The King's Fund: What is compassionate leadership? (15 February 2022)

Summary

Compassion can be defined as ‘a sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it’ (Gilbert 2013). We can experience compassion in different ways: we can feel compassion for other people; we can experience compassion from others; and there is also the compassion we can direct towards ourselves. 

Compassionate leadership involves a focus on relationships through careful listening to, understanding, empathising with and supporting other people, enabling those we lead to feel valued, respected and cared for, so they can reach their potential and do their best work. There is clear evidence that compassionate leadership results in more engaged and motivated staff with high levels of wellbeing, which in turn results in high-quality care.

In this King's Fund explainer, Suzie Bailey and Michael West describe four behaviours of compassionate leadership and why compassionate leadership matters.