8

UNDERSTANDING COMPASSION COMPETENCE

ALTHOUGH ZEKE WAS IN A relatively low-level sales position in a far-flung subsidiary office of a multinational corporation, TechCo swung into action immediately upon his hospitalization. Over a period of months and across a span of geography, this organization and its members engaged in an extraordinary pattern of collective noticing, interpreting, feeling, and acting to alleviate Zeke’s suffering in whatever ways they could. To some, it may seem unusual that an organization would go to such lengths for one employee. Yet we know from our research that TechCo engaged in patterns of compassion competence regularly and consistently. Employees suffering from different kinds of losses and setbacks, working in all kinds of positions, and located all around the world experienced the power of compassion at TechCo. While each pattern encompasses different details, what they have in common is the competence enabled by TechCo’s social architecture that allowed for a high degree of calibration of resources with needs, matching the breadth to what was most useful, and customizing them to the individuality of people who were suffering.

TechCo’s capacity to respond to the suffering of not just Zeke but also thousands of other employees in a unique, individualized, competent manner animates our ability to imagine how we might design organizations that excel at compassion competence. Of course, TechCo was not perfect. Some employees experienced compassion lacking even in this highly competent organization. But if you think Zeke’s story is too good to be true, we encourage you to realize that there are many others like it. In this chapter, we want to revisit some elements of the TechCo case to reveal more about what enabled the organization to create reliable and repeated patterns of compassion in response to multiple episodes of suffering. Let’s explore a framework that helps us to more deeply understand what enables compassion competence in organizations.

A SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK

Awakening compassion competence in organizations goes beyond individual hearts and minds—it requires the fundamental building blocks of organizational life. In our research, we have identified elements of organizations that make the biggest difference in a system’s ability to achieve highly competent patterns of collective noticing, interpreting, feeling, and responding. We refer to these elements all together as an organization’s social architecture.¹ The social architecture of an organization is composed of its social network structures and the ways that people are tied together in the system, the culture of the workplace, the ways that work roles are defined, the ways that routine work is accomplished, and the meaning and modeling that leaders provide. Looking at how the social architecture of an organization enables compassion competence helps us to see how structures and processes in work organizations contribute to people’s ability to pick up on suffering and create patterns to alleviate it.

One of our goals in illuminating the framework of a social architecture is to help leaders, managers, employees, and change agents to understand what enables organizational compassion competence. These are the system’s compassion architects. They design and build the elements that make up the social architecture, and as they do, they exert enormous influence over our expectations of what is appropriate and possible when suffering surfaces at work.

NETWORKS AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

Organizations are composed of what sociologist Georg Simmel called webs of affiliations, or what are today commonly referred to as social networks.² When researchers study organizational networks, they point to how repeated social interactions between people form a social structure that governs flows of information and helps determine people’s power and influence based on whom they know and interact with on a regular basis.³ You might have heard of network research in terms of “six degrees of separation,” which is a popular way of understanding how many network ties link us with other people and allow us to reach them even if we don’t know them well. This is the first aspect of networks that we focus on in relation to compassion competence. Since social networks provide a structure that captures patterns of interactions between people, these networks can be activated in the wake of suffering. Network structures are often depicted in maps that show how regularly people talk or share information or advice with each other, and research also shows how energy and emotion flow through these structures.⁴ As in a highway system, feelings, interpretations, and calls for action travel fast on the most established and biggest paths. This is why networks matter so much for how quickly information about suffering is shared and how easy it is to calibrate and coordinate patterns of compassion competence in a system.

Social networks in organizations matter for compassion competence in a second way too. In addition to the structure of the networks, we can look at the quality of the interpersonal ties between people. High-quality connections are defined by feelings of mutuality, vitality, and positive regard that flow between people, even in momentary interactions. These connections have strong effects. For instance, when ties are higher in quality, they are more tensile, helping us to be more flexible in responding to one another. High-quality connections also have the capacity to carry more positive and negative emotion with less strain.⁵ For example, if someone who is suffering missed a deadline, high-quality connections enable coworkers to express both the negative emotions of displeasure with the missed deadline and positive concern or care without sacrificing the relationship. Jane and her colleagues have researched the energizing effects of high-quality connections at work.⁶ Connections like these speed up the flow of information and resources when suffering surfaces because people can rely on the respect and trust they’ve built in their connections to find ways to improvise together.

In the case of TechCo’s social networks, we see structural network effects on competence in the rapid sharing of information and resources between the Haifa office and Europe and Middle East division office. Similar structural effects between Raoul’s division and Barbara’s division at headquarters kept information and resources flowing. Similarly, when Zeke’s coworkers sent out calls for other TechCo employees to participate in the vacation donation program, they tapped into their own social networks to draw even more people into the pattern. We also see that TechCo’s network ties are generally infused with a high degree of trust and respect. For instance, the high-quality bonds between Zeke and his teammates amplified the pattern. So did the high-quality connection between Avi and Raoul. Zeke reflected to us that this seemed to characterize many relationships within TechCo: “Although TechCo is a huge, multibillion-dollar company with branches all over the world, I felt that the people I work with really cared about their peers and started to organize on my behalf when I was in the accident. I believe that the close relationships I had with many of the people here is why they reacted this way.”

In some 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. Perhaps the employee would take a leave of absence or maybe just disappear. So why in Zeke’s case did his accident become a rallying cry for months of compassionate responses? Network structures in the organization carried information about Zeke’s accident and calls for help throughout the organization quickly. Connections characterized by trust helped people to regard the news as credible, amplifying people’s attention and responsiveness. In this way, networks and the quality of connections between people provide a central leverage point for designing compassion competence.

KEY POINTS: HOW NETWORKS AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

∞ Organizational social networks create a social structure that ties people together in particular ways.

∞ Network ties provide highways for the flow of information, advice, feelings, and energy. Activating these highways upon learning of suffering is a powerful way to evoke patterns of compassionate action.

∞ The quality of the ties in the networks matters. High-quality connections are more flexible, lending to the capacity to improvise together. They carry more emotion without strain, amplifying feelings of empathy.

∞ Networks contribute to compassion competence by making it faster and easier to communicate and coordinate as well as more likely that people will pay attention and regard notifications about suffering as credible.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AWAKENS COMPASSION COMPETENCE

Emphasis on the importance of organizational culture has grown, so it is fairly common today to talk about the role of organizational culture in making great places to work. Organizational culture is an important contributor to compassion competence. We define organizational culture following scholar Edgar Schein, who wrote about it as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group . . . which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel.”⁷ In Schein’s work, culture is observable in three ways. Easiest to see are symbols and artifacts, like a building and how it is decorated; harder to see are values; and hardest to see are basic assumptions that become taken for granted about “the way things are around here.”

Two aspects of organizational culture are particularly important in understanding compassion competence. First, organizational cultures teach members basic assumptions about human nature and human relationships. When cultures teach their members that humans by nature are essentially good, capable, and worthy of compassion—what we called the positive default assumption in chapter 4—these cultures enable more generous interpretations of suffering and legitimize compassionate action. We sometimes refer to the bundle of assumptions that enable compassion in an organizational culture as an organization’s emphasis on shared humanity. We saw the importance of shared humanity in chapter 4 as well. The assumption that in an organization we all belong to one human family speeds and eases patterns of compassion by enabling us to take for granted the idea that others are capable, worthwhile, and acting with good intentions.

A second aspect of culture that is important for compassion competence involves what Edgar Schein calls espoused values, an organization’s stated and lived-out ideals, goals, and aspirations. Values that emphasize human worth and human interconnection enable compassion competence. These are often stated in words like dignity, inclusion, respect, teamwork, collaboration, partnership, support, care, kindness, stewardship, service, justice, and fairness. Values such as these support patterns of compassion by working in the background when suffering surfaces to guide people’s attention about what is important in a response. Humanistic values in organizations color interpretations of suffering as worthy of compassion and fuel competence.⁸

Organizational scholars Sigal Barsade and Mandy O’Neill have investigated organizations that manifest what they term cultures of “companionate love” that are characterized by values such as affection, care, and respect. These cultures reinforce basic assumptions about shared humanity and worthiness, featuring values that set the stage for compassion. Cultures of companionate love foster better results for organizations, generating higher customer and employee satisfaction and lowered costs from absenteeism, burnout, or turnover.⁹ These cultures also fuel what social psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Amy Canevello refer to as “compassionate interpersonal goals.”¹⁰ Goals that emphasize collaboration, building trust and respect, and the need to work together to “win together” are also known as ecosystem goals. Such goals orient us to view ourselves as interdependent with others and build on the humanistic values and assumptions of shared humanity that support compassion competence.

In contrast, organizations can build cultures that assume people are lazy or untrustworthy, often adopting values that reinforce competition and setting what researchers call egosystem goals. In an egosystem, as it sounds, people prioritize self-promotion and self-focused gain, with goals like “make all the money I can and get ahead of other people.” Values such as winning at all costs lead these cultures to disregard the losers, undermining the sense of shared humanity. Those who suffer are assumed to deserve to lose and are therefore unlikely to be imbued with the worth that supports compassion. In chapter 13, we describe the example of Enron as it built a culture of ruthlessness. The organization spawned egosystem goals, creating a system in which the top executives became very wealthy while stripping others with less power of their jobs and their life savings. An organization’s culture infuses the assumptions we make about people, the values we hold, and the goals we set. When these involve getting ahead of other people, winning at all costs, and taking the spoils for ourselves, compassion fades into the background. By contrast, when a culture involves us in seeing others with dignity, working together for shared gain, and envisioning collective success, compassion comes alive.

At TechCo, people worked in a culture that emphasized shared humanity, with humanistic values and goals that supported an ecosystem perspective of mutual success. TechCo’s stated values include “respect and care for each other,” and goals include aspirational ideals that reinforce people’s interdependence, like “win together.” We see these assumptions and values guiding the behavior of Zeke’s coworkers, who without hesitation began to muster organizational resources that might alleviate his and his family’s suffering. We also see the assumptions and values in action when managers like Avi or leaders like Raoul and Barbara unquestioningly embraced the team’s actions on behalf of Zeke and expressed belief that it was right and good to expand the pattern of compassion at TechCo.

KEY POINTS: HOW CULTURE AWAKENS COMPASSION COMPETENCE

∞ Organizational culture refers to shared basic assumptions about human nature as well as shared values espoused in the organization.

∞ Basic assumptions about human nature in organizations can emphasize or de-emphasize people’s shared humanity, the positive default assumption that people are good, capable, and worthy of compassion as part of the one human family.

∞ Humanistic values such as teamwork, collaboration, inclusion, dignity, and justice characterize cultures that enable greater compassion competence.

∞ An organization’s culture enables compassion competence through normalizing inquiry work and generous interpretations of suffering, drawing out empathic concern and emotional expression, and making compassionate action seem like an expected part of the work environment.

ROLES AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

In organizations, we act and interact according to roles, which are patterns of expected behavior that go along with particular positions.¹¹ Roles are socially determined and recognized; they identify us within the organization because others can recognize our position. Roles provide a set of internalized expectations and scripts that others will also reinforce. Roles are different from the individuals assigned to them—we take them on, which is what we mean by the expression “wearing my work hat.” Anyone given a work role such as manager, teacher, physician, or file clerk learns to wear the hat, taking on a set of expectations that encompasses both how to be and how to act. For instance, a manager is expected to be firm and clear, while a teacher is expected to be warm and dedicated.

In relation to compassion competence, we focus on a distinction between role taking and role making.¹² Both can contribute to compassion competence, but they do so in different ways. Role taking, as it sounds, refers to how we learn to take on roles. This involves how roles are described, formally designed, and communicated to newcomers. Training often conveys what a role entails to help people take it on faster or more effectively. Research validates the fact that people very quickly learn how to act and be in ways that are appropriate for social or work roles.¹³ We implicitly pick up what is within our zone of responsibility, and if we violate the expectations of a new role, people in the organization will correct us, so we become more and more likely to conform to the expectations that go along with it.

Roles can be powerful for awakening compassion when they are described with compassion at their core. For instance, when people become managers, they often receive managerial training. This training can emphasize care and responsibility for employees’ and customers’ well-being as part of what is expected for managers. When it does, managers—like Avi at TechCo—expand their zone of responsibilities to include compassion for employees. This kind of role design can be done for any type of work. For instance, compassion architects interested in increasing compassion competence in a large urban transportation system convened groups of bus drivers and involved them in discussions about how their role linked to the larger purpose of creating a safe and compassionate city. We have seen role descriptions and training for many types of work—from bus drivers to physicians to housekeepers—redesigned in just this way, with significant effects on awakening compassion competence.

Role making is distinct from role taking. People invent and sculpt new aspects of their roles in dynamic ways over time. People learn expectations by role taking and change those expectations by role making, in which role expectations are shifted in response to social interactions and social understandings. Jane’s research with Amy Wrzesniewski uses the term job crafting to show how people who occupy the same role can innovate what they do. People craft new or different tasks and incorporate them into their roles. People also shift the relationships they regularly engage in as part of their work role. For instance, the hospital cleaners who participated in the first study of job crafting sometimes sculpted their roles by interacting in a caring way with patients, which enhanced their work.¹⁴ In organizations that embrace this kind of role making in the service of compassion, people create ingenious ways to shift their roles to add to patterns of compassion.

People can also innovate their roles by changing meanings and linking their work to the broader values and purpose of the organization. Our fellow organizational researchers Donde Plowman and Laura Madden, along with other colleagues, point out the importance of this essential link between values and roles in enhancing compassion competence. They have found that compassion becomes widespread in a complex system “when the alleviation of suffering is internalized as a fundamental value and behavioral norm that agents recognize, act on, and alter their roles to include.”¹⁵ The hospital cleaners sometimes crafted their roles in this way by defining their role as healers who contributed to the broader mission of the hospital to help people heal. At TechCo, the human resources leader, Barbara, told us about how she changed her role from one that focused mostly on compensation data and spreadsheets of employee information to one in which she was a sort of “chief compassion officer” charged with making the values of the organization come alive and doing whatever it would take to increase compassion throughout the global company.

KEY POINTS: HOW ROLES AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

∞ Roles are socially defined patterns of expected behavior that go along with particular positions.

∞ People throughout organizations rely on role expectations of others to make actions more predictable. When compassion is incorporated into roles, it becomes more reliable and predictable.

∞ Role taking is a process of learning and internalizing the expected patterns that go along with a position. Formal training and descriptions that emphasize compassion make it seem like an expected part of work.

∞ Role making is a process of innovating by crafting new tasks, relationships, and meanings into the expectations. Role making can enable compassion competence when people craft work to include more emphasis on others’ well-being.

ROUTINES AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

Organizational routines are the recurrent, interdependent ways that people accomplish work tasks.¹⁶ We are used to participating in routines for many tasks at work, particularly hiring, tracking projects, accounting for money and time, planning for the use of resources, getting together to discuss work, making decisions, and resolving conflicts. Often compared to the ruts in a road, routines make action faster and easier to coordinate.

Two aspects of routines are crucial for creating compassion competence. First, because routines create expectations for how things happen in organizations, people don’t have to think about them. They just seem like “standard practice” and happen easily. At TechCo, we saw this aspect of routines as standard practice when Avi used the TechCo communication routines to communicate Zeke’s hospitalization to a broad network of executives in the organization. Because this notification was routine, Avi didn’t have to debate about whether or not to alert others, and when Raoul received the alert, he did not raise questions about using organizational resources or communication channels to respond to suffering. The whole pattern was part of what had become a standard operating procedure at TechCo.

A second aspect of routines that is crucial for creating compassion competence points to the fact that although routines are taken for granted, they are not static or mindless. In fact, they are flexible and help improvisational action to take shape at work. Organizational researchers show that people simultaneously hold an expectation about how the routine is supposed to happen but deviate as they need to in order to get the task accomplished, without seeing this as a violation of the routine itself. An easy way to see this is to look at hiring routines that guide how new members are identified and brought into the workplace. Employees in the organization know how the hiring routine works, and they coordinate across many people to take the steps necessary to get approval for a new job, post a job, receive and examine applications, and select people to interview. All of these steps are relatively invisible to the interview candidate, who comes into the coordinated effort with expectations for what will happen but also can adjust to whatever is necessary to make the selection process work.

Chris Murchison, former vice president of staff development and culture at HopeLab, a Silicon Valley think tank devoted to “combining science and design to help people thrive,” was masterful at weaving compassion into the organization’s hiring routines. He shared a story that illustrates this flexibility in routines and how it can be used in the service of alleviating suffering. “Today at work we interviewed a job candidate, Nadia, who was particularly nervous. I decided to ask her about it, and what unfolded was an authentic conversation about the peculiarity of interviews. Now beyond the script, she soared with a new energy and stories and laughter.” Because Chris was sensitive to the surfacing of anxiety and stress as a form of suffering, he was able to respond with compassion and shift the way that he and Nadia and others engaged in the hiring routine. Instead of questions about her background or past, they discussed interview expectations. This move from performing the hiring routine as a stilted interaction to performing it as an authentic conversation evoked empathy and improvised compassionate action. The hiring routine at HopeLab created conditions such that even those who did not get a job offer often “fell in love” with the organization through this relational resonance and became supporters.¹⁷ For Chris, his actions reflected his desire to awaken compassion in the organization, regardless of whether or not someone got the job.

At TechCo we also see the flexibility of routines contributing greatly to compassion competence. The human resources group used their routines for providing insurance coverage to employees, but improvised on them to find new ways to extend Zeke’s coverage, adding breadth to the resources that TechCo mobilized. The organization had developed a routine for paying out vacation-time donations to employees who needed financial assistance, and they launched this routine to help alleviate Zeke’s suffering. As Zeke’s expenses mounted, however, and this wasn’t enough to help him receive the treatments he needed, the organization improvised on this routine by coupling it with matching grants from Raoul’s division budget and from TechCo’s headquarter’s budget.

Thinking about organizational routines tends to be one of the most unexpected aspects of social architectures that awaken compassion. While it might seem odd to think about compassion and budgeting routines, for example, our research shows that routines put into the service of creating patterns of compassion weave a new tapestry. Organizations that deploy routines in this way are “knotted together” in ways that enhance compassion competence.¹⁸

KEY POINTS: HOW ROUTINES AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

∞ Routines are defined as recognizable, recurring ways that interdependent tasks are accomplished in organizations. They provide “grooves” that guide how work gets done.

∞ People hold a view of how a routine should work, so when routines incorporate compassionate actions, the system becomes fast and reliable, and patterns of compassion are created easily.

∞ People simultaneously hold a view of what commonly happens and what needs to happen right now in order to accomplish a task. They incorporate this simultaneous view into a routine, which makes compassionate actions easier because they can be both standard and improvised.

∞ Many kinds of work routines can incorporate compassion, including hiring, onboarding, offboarding, accounting, planning, meeting, communicating, budgeting, decision-making, conflict resolution, and recognizing people.

STORIES AND LEADERS AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

In addition to being systems of network ties, cultural assumptions and values, roles, and routines, organizations are systems of meaning—collections of symbols, stories, and information that come to be interpreted in shared ways as members interact with one another and with the system.¹⁹ In relation to compassion competence, we point to the crucial importance of both stories and leaders as focal points in shaping meaning in organizations.

According to scholars and management consultants alike, stories are one of the most important ways that people share knowledge, motivate themselves and others, build trust, convey and understand values, and share a vision of the future.²⁰ Stories about the organization and about what happens in it are a primary way that members come to share interpretations and understandings of three central questions: what kind of place is this to work, what kind of people are these, and what kind of person can I be while I am working here? In our research, when people heard and shared stories of compassion at work, they came to understand the whole organization as a more compassionate place, to see their colleagues as more compassionate people, and to realize that they could be compassionate at work.²¹ These patterns of meaning in the system make it more likely that when suffering surfaces, members of the organization will interpret it generously. Research by CompassionLab member Sally Maitlis demonstrates that teams can use narratives of care to engage in performance improvement and to enhance their connections; in other words, the stories that teams tell themselves can make them more or less competent in extending compassion to one another.²² As we saw at TechCo, where stories of compassion were plentiful, while Zeke’s accident happened on personal time away from his workplace, his coworkers interpreted his suffering as meaningful and relevant to them. They interpreted their organization as the kind of place that would want to respond with compassion, and these meanings of their team and their organization supported their immediate action.

Our study of how an organization responded to three of its members who lost all of their belongings in a fire showed how stories fuel compassion competence. When organizational members learned of the fire, stories about the loss spread rapidly. People started contributing funds quickly in a donation box that had been placed in the central café. Stories about how much money had been raised in a short time also began to circulate. These stories reinforced people’s sense that their workplace was compassionate, and they sped up the generation of resources and amplified the magnitude of further donations, so that the organization raised more money faster. Stories that spread about compassion also sparked other ideas for resources that might be useful and generated a greater scope of resources that were more customized.

Leaders are also important focal points in systems of meaning. Members of the organization look to them for guidance about how to interpret what is happening and how to make sense of the world.²³ Members also follow models set by leaders, so a leader’s compassionate actions can spur many other acts of compassion. We do not mean to suggest that compassion must be driven from the top down in organizations, however. In fact, because compassion is an emergent pattern, it is rarely controlled in a conventional top-down manner. In his book titled The Positive Organization, our colleague Bob Quinn shows that learning how to provoke and trust an emergent process is one of the most challenging things for leaders to do.²⁴ We encourage leaders to learn how to work with emergent processes of compassion more adeptly because we see clearly in stories like Zeke’s the power of leaders to amplify participation in patterns of compassion that they do not control. Leaders like Avi, Raoul, Barbara, and the CEO played key parts in expanding participation and mobilizing resources at crucial junctures in the pattern. By modeling compassionate responses to suffering, even though the unfolding process was not under their direct control, these leaders amplified compassion. Because of its tremendous amplifying power, we will explore additional aspects of compassion and leadership in chapter 10.

KEY POINTS: HOW STORIES AND LEADERS AWAKEN COMPASSION COMPETENCE

∞ Organizations are systems of meaning—collections of symbols, stories, and information that come to be interpreted in shared ways by members.

∞ Stories are focal points in systems of meaning. Compassion stories enhance competence by building belief in compassion.

∞ Leaders are focal points in systems of meaning. Leaders shape meaning by modeling compassion and by communicating about it.

∞ Leaders’ actions and stories enhance compassion competence when they mobilize additional resources and make the pattern of compassion more sustained and customized.

AN INVITATION TO REFLECT ON A SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE OF COMPASSION

Understanding a social architecture that supports compassion at work shows us new ways of thinking about compassion in organizations. Beyond simplistic views or overly individualized accounts, this framework offers a systemic perspective. It opens up visibility into the complex and artful work involved in creating emergent patterns of compassion. This framework offers us the possibility of many starting points for enhancing compassion competence in organizations. With these new starting points come new insights about each organization. While creating compassion competence isn’t simple, seeing that it is meaningfully patterned in ways that allow compassion architects to intervene ignites a sense of grounded optimism. We can catalyze action and create change that awakens compassion competence in organizations.

∞

How would you characterize the social architecture of your organization? Use the tools in Part Four: Blueprints for Awakening Compassion at Work to create a blueprint that will help you enhance your organization’s compassion competence.