The case for compassion
Compassion and business results aren’t often mentioned in the same sentence. The experts talk about systems thinking, tight processes, automation and conversion metrics, but very rarely do they emphasise the importance of understanding your team, looking out for them and supporting them through difficult times.
Systems are important. Process matters. Ratios and metrics are crucial. But none of it matters if your team isn't performing. Compassion may be the trick you’re missing.
It’s hard to be compassionate when you have investors, partners, board members, the press and all your other stakeholders breathing down your neck, demanding results. Employees, especially if they’re the wrong fit for your organisation, will test the most sanguine of managers. The pressure of making difficult decisions, managing your financial runway and dealing with people who let you down can make cynics of the best of us. If your optimism about your colleagues and team members fades, though, you’re beginning down a path that leads to failure.
When I talk about compassion here, I don’t mean tolerating wilful underperformance or poor behaviour, making targets and objectives easy or allowing people to coast. That’s laziness. I’m referring instead to remembering that most people are well-intentioned and in the right environment, with sufficient clarity, support and motivation will work hard to be successful. Sometimes, life just gets in the way.
Building a company (or a team) is a marathon, and while squeezing every last drop of attention and energy from your people might help you hit this quarter’s numbers, true success means fostering commitment and engagement over decades. On that time horizon, even the very best people go through personal ups and downs, many of which may affect their work. Would you really want to lose your best salesperson for good because a divorce causes a few poor months? Or drive your top engineer to a competitor because their sick child meant they needed more flexibility for a while?
Research suggests that compassion and understanding are in shorter supply than ever. The Muhammad Ali Center’s 2025 Compassion Report found that 61% of Americans feel compassion has decreased over the last four years, and the social psychologist Sara Konrath discovered a steep decline in empathic traits among US undergraduates from 1979 to 2009, with a simultaneous rise in narcissism, individualism and other self-centred behaviours.
This matters for how you run your team and your business. We’re living in a world that’s increasingly self-absorbed, which means that when faced with difficult challenges, the people around us are more likely than ever to have to tackle them alone. While we’d like our colleagues to leave their personal lives at the door when they arrive at work, major life events will always overshadow the priorities of the day, especially in an increasingly remote and hybrid workforce.
We’re also on the precipice of major global change, and the next ten years is likely to bring more disruption than the last hundred. Your team members will feel uncertain, destabilised and anxious as they navigate their way to the future of work. Patience, understanding and yes, compassion will be the tools with which you guide them on their way.
None of this is easy. Managing short term pressures while maintaining a long term view on the people delivering your vision is a challenging tightrope to walk, but it’s the one we commit to when we become leaders.
High performance teams and cultures have excellent levels of staff retention. Established institutional expertise is essential for delivering world-class results. Without compassion, you’ll lose your best people, and your competitive edge - it’s a crucial ingredient if you want sustainable, compounding success.
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