Heal to Lead

17Fundamental #3: Leading with Compassion

BEYOND SIMPLY UNDERSTANDING those under our stewardship and feeling with them, as conscious leaders we are moved to take action to help our people in some meaningful way. Leading with Compassion, the third fundamental of high-conscious leadership, translates into better support for our employees and the planet through a more conscious approach to doing business—whether you run a charity, a corporation, a country, or a corner store.

Let's delineate among three terms that often get used interchangeably but are not synonymous: sympathy, empathy, and compassion.

Sympathy

The ability to understand someone's emotional experience, or simply that they are having one, is sympathy. Too often, this comes across as having pity or feeling sorry for someone who is suffering, and that doesn't help anyone. While it's better to feel for a colleague than sorry for a colleague, sympathy is antithetical to effective leadership traits.

Empathy

Empathy goes beyond the understanding of another's experience and is often described as feeling with someone who is having an emotional experience. The work of Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman breaks empathy down further into three distinct subsets: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. These lead to more effective communication about challenging experiences, deeper human connection, and more harmonious relationships in work and life.

• Cognitive empathy: Understanding how someone might be feeling and what they ...