
Is there a space for compassion in leadership and business? The simple answer is yes. I would make the case that leadership, unlike management, is all about kindness, empathy, and compassion. Somehow however, we’ve come to some collective conclusion that business and kindness are mutually exclusive. In my most current book, Engaging Your Employees, I share two stories about how leaders demonstrated compassion towards their employees and actually realized better business results.
We know that the stressed, tired, anxious, frustrated brain does not function at its top capacity, which therefore limits creativity and innovation – something that does not help business effectiveness. I taught this to MBA students for seven (7) years. I myself, believed that I was immune from it because I was in a role that I loved and worked with a high-degree of autonomy. It wasn’t until I became self-employed that I realized that my own creativity was indeed limited by stress.
Yesterday, yet another leader was sharing with me the frustration they were experiencing with a GenZ employee, (GenZ 1997 – 2012 current working ages 16- 27). They entered the workforce during the Covid measures. Anecdotally, I am seeing additional information and stories about their lack of work effort, and I was reminded of the blog I wrote a few weeks ago “The emerging workforce and the state of emotional abandonment: what does this mean for leaders”? Which leads me to conclude: we have a generation that has developed their frontal cortex during a time of great trauma – they are living, or rather existing, in an amygdala-hijack. We have an entire generation who have experienced a moral injury. Organizations could possibly further the trauma by firing them rather than investing in their recovery through development and mentoring.
Do businesses have any type of ethical or moral obligation to help a generation of traumatized, young adults? I would argue that we do. If it’s not organizations, who need and benefit from an effective workforce, then who? Who else is willing to step up and do it? We can point fingers and shake off responsibility, but do we simply abandon them, after all we broke them. How does leaving millions of people in a state of trauma trickle down to future generations? When we consider the epigenetics of trauma –holding onto trauma in our genetic code- we will be living in 1870’s England. How does that benefit our businesses?
I understand there are a lot of challenges, especially the sense of entitlement as well as a technology addiction, or the inability to put down the cell phone. Consider that the cell phone, through games, FB, videos, etc., provides the brain with an immediate, short-term dopamine response. If it is indeed a short-term response, then going back to the phone for more and more of it, seems rather logical. I think this was most likely a need during the Covid measures. Consider the isolated and lonely university student, what else was there to do but rely on the phone for connection and mental health. Here’s an alternative: as leaders we should be looking for different ways to create a more long-term dopamine response and rewarding new behavior.
If we want a viable workforce, well into the future, business leaders are going to have to step up and mentor to help this generation re-wire their neuropathways. What is the long-term outcome if we do nothing?
There are solutions. We can collectively decide that as leaders we want to make a positive difference in the lives of a potentially traumatized or a morally injured generation. It begins with us however by:
Better understanding ourselves so we can better understand the needs of others,
Ensure compassionate care for ourselves so we can compassionately care for others – a bit like putting on our own oxygen mask first,
Limiting judgement. In the words of Stephen Covey, PhD “ seek first to understand.” We may never be able to fully grasp what they are experiencing or how an entire generation is simply muddling through, but we can understand there is something very large at play with very big, long-term consequences.
Listen to Dr. Jennie Byrne's interview on Moral Injury:
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