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Acting: The Moves That Alleviate Suffering at Work
Compassion at work is expressed through action-largely improvisational moves shaped to fit unique circumstances of suffering. Like improv actors or jazz musicians, compassionate individuals create responses that build on their interpretations of suffering, feelings of empathic concern, and perceptive engagement.
Nazima's story illustrates several common compassion moves. When Nazima received news that her niece Faith had died in an accident, she was preparing for a major board meeting and scheduled to travel that afternoon. Her colleague Ed immediately responded, "Your sister needs you. Don't worry about the meeting. I'll handle everything." This began a series of compassion moves that supported Nazima while keeping work functioning.
Common compassion moves include:
Flexible time to cope with suffering: Some people cope with suffering by being completely present with family, others prefer to work, and some need partial involvement. Accommodating these unique preferences matters deeply.
Task flexibility and buffering: Creating task flexibility involves offering choices for how suffering individuals engage with work based on their preferences and abilities. This often includes having someone act as a buffer, protecting the person from being overwhelmed with communications and questions.
Monitoring and listening: Because circumstances can change quickly during times of suffering, regular check-ins help ensure that while people have freedom from work tasks, they don't feel alone.
Reassurance and safety: Offering reassurance about job security is another vital compassion move. When people are suffering, knowing their job is safe relieves a significant burden of worry, especially during extended absences.
Rituals, memorials, and mementos: Compassionate action often involves highly customized, improvised responses that generate meaningful resources for those suffering. In Nazima's case, Ed organized a beautiful ritual with her colleagues in Hawaii, where they performed a remembrance ceremony for Faith.
Compassion at work isn't always straightforward. Downsizing creates suffering for both those who lose jobs and those who remain. Research shows that when managers meet personally with departing employees and express compassion, suffering is reduced. Similarly, addressing the loss with remaining employees and creating space for discussion helps alleviate isolation and grief.
Compassion competence in an organization depends on an emergent pattern of collective noticing, interpreting, feeling, and acting in an effective and customized fashion to alleviate suffering. This definition hinges on collective and coordinated emergent patterns that take shape across many people and actions, not determined in advance.
Zeke's story helps us understand true compassion competence. After a severe mountain biking accident, Zeke's work community at TechCo responded almost immediately. Though it was a weekend, his team members filled the hospital waiting room before he regained consciousness. Following standard practice after a major employee injury, Zeke's manager issued an alert to executives across TechCo, resulting in a call from Raoul, the vice president of European and Middle Eastern operations. This alert activated broader organizational networks, enhancing TechCo's speedy response.
Compassion competence can be measured through four dimensions:
Speed: How quickly does the organization respond to suffering, and how well does it sustain and adjust its response over time? TechCo demonstrated this through sustained attention for Zeke and his family over months. His coworkers coordinated a visiting schedule spanning his extensive hospitalization, ensuring someone was almost always available to run errands, hold the baby, listen, or talk.
Scope of resources: What breadth of resources does the organization bring to bear on alleviating suffering? In Zeke's case, resources included colleagues' presence, managers' attention, empathic listening, emotional concern, reassurance, flexible recovery time, meals, a cell phone, errand help, and childcare.
Magnitude of resources: How substantial are the resources generated to alleviate suffering? At TechCo, employees across the company donated unused vacation time converted to cash, while managers at various levels secured matching funds-first from the European and Middle East division, then from US headquarters with CEO approval.
Customization: How individualized are the resources to unique needs and preferences? TechCo exemplified this with highly individualized resources for Zeke-building a customized workstation at his rehabilitation center, arranging a modified laptop with secure network access, and organizing a Hanukkah party for all residents when employees realized the center wouldn't have one.
Awakening compassion competence in organizations requires more than individual hearts and minds-it demands fundamental organizational building blocks. The social architecture framework encompasses social network structures, workplace culture, role definitions, routine work processes, and leadership modeling. These elements together enable systems to achieve competent patterns of collective noticing, interpreting, feeling, and responding to suffering.
Networks: Organizations function through webs of affiliations or social networks that determine information flows and influence. The structure of networks creates pathways for quickly sharing information about suffering and coordinating responses, like a highway system for feelings and calls to action. The quality of interpersonal ties matters-high-quality connections characterized by mutuality, vitality, and positive regard are more tensile and can carry both positive and negative emotions without strain.
Organizational culture: Cultures that teach members that humans are essentially good, capable, and worthy of compassion enable more generous interpretations of suffering. This emphasis on shared humanity speeds compassionate responses by reinforcing that we all belong to one human family. Organizational values that emphasize human worth and interconnection-expressed through ideals like dignity, inclusion, respect, teamwork, and care-guide people's attention to what matters when suffering surfaces.
Roles: In organizations, roles provide patterns of expected behavior associated with particular positions. Roles become powerful for awakening compassion when they explicitly include care and responsibility for others' well-being. Through job crafting, people can add new tasks, shift relationships, and change meanings to incorporate compassion into their work.
Routines: Organizational routines-the recurrent, interdependent ways people accomplish work tasks-create pathways for compassion to flow through organizations. These routines function like ruts in a road, making coordinated action faster and easier. While routines provide structure, they're not static or mindless. They offer flexibility that enables improvisation when needed.
Stories and leaders: Organizations function as systems of meaning-collections of symbols, stories, and information that members interpret in shared ways. When stories of compassion circulate, people come to understand their organization as more compassionate, view colleagues as more compassionate people, and recognize that they themselves can be compassionate at work. Leaders function as focal points in systems of meaning, with members looking to them for interpretive guidance.
Midwest Billing exemplifies a "positive deviant" workplace-exceptional in both performance metrics and compassion competence. This hospital billing unit demonstrated remarkable attunement to one another's needs. When we observed their morning routine, we witnessed members spontaneously helping Dorothy open mountains of mail without being asked-a silent, effortless choreography that turned a half-day task into minutes. This normalized help-giving created high-quality connections that supported compassion. Their web of care yielded industry-leading efficiency and reduced turnover from the industry standard of 50% to under 5%.
Key design principles for enhancing compassion competence include:
Creating subnetworks where people feel authentically known: Midwest Billing's physical separation and strong network ties helped members feel seen and known. Their recruitment emphasized connection quality alongside technical skills, and daily morning meetings served dual purposes: discussing performance data and surfacing personal struggles.
Lowering the cost of empathy: Organizations operate within what sociologist Candace Clark calls a "sympathy economy," where compassion can be viewed as costly in terms of time, effort or creating indebtedness. Compassion architects can create "psychological subsidies" that make compassion rewarding rather than depleting. Midwest Billing achieved this through cultural values of care, normalized helping, and recognition practices like gold-star awards displayed throughout the workspace.
Mitigating persistent sources of suffering: At Midwest Billing, career stagnation became a source of suffering as the unit improved performance. Recognizing this, the group developed cross-training routines allowing billers to move between teams and build new skills. Sarah created informal team leader positions that eventually became formally recognized roles with additional compensation.
Reinforcing community aspirations: When we view work as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a self-interested egosystem, we interpret suffering differently. Julie Morath, as COO at Children's Hospital and Clinics of Minnesota, set an aspirational goal of 100% patient safety, years ahead of her field. To achieve this goal, Julie instituted "blameless reporting" based on the assumption that everyone had good intentions, allowing examination of errors without blame to foster learning and compassion.
Designing for playfulness: Playfulness, though seemingly at odds with work, enhances compassion competence when embraced as both value and practice. HopeLab, a Silicon Valley technology think-tank, adopted "play with purpose" as a core value, infusing fun into their work activities. Play helps create architectures filled with empathy by attuning people to subtle cues about others' well-being.
Leaders serve as repositories for our worries and aspirations during times of suffering. Beyond their symbolic power to model compassion, leaders shape the organization's social architecture and hold significant influence over compassion patterns. Research reveals two avenues by which leaders cultivate compassion competence: leading with compassion and leading for compassion.
Leading with compassion involves leveraging the symbolism of leadership position and modeling compassionate behavior that guides others in how to respond when suffering surfaces. Effective leaders cultivate relationships based on truly knowing others as full human beings, listening closely to their struggles and joys. This compassionate connection offers renewal for leaders themselves, reminding them of the satisfaction from wholehearted human connection.
Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, transformed his failing company through compassionate leadership, adopting stewardship as a core value that takes responsibility for lives touched through leadership. Chapman witnessed how compassion at work creates positive spillover effects at home, as illustrated when a manufacturing team member revealed that workplace communication skills improved his marriage: "My wife now talks to me more."
Leading for compassion helps awaken compassion competence even when leaders cannot personally model it through daily interactions with most organizational members. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO, exemplifies this through public advocacy. In his essay "Managing Compassionately," he articulates compassion as a cultural value while personalizing it by sharing his own struggles to practice it consistently. This communication reinforces assumptions of common humanity-that everyone tries, sometimes fails, and is "in it together."
Fred Keller, founder of Cascade Engineering, demonstrates how leaders can become high-level compassion architects by redesigning organizational systems. Cascade's "welfare-to-career track" exemplifies this approach-after years of experimentation, they transformed their social architecture by creating new transportation services, implementing poverty simulation training, establishing on-site social work support, and forming integration teams.
Crisis situations reveal what leaders and organizations truly value, as humans tend to fall back on established patterns under pressure. Phil Lynch's leadership at Reuters during 9/11 exemplifies compassionate crisis response, establishing a command center with the priority of "People first, then customers, then the business." This crisis response transformed Reuters' compassion competence, with one employee noting: "I knew Reuters was a wonderful machine, but now I know it is a wonderful machine with a great big heart in the middle."
Six major obstacles can harden hearts against compassion in organizations: (1) networks characterized by incivility and disrespect; (2) cultures emphasizing self-interest over shared humanity; (3) roles focused solely on self-oriented responsibilities or organizational protection; (4) blame-oriented approaches to failures; (5) overload and overwork leading to "empathy fatigue"; and (6) leaders who model self-interest and systems dominated by stories lacking compassion.
Dr. Arnav's story illustrates how these obstacles can be overcome. As a young physician working lonely night shifts in the ER, the hospital's rigid hierarchy disconnected him from colleagues and patients alike. When he muttered "Damn druggies" about a patient named Anthony, the man confronted him with unexpected dignity: "I guess from your point of view, I'm just a damn druggie. But that doesn't mean I'm not a human being." This encounter transformed Dr. Arnav, who devoted himself to changing his approach to patients and his organization, working with homeless advocacy groups and becoming a compassion architect for his hospital-proving that mindfully confronting obstacles to compassion can prevent our hearts from turning to stone.
Professional roles can become barriers to compassion when they emphasize economic logic over human connection. Research by Molinsky, Grant, and Margolis demonstrated this effect when executives primed with economic-focused sentences (like "they earn high profits") wrote significantly less compassionate notes to a hypothetical employee in need than those primed with neutral sentences.
Work routines can lead to compassion fatigue-secondary trauma from witnessing others' suffering. Without rest and recovery, our hearts harden. Anthropologist Sherry Turkle shares the story of Diane, a museum curator who worked constantly on her devices until 2 a.m., developing nervous symptoms and losing her voice. The endless demands turned her into a "maximizing machine," erasing her humanity.
Missed opportunities for compassion often become sources of regret. While facing the pain of others can be heartbreaking, it "opens up the heart of human-focused work and infuses it with meaning." Finding courage to examine and rewrite these missed opportunities offers the possibility of transformation.
Compassion teacher Pema Chodron asserts that "awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal," echoing the Dalai Lama's belief that compassion cultivation is necessary for human survival. Organizations can't afford the hidden costs of perpetuating suffering, as they desperately need new sources of adaptability, collaboration, innovation, and engagement.
The quiet power of compassion elevates both people and organizations, offering a vision of what good society can be. Though words like wonder, beauty, and compassion aren't typically lauded in leadership, they should be. When suffering can't be solved-as with Rashid, who contemplated suicide after losing his daughter-compassion provides healing through beholding rather than fixing. This distinction between seeing (which objectifies) and beholding (which honors intrinsic worth) reveals compassion's transformative potential.
Whether small and private or immense and public, compassion sparks wonder and renews belief in what's possible in organizations. The challenge now isn't finding reasons compassion matters for business, but heeding the call to design workplaces that awaken it. As technology and robotics transform work, organizations increasingly need human ingenuity-the kind that suffering can crush if left unaddressed. Compassion isn't merely nice-to-have; it's the hidden heart of strategic success in our rapidly changing world.
