13

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO COMPASSION AT WORK

JUST AS THE POSSIBILITY OF human responsiveness to pain is inherent in every system, so too is the possibility that we will turn away from suffering. Throughout this book we have offered numerous examples of failures of compassion at work and the gullies they carve in people’s sense of how much of themselves they can bring to work, how much they can trust those around them, and how committed and engaged they will be in their workplace. In this chapter, we summarize the most common obstacles to compassion in organizations and offer tools for overcoming them.

HEARTS TURNED TO STONE

Here are the six most common obstacles to compassion that arise in an organization’s social architecture:

1. When ties between people are characterized by incivility, disrespect, or a sense of injustice, it is far less likely that networks can be activated in the service of compassion.

2. When self-interest is at the core of an organization’s culture with little emphasis on values that support shared humanity or the common good, it is far less likely that people will regard others’ suffering as relevant or worthy of their attention and effort.

3. When systems feature roles that emphasize self-oriented responsibilities or focus solely on protecting the organization from risk, it is far less likely that people will view others’ well-being as part of their work. When systems offer little room for creative job crafting, it is far less likely that people who are motivated to build compassion into their work will find acceptable ways to do so.

4. When organizations and leaders easily generate blame for anything that goes wrong, it is far less likely that people will engage in generous interpretations of failures, errors, missed deadlines, absences, or other circumstances where suffering arises.

5. When overload and overwork mark the routines that characterize a workplace, it is more likely that people will experience “empathy fatigue,” a form of emotional exhaustion in which our capacity to connect with others is diminished.¹ Empathy fatigue makes it far less likely that they will notice suffering, limits feelings of concern, and dampens people’s creativity and flexibility in improvising actions to alleviate suffering.

6. When an organization is led by someone who models self-interest and when a system is dominated by stories of a lack of compassion, the leader’s actions and stories amplify the other obstacles. Leaders who model a lack of compassion become barriers to mobilizing resources in response to suffering. Stories that spread the value of an extremely self-interested view or a punitive approach to suffering drive compassion out of an organizational environment, even one with a mission of compassion.²

These six obstacles can turn our hearts to stone. In the following section, we shed more light on them and invite you to create a blueprint for overcoming them. Our colleague Arne Carlsen reminds us how we can use “the sensuous experience of being in a mystery” to renew our wonder at compassion when the world threatens to harden our hearts. “Wonder underpins all imagination, empathy, and deep interest in anything beyond self.”³

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Have I ever experienced compassion as a window of light in the darkness? Can I challenge myself to notice more of the compassion I have been overlooking as part of everyday working life? How does beholding others and my workplace in this way inspire me?

WHEN TIES BETWEEN PEOPLE CREATE OBSTACLES

We have seen how important it can be that the ties between people in an organization’s networks are plentiful and characterized by respect and trust, so that people identify with each other and have a sense of being seen, valued, and known. But often networks have the opposite effect, isolating and disconnecting people or trapping them in corrosive connections characterized by incivility, disrespect, or injustice.⁴

We met Dr. Arnav through our research on compassion in health care. He recounted a situation that had occurred many years earlier. As a young physician, Dr. Arnav was assigned to the overnight shift in the ER in his hospital, often working alone. The rigid status hierarchy made it almost impossible for him to connect with others on the staff, and he found the night shift lonely. Because of the hospital’s location, being on the night shift often meant working with patients who were homeless, suffering from addiction or drug overdoses, or victims of trauma on the city streets. Answering a page one night, Dr. Arnav entered a curtained area of the busy ER to find a large man who made the hospital gurney look small. A wound on his arm had filled with fluid that needed to be drained. Injection tracks patterned the man’s forearm, testifying to his addiction. As Dr. Arnav inspected the wound and turned to get equipment to treat it, he remembered muttering under his breath: “Damn druggies.”

The mutter wasn’t quiet enough. As he left the room, Dr. Arnav felt uneasy and tried to push his feeling away. He rationalized that the addict might have been too out of it to notice. But when he returned with the necessary equipment, Dr. Arnav was surprised to find the man standing beside the bed. He held out his hand. “I’m Anthony,” he said. Dr. Arnav froze, as if he’d never shaken a hand before. “What’s your name?” Anthony asked.

As Dr. Arnav slowly reached out to shake Anthony’s hand, Anthony continued to speak: “I was born in this hospital, probably long before you were born, Dr. Arnav. My mother was a nurse. I never knew my father.” He continued, “I’ve probably been doing drugs since before you were born, too. And yes, I guess from your point of view, I’m just a damn druggie. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a human being.”

For just a moment, the social architecture of Dr. Arnav’s work shifted. No longer was he in a system where patients were numbers. No longer did his power and status in the hierarchy confer the ability to treat others with disrespect with few consequences. Anthony’s insistence on being granted humanity and dignity forced a change.

After this encounter, Dr. Arnav told us, he devoted himself to changing his approach to patients and to changing his organization. He learned an important lesson about awakening compassion in his work. Though he thought of himself as a healer, Dr. Arnav realized that his isolation in the hierarchical networks of the hospital, combined with his position of power, had allowed him to disregard the humanity of other staff members, not to mention poor, homeless, or drug-addicted patients who were in need of care. Dr. Arnav began to work with organizations that advocated for the homeless, and he went out of his way to learn more about the conditions of others’ lives, confronting his internalized stereotypes about the laziness of people in poverty. He actively worked to take a stance that allowed for more generous interpretations of suffering, and he renewed in himself a personal value of embracing all people in a circle of concern. Dr. Arnav worked as a compassion architect for his hospital, advocating for new forms of care for patients in poverty and for support teams for physicians and nurses on the front lines. For Dr. Arnav and those who joined him, mindfully confronting the obstacles to compassion presented by a cultural tolerance for incivility and disrespect kept their hearts from turning to stone.

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Can you identify a time when you missed an opportunity to give or receive compassion at work because the ties between people were characterized by incivility, disrespect, or injustice?

WHEN AN ORGANIZATION’S CULTURE CREATES OBSTACLES

Philosopher and social theorist Martha Nussbaum reminds us that “social institutions . . . construct the shape compassion will take.”⁵ We have seen how important an organization’s cultural assumptions and values of shared humanity are for awakening compassion competence. Let’s look now at what can happen when an organization’s culture instead turns hearts to stone.

In an investigative exposé of the Enron Corporation, journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind described such a culture.⁶ They detail how CEO Kenneth Lay responded to traders who were illegally investing in the oil market and diverting money into off-shore accounts by encouraging them to keep generating money, later denying any knowledge of their wrongdoing to protect his position. Lay also hired Jeffrey Skilling to transform Enron into an energy trading firm. Skilling instituted a process nicknamed “rank and yank,” whereby employees ruthlessly graded one another, and the bottom 15 percent were fired annually. Skilling’s lieutenants, who became known as “the guys with spikes,” were charged with reinforcing a highly competitive and brutal working environment. Lay, Skilling, and other executives across the company began taking advantage of opportunities to artificially and illegally inflate the stock price. As they did this, they cashed in their options and quickly built their personal wealth, while simultaneously encouraging lower-level employees to invest their savings and retirement funds in Enron stock. All the while, the organization and its leaders knowingly invested in shell companies to hide burgeoning debt, bankrupting the company. The tragic result was that many employees lost their life savings along with their jobs when Enron collapsed.

We might see this example as an extreme opposite case of the story of Zeke—where an organization engaged in numerous ways to awaken compassion competence on behalf of a lower-level employee. In the Enron example, organizational values that emphasized competition and ruthlessness—coupled with the leaders who modeled and preached extreme self-interest—resulted in an organization that heaped suffering on its members.

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Have you ever witnessed a missed opportunity for compassion because strong self-interest took over in your organization? Have you ever missed an opportunity to give or receive compassion because of competition at work?

WHEN ROLES BECOME OBSTACLES

Just as roles can be a powerful source for awakening compassion, they can be formidable obstacles as well. Organizational researchers Andy Molinsky, Adam Grant, and Joshua Margolis created a study in which executives responded in writing to work scenarios where suffering might play a part.⁷ They first unscrambled sentences of jumbled words, which served to prime them for what came next. Some of these sentences were neutral (the control condition), while others were designed to activate a professional role script infused with the economic logic of business. In the neutral condition, executives received sentences such as “blue the is sky,” which they unscrambled to “the sky is blue.” In the economic logic condition, executives received sentences such as “high they profits earn,” which they unscrambled to “they earn high profits.”

After this priming task, the executives responded to a story by writing a note to Sasha, a hypothetical, highly competent employee who sometimes was late for morning meetings because she didn’t have a car. The executives who had unscrambled neutral sentences wrote significantly more compassionate notes to Sasha than the executives who had been primed with scripts that emphasized economic logic. The executives who wrote less compassionate notes also scored lower on a measure of empathy. How we construe our roles and the meaning we hold about our responsibilities matters mightily for how much empathy and compassion will become part of our normal work.

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Have you ever missed an opportunity for compassion at work because you felt that it wasn’t professional to express emotion or care for someone? Have you seen others miss opportunities for compassion because compassion wasn’t seen as part of the job?

WHEN ROUTINES CREATE OBSTACLES

We have explored the power of putting organizational routines in the service of compassion. Work routines, however, can also contribute to tremendous fatigue. Work can create compassion fatigue, a condition in which we experience secondary trauma by witnessing the trauma of others.⁸ When our work brings us into contact with suffering, if we don’t rest and recover, we can turn our hearts to stone.

In her book Alone Together, anthropologist Sherry Turkle relays a story of a museum curator, Diane, who gave up her evenings and weekends to work, consistently using her handheld device until two in the morning. Diane described the effect of a cacophony of demands: “I don’t sleep well, but I still can’t keep up with what is sent to me. Now for work, I’m expected to have a Twitter feed and a Facebook presence about the museum. And do a blog on museum happenings. . . . I keep losing my voice. It’s not from talking too much. All I do is type, but it has hit me at my voice. The doctor says it’s a nervous thing.”⁹

In response to this cacophony, Diane tried to erase her humanity and turn herself into a “maximizing machine.” Her empathy for others (and herself) was quickly exhausted by hundreds of emails and text messages along with the meetings and phone calls that cluttered her days. Also driven out were generous interpretations that might come from inquiring about what was happening to others or her sensitivity to small details that might reveal suffering.

In our research, Ning told us a similar and deeply personal story:

I gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. I work in child care, and I was very nervous about going back to work. The other teachers in my school asked me to help with the infant care unit after just being back at work a few days, because someone had called in sick and they needed help. I knew that I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t ready. Sadly the people I was working with were not compassionate. They were busy and they felt I should take my turn to substitute in the infant care unit. I approached the head manager and told her that I was willing to resign my position immediately.

Luckily, Ning’s manager was not drowning in compassion fatigue or lost in the same cacophony of work demands. She quickly grasped the depth of Ning’s loss and exempted her from substituting on the infant care unit.¹⁰ Being deafened by a cacophony of demands, buried under an endless pile of emails, or tangled in a web of deadlines often blinds us to the suffering of others.

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Have you missed an opportunity for compassion at work because you felt overloaded, distracted, overwhelmed, or under such pressure that you did not notice others? Have you witnessed missed opportunities for compassion in your workplace because people were too burdened or burned out to feel empathy and act with compassion?

WHEN LEADERSHIP CREATES OBSTACLES

When leaders fail to acknowledge suffering, the silence often leaves the members of an organization uncertain about how to interpret and handle difficult situations. In chapter 10, we saw the example of Bruce Shepard bravely breaking the silence that so often surrounds suicide in work communities, but we have seen many organizations where talk of suicide was swept under the rug, leaving people mute, their suffering unacknowledged.

When leaders treat others in the organization as if they are not worthy of respect, especially in the face of errors and failures, compassion drains from a system quickly. We saw this in one corporate setting we observed. Monica remembered witnessing this corrosive leadership. She recounted:

I was sitting in a large shared workspace called a bullpen watching a marketing team go about their daily work. They were focused on a spreadsheet, trying to manage a budget problem. An executive, who I will call Doug, had not attended the daily work huddle and did not seem to know or care about the team’s urgent need to focus on the budget. He walked briskly into the bullpen demanding a status update about a website project. He began to fire questions at people in a loud, brash voice. People answered as best they could, but the interaction was a jarring interruption to their focus. Doug wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting, so his voice grew louder and angrier. The quiet efficiency that had characterized the bullpen was shattered. People scrambled but attempted to avoid catching Doug’s eye. He walked toward one person’s workstation, took a look at a prototype web design on her computer, and started to swear about the design imperfections. “Where the f--k is Vince?” he yelled, looking for the graphic designer. “This is all his fault.” People looked on in silence, no one knowing what to say. Just then Doug’s administrative assistant Julie walked into the space to give the team some updated budget information. Doug abruptly shouted at her, “Shut up. Can’t you see I’m busy?” Turning his back on the team and Julie, he stormed out of the bullpen. Everyone could hear Doug’s voice as he walked away, saying, “What a worthless pile of s--t. Heads are going to roll.”

It is all too easy for leaders who lose sight of how they are treating lower-level people in organizations to leave a trail of suffering in their wake. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us of the central responsibility of leaders not to lose sight of the humanity they share with others: “The misfortunes to which compassion commonly responds—deaths, wounds, losses of loved ones, losses of citizenship, hunger, poverty—are real and general. They really are the common lot of all human beings. Thus the kings who deny that the lot of the peasant could be theirs are deceiving themselves.”¹¹

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Have you witnessed a missed opportunity for compassion in your organization because a leader was not paying attention or not willing to acknowledge suffering? Have you missed opportunities for compassion because you were blinded by power to the condition of others?

REWRITING MISSED OPPORTUNITIES TO OVERCOME OBSTACLES

Missed opportunities for compassion often become opportunities for regret. Compassion writers Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt remind us that while it may be “heartbreaking to hear the pain of strangers, it also opens up the heart of human-focused work and infuses it with meaning.”¹² It can be painful to look at missed opportunities for compassion and see how work threatens to turn our hearts to stone. But finding the courage to turn toward these stories and rewrite them offers us the possibility of change.¹³ This final blueprint harnesses the power of rewriting missed opportunities for compassion, using them to catalyze change. As Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt say, “You can’t engage with human pain and remain unchanged. But that is the beauty of it. . . . In taking on the pain of others we act in the transformation of the world.”¹⁴

CREATE A BLUEPRINT FOR OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO COMPASSION

STEP 1: IDENTIFY YOUR MOST COMPELLING STORY

Step back and look over all of the missed opportunities for compassion that you have recalled as you read this chapter.

Identify the one that represents an obstacle you would most like to overcome.

STEP 2: REWRITE THE STORY

Tell the story as it would happen if compassion had been present. How would the story unfold differently?

Identify the main elements that would need to change to make your new story true. How did incivility, toxic culture, narrow role definitions, exhausting routines, or insensitive leadership contribute?

Make a list of what would need to change for this new story of compassion to be plausible in your organization.

STEP 3: SPRINGBOARD TO CATALYZE ACTION

Use the missed opportunity as a springboard to action. Learn to tell the story of the missed opportunity compellingly, to draw people into the need for compassion and convey the suffering that happens without it.

Add a call to action that builds on your rewritten story and conveys your vision.

Add skills to your personal development plan that will enable you to do what is needed to help overcome these obstacles to compassion in your work.

Identify the other people you must influence in order to create and sustain conditions that would transform this obstacle in your organization.

Make a plan to approach influencers. How will you use your story to help them see the necessity, power, and beauty of greater compassion competence in your system?