monitoring transit on an hourly basis. The leaders opened the cafeteria to all, offering free food, and made plans to house people overnight if necessary. Many senior managers did not leave the building for days. By the evening of September 11, the organization had located all but twenty employees. Phil personally made phone calls to the homes of the missing employees, explaining what Reuters was doing to find everyone. By the next morning, it became clear that two employees, who were attending a risk-management conference at the top of the World Trade Center, were still missing and had likely died in the attack. The leaders responded immediately to what the families wanted, flying them to New York, personally meeting them at the airport to shield them from reporters, and providing a car and driver who used his knowledge of the city to navigate through the maze of hospitals and locations for families with missing members. A mother of one of the employees who died came to Reuters's headquarters and asked to meet with Phil. Sharon from the human resources team described the meeting: "She refused to believe that anything had happened. This was understandable. Reuters did everything they could to help her. Phil Lynch called her in the mornings to make sure she had eaten breakfast. We got her a car to take her around New York. We got her sandwiches to keep her fed on visits to the hospitals. She shared stories of her son. We were very conscious that we would not challenge what she thought." One employee, witnessing this effort, commented on how the system took on new meaning through these efforts: "I knew Reuters was a wonderful machine, but now I know it is a wonderful machine with a great big heart in the middle." To lead for compassion when tragedy strikes requires activating networks, emphasizing values of shared humanity, creating new roles on the spot, and modifying routines to allow people to understand what is happening. The Reuters story illustrates that leading with compassion in crisis is not just about individual leaders' kind hearts—it's about how they use their position and influence to shape organizational response in ways that elevate suffering into significance rather than pushing it aside.

Chapter 7: Designing a Social Architecture for Workplace Compassion

Sarah, the manager of Midwest Billing, led a unit that many would consider an unlikely place for extraordinary compassion. This hospital billing department, staffed entirely by women, was what scholars would label a "pink-collar ghetto"—service-sector work offering little opportunity for advancement. But when researchers walked into Midwest Billing, they discovered an organization that was both high-performing and extraordinarily compassionate. On their first morning there, researchers watched as Dorothy sat behind a mountain of envelopes containing insurance claim notifications. Each employee who entered the conference room for the morning meeting saw Dorothy's predicament, set down their things, and without a word went to get a letter opener. They returned and began helping open envelopes while the meeting proceeded. In an utterly silent and easy choreography of lending a hand, by the end of the half-hour meeting, tidy stacks of cleanly opened envelopes sat in front of each seat. What would otherwise have been a half day of work was done. Midwest Billing members emphasized the quality of connections with coworkers as a primary focus of their working lives. They designed recruitment and hiring routines that emphasized fit with the group as well as billing knowledge. The unit met every day at 8 a.m. to discuss data and make decisions about performance improvements. This daily meeting also became a place for sharing relational information and surfacing suffering. One member described it: "The morning meetings kind of bring us all together as a whole. It's not always business oriented. We do talk business, but we also have the occasional sharing of other things if we need to. I think that keeps us informed, like a person's sick or having surgery—that's the time those things come out." Over time, as the unit grew, they discovered they could increase efficiency by working in teams rather than individually. They also centralized some tasks, creating a "support pod" to handle mail opening and claim number checking. While this model could have created suffering by making some members feel less valuable, Midwest Billing guarded against this by highlighting its core value of support. Any newcomer, regardless of the role she was hired to fill, began by working in the support pod for a period of time. Plentiful appreciation and expressed gratitude for the support pod elevated members from what could have been a second-class role to what many billers said was "the most important role here." When Kallie, a member of the unit, was shot in an episode of domestic violence, the morning meeting took on a new character and became central in the unit's improvised compassionate response. When the group learned of the trauma, they immediately began organizing. One member offered to create a role as monitor and report daily on Kallie's status. Another began collecting donations. Another picked up paperwork for medical leave to make it easy for Kallie to apply once out of intensive care. Another created a unique gift allowing everyone to write words of comfort. When Kallie returned to work months later, the daily meeting became a place to coordinate safety measures. After a scare when Kallie was approached by her attacker while walking to the bank alone, members used the meeting to organize a buddy system so Kallie never had to go anywhere alone during work time. The fact that members were practiced at meeting regularly, sharing information, paying attention to each other's well-being, and improvising actions made it easier to adapt to changing security needs while continuing to express care for Kallie. What made Midwest Billing's compassion competence remarkable was its intentionally designed social architecture. The unit created small networks where people knew each other well, established cultural values emphasizing support, designed roles that included responsibility for others' well-being, developed routines like the daily meeting that allowed for coordination, and ensured that leaders modeled compassion. This deliberate attention to the structures and processes of work created a system where compassion could flourish alongside high performance.

Summary

Throughout this journey into compassion at work, we've witnessed its quiet yet profound power to elevate both people and organizations. From Sandeep's sensitive inquiry that saved Dorothy's job, to TechCo's extraordinary mobilization for Zeke after his accident, to the surprising resilience of Midwest Billing's care for Kallie—these stories reveal how compassion transforms workplaces from mere production sites into communities of human connection. The research is clear: compassion isn't just nice to have; it's a strategic imperative. Organizations with greater compassion competence demonstrate higher innovation, stronger collaboration, better service quality, increased employee engagement, and more agile adaptability to change. They achieve this by designing social architectures that make compassion reliable and sustainable—interconnected networks that spread attention to suffering, cultures that value shared humanity, roles that include responsibility for others' wellbeing, routines that facilitate coordinated action, and leaders who model and inspire compassion through their actions and stories. As we navigate increasingly complex and demanding work environments, the organizations that thrive will be those that recognize suffering as inevitable and compassion as essential—creating workplaces where we can bring our full humanity to bear on our greatest challenges, and where responding to pain becomes a path to collective flourishing.

About Author

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Jane E. Dutton

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