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NOTICING: THE PORTAL TO AWAKENING COMPASSION
SUFFERING THAT ISN’T NOTICED will never be met with compassion. That is why noticing is the portal to awakening compassion at work. At first glance, noticing seems simple. But we have found that paying attention to suffering in work environments is much harder than it seems.
We uncovered a compelling example of the complexities of noticing as a portal to compassion when we studied Dorothy’s organization. When Dorothy’s husband was diagnosed with kidney failure, she asked for time off to be with him in the hospital. Thinking it would be just a few days, Dorothy, a clerk at an insurance company, didn’t notify anyone about why she needed the time off. The organization prided itself on its financial and managerial discipline, and Dorothy was a no-nonsense employee who had always been on time and on budget. But three weeks later, Dorothy was on the edge of being terminated for too many absences and late arrivals. The company’s strict attendance and tardiness policy meant that each absence over an approved number earned Dorothy a point in the system, and after five points in a year, dismissal was mandatory. She had quickly racked up four and half points before she decided to talk to her manager. She couldn’t remember the last time she had even earned a point in the system. She didn’t know what to say. She felt ashamed, and she didn’t want to lose the job.
Feelings of shame or fear can easily lead people to withhold information about suffering at work, blocking compassion. For people attuned to suffering at work, any knock on the door can be an invitation to compassion. Dorothy’s manager Sandeep invited her to come in and sit down. “I don’t know what to do,” Dorothy blurted out almost immediately, flushed with embarrassment. Sandeep picked up on this as a clue that perhaps suffering was surfacing. People often offer clues, if we are paying attention. Sometime they are not as engaged as usual. Sometimes their bodies convey exhaustion or tension. Sometimes their facial expressions display sadness or anger. Noticing suffering at work is partly learning how to pick up on these clues and work with them. In fact, researcher Max Bazerman equates becoming a great leader with becoming “a first-class noticer.”1 While we don’t often conceptualize it this way, noticing is a skill that we can build with awareness and practice.
Sandeep had already noticed Dorothy’s unusual absences, and his attention was heightened further because the organizational attendance system had flagged her as being in danger of dismissal. “You haven’t been acting like yourself,” Sandeep observed. He said it with kindness, but his comment was direct. When Dorothy stayed quiet, he said gently, “It might help us both if I could understand why.”
NOTICING THROUGH INQUIRY WORK
Sandeep’s question acted as a portal to compassion at work. Dorothy’s shame and fear had prevented her from reaching out or asking for help. When people do not reveal what is happening in their lives, often suffering surfaces because someone like Sandeep notices behavior outside of a usual pattern and asks about it. Our CompassionLab colleague Reut Livne-Tarandach calls systematic questions that flow from curiosity about the suffering of another person inquiry work. Inquiry work helps us notice suffering because it requires being willing to ask about what someone is experiencing instead of assuming that his or her experience is similar to our own. In her study of how people lead and manage a summer camp for children whose parents have cancer, Reut finds that camp counselors and campers themselves are more effective in responding to suffering that surfaces at camp when they remain curious. Campers and counselors use questions to draw out more information about one another’s state of mind and heart, using inquiry work as a skilled form of noticing that opens space for compassion. Developing both a comfort and a vocabulary to ask humble, gentle, and kind questions about someone’s experience is another aspect of skillful noticing that we can learn.2
Sandeep’s invitation for Dorothy to talk about what was happening is an example of skillful noticing through inquiry work. His observation that Dorothy wasn’t acting like herself brackets this period in Dorothy’s work from her prior performance, reinforcing Dorothy’s value as an employee. Sandeep’s curiosity told Dorothy, not just in words but also through his facial expressions, voice, posture in the chair, eye contact, and attentive presence, that he was present with her and was open to her situation.
As we said, noticing suffering at work is harder than we might assume—both for the person suffering, who risks drawing attention to herself, like Dorothy, and for the person who risks asking a question that opens up an unknown topic, like Sandeep. Part of what makes noticing suffering more difficult than we expect it to be is that suffering is related to larger personal questions about meaning and existence. In fact, a definition of suffering is experience that threatens our sense of holistic integrity and existence.3 For Dorothy, her husband’s illness evoked larger questions about mortality, while the need to care for him threatened her sense of integrity at work. Sometimes the existential questions tied to suffering become frightening or overwhelming, blocking both our ability to reveal suffering and our willingness to notice and inquire. This fundamental difficulty is another reason that noticing suffering is more difficult than we might imagine in work organizations.
It is also the case that suffering in our current experience takes on meaning in relation to our past experiences. If we haven’t experienced a form of suffering, it is sometimes hard to notice its subtle implications. We have found that someone who can relate to a similar source of suffering in his or her past is often attuned to picking up on small clues and inquiring in ways that open up space for suffering to surface. For instance, in our study of an organization’s response to people who lost everything in a fire, we found that people who had experienced fires or natural disasters were better at noticing some aspects of this form of suffering. This means that different coworkers will notice different things about one another. Workplaces can use this distributed noticing by taking advantage of communication and ties between people in social networks so that clues related to suffering are shared. We will pick up on this systemic aspect of attention in the third section of the book.
Finally, the meaning of suffering differs across cultures and times of life, which is another reason that it can be difficult for us to notice. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has written that the very nature of suffering is inexpressibility, meaning that the experience of suffering and what it means to us are almost impossible to adequately convey to others.4 In that way, we are all like Dorothy and Sandeep—the one who suffers is mute, and the one who notices must be able to inquire and help give voice to pain. Noticing suffering involves figuring out together how to say the unsayable.
KEY POINTS: NOTICING THROUGH INQUIRY WORK
∞ Noticing suffering at work is harder than we expect.
∞ When suffering goes unnoticed in organizations, compassion fails.
∞ Suffering is inherently difficult to express. Sometimes feelings of shame, fear, or uncertainty will make it even more difficult.
∞ Sometimes people notice suffering by drawing on a similar experience from their past.
∞ Noticing becomes more likely and skilled as we learn how to discern people’s patterns of energy and engagement and pick up on deviations from those patterns.
∞ We can build skill in noticing by learning to ask gentle, humble questions about others’ experiences. This is called inquiry work, and it is crucial to awakening compassion.
ORGANIZATIONS SHAPE WHAT WE NOTICE
Suffering often hides in other forms of work behavior that mask its influence, as in Dorothy’s case, where suffering was manifest by tardiness and absence from work. Her behavior could be perceived as inadequate performance, but it was actually being driven by distractions from suffering and caregiving. This happens often, especially when people who feel shame or for other reasons desire privacy for their personal lives withhold information about illness, hardship, loss, or grief that is impacting their work performance in some way. Organizations can make it harder to notice suffering that is masquerading as performance deficits. Typical policies that govern attendance, tardiness, dress code, and other aspects of workplace discipline tend to focus us on punishment. We notice the rule being broken instead of the person behind the rule.
In Dorothy’s workplace, with its values of discipline and order, her inability to live up to the rigid time demands triggered concern about punishment. Dorothy, as a no-nonsense, responsible employee, felt that the missed work time that came from her need to tend to her husband’s illness was irresponsible. The punishing tone of the attendance rules and their emphasis on dismissal exacerbated Dorothy’s personal self-criticism and internal shame. Her worry about being irresponsible prompted her to hide her circumstances, making it even more difficult for others to notice what was happening and intervene. Many organizational policies, procedures, rules, goals, and norms shape what we pay attention to and how we regard deviations from it. At times, organizational factors can help us notice something unusual—such as when the system flagged Sandeep about Dorothy’s attendance irregularities. But without attention to suffering and his skilled inquiry work, Sandeep could simply have used the flag to scold Dorothy or even fire her rather than to awaken compassion.
When Sandeep learned that Dorothy’s husband had experienced kidney failure and was undergoing continuous treatment, her absences and lateness made a new kind of sense to him. When he also learned that Dorothy was hopeful that her husband would have transplant surgery but the organ could arrive at any moment, Sandeep paid attention to Dorothy’s agitation in a new way. Her need for greater flexibility than the attendance policy allowed was obvious to him. Sandeep wanted to keep a good employee, not lose her to an arbitrary attendance count. He called his human resources partner and obtained a waiver for the points that Dorothy had earned on days when her husband was hospitalized. With the burden of imminent termination lifted, Dorothy felt flooded with gratitude. Her commitment to her work deepened even further. Sandeep’s attention and his compassionate response to Dorothy’s life circumstances alleviated some of her suffering and at the same time enabled the organization to retain a valuable employee.
SPREADING ATTENTION TO SUFFERING
Often it is quiet conversations in a conference room or a manager’s office that awaken compassion, just as with Sandeep and Dorothy. These interpersonal moments direct our attention to suffering that would otherwise go unnoticed. Instances when suffering surfaces between two people become opportunities for activating the attention of others who can also respond.
In Dorothy and Sandeep’s case, after the immediate threat to Dorothy’s employment had been addressed, Sandeep’s attention could have wavered. As an experienced manager, however, Sandeep knew that this was just the beginning of Dorothy’s need for compassion. Her husband’s illness would be protracted, and the transplant opportunity might interrupt Dorothy’s attendance again at any time. Sandeep asked Dorothy if he could tell others about what she was going through. This is an important aspect of noticing and spreading attention to suffering: gaining permission about what can be shared.
Reluctantly, Dorothy agreed. Talking to Sandeep helped her see that revealing her circumstances would make it easier for others to help if she had to be absent or late in the future. With her permission, Sandeep began to mention Dorothy’s husband’s illness to others in the organization. He invited others with ideas of how to support Dorothy to meet with him. Attention began to spread, feeding a river of compassion. As word spread, coworkers found a new clarity about why Dorothy had been acting strangely. This spurred them toward the rest of the process—interpreting, feeling, and acting with compassion. One member of Sandeep’s team who knew Dorothy as a neighbor outside of work volunteered to check in with Dorothy each morning to monitor her husband’s status on the transplant list. This helped Dorothy to more easily relay information when she needed to be unexpectedly absent, preventing her from accruing points in the system unnecessarily. Others on her team tracked her tasks on a weekly basis, so that they could easily pick up her workload whenever the transplant call came. This gave both Dorothy and her coworkers peace of mind about a potential bottleneck in the organization’s performance.
Attention spread beyond their immediate group. Someone outside of Sandeep’s unit organized a nonprofit fund into which anyone could make financial donations to help Dorothy and her husband pay the mounting medical bills. He knew firsthand of the need for this, having been driven almost to the point of bankruptcy when his wife died of cancer. As the attention to Dorothy’s life circumstances spread throughout the organization, the attention brought with it new forms of compassion. Little had she understood that by withholding her situation from her manager and coworkers, Dorothy had also inadvertently denied them all this opportunity to relate with compassion.
KEY POINTS: ORGANIZATIONS SHAPE ATTENTION TO SUFFERING
∞ Time pressure, overload, and performance demands distract us from noticing suffering at work.
∞ Policies, rules, and norms of conduct can orient us toward punishment rather than curiosity about what is happening with the person.
∞ Ask for permission to share a coworker’s life circumstances if you learn about suffering. Spread attention to awaken compassion.
∞ As attention to suffering spreads, new ideas about how to respond also come to the surface.
AN INVITATION TO REFLECT ON NOTICING AS A PORTAL TO COMPASSION
In the flow of daily work life, colliding people and activities create a form of surface tension—that mystery of physics that allows water sliders to glide across the top of ponds. The surface tension of work allows everyone to glide across the seemingly solid surface. But mysteriously, maybe with a knock on a manager’s door, the surface that allowed life to seem ordinary is breached. Suffering breaks through.
When suffering surfaces this way in work life, the sudden shift from a task-focused conversation to the existential questions that come along with loss or grief or illness can be jarring or even frightening. To awaken compassion, we can learn how to engage in skilled inquiry work that makes room for these sorts of revelations. We can learn to keep our eyes open for changes in people’s usual patterns. We can find a way together to give voice to suffering. We can learn to ask for permission to share people’s circumstances, trusting that as attention to suffering spreads, so does compassion.
∞
Is there a moment when suffering broke the surface tension of everyday work and you were called on to inquire about another person’s pain? Recognizing that noticing suffering is a portal, do you also see instances in which you may have overlooked suffering at work? What do these reflections show you about awakening compassion in your work?