by Belinda Bradley, Head of Best Practice
It’s the way that you do it – Inspiring Leadership in MacIntyre
What's love got to do with it? Cheesy title for this blog post! Compassion is one of MacIntyre’s values, and both compassion and love, when related to work, can be subjects that many people find uncomfortable. So in this post I am going to attempt to show that compassion is not a ‘fluffy’ nice to have and to convince even most sceptical reader that you really can’t be a successful leader without it.
Professional boundaries and love
Love and compassion are interlinking concepts. I picked love, rather than compassion, for the title of this blog post, because recently I have noticed a few of my colleagues feeling the need to defend feelings of love for a person who draws on their support. This has been most apparent during very sad times such as following the death of someone they had supported for many years. This got me thinking: a focus on professional boundaries is important for keeping people and relationships safe but is it also creating a barrier to staff being able to live one of our core values and bring their whole selves to work?
I have been convinced of the importance of compassion for many years. An early career experience which strengthened this view happened during my teacher training while working alongside a very experienced teacher on placement. She told me I needed to be stricter and challenged me to assert my authority over the first child to act out of line in my next lesson. This felt totally against my values but I did as she suggested. The child in question proceeded to throw a chair at me and became very distressed and I later discovered that his father had died just a few weeks earlier.
Trauma-assumed working
I have never forgotten that experience and it confirmed to me the importance of acting with compassion, building relationships and of what I now know as working in a way that is trauma-assumed. This means knowing that our actions have the potential to trigger trauma, or powerful negative emotions such as shame, for other people we interact with. When we act with this assumption we act with compassion.
The evidence for compassion is not only isolated to caring professions. It turns out that big businesses have discovered the importance of compassion too and that as leaders we need to be investing in being compassionate towards our colleagues and team as well as people who draw on our support.
Compassion and trust
I have spoken to lots of colleagues who are concerned about seeming ‘soft’ or being taken advantage if they act with compassion. I’ve been reading the book Leadership Mindset 2.0 recently and in that the author explains that when leaders hold back on compassion what they actually get is a lack of trust from others and poor performance from their team. People are significantly more engaged and do a much better job when they know that you genuinely care about them.
Difficult conversations: with compassion
Another compassion pitfall I have noticed, and fallen into myself, is taking compassion as a reason to avoid tackling difficult conversations and poor performance for fear of upsetting the person. Most definitions of compassion include a motivation to take action and so being compassionate actually requires us to address concerns and to do so openly and honestly.
To do this with compassion it helps to approach the conversation with curiosity and to avoid blaming. One of my colleagues recently wrote herself a really helpful list of sentence starters to help with this such as ‘I am curious about why...’, ‘I have noticed that…’. What a great way to help ourselves make these changes.
Three boundary areas
So back to the question about professional boundaries and permission to love within our work. MacIntyre has always talked about the importance of relationships. The song line ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it’ has been shared across MacIntyre for well over a decade as part of our Great Interactions™ approach – a way of helping all staff learn how to create stronger relationships and make every interaction count. While people’s basic needs can sometimes be met without compassion, our MacIntyre purpose, to support people to live gloriously ordinary lives, cannot be. So how could we support people to think differently about professional boundaries in a way that aligns to our purpose?
I was recently introduced to the 3 Ps model during a course with the organisation ThemPra. I really like the way this reframes professional boundaries by considering three areas: professional, personal and private. Many of our gifts, skills and passions are part of our personal self and not within our job description or professional training and in MacIntyre we ask staff to bring their whole self to work and work hard to create a work environment where we celebrate diversity and people can be fully themselves.
The personal is essential to achieving our purpose and doing so with compassion. In this model the boundary is between personal and private and it is our private self which we should not bring into a work relationship. This can be a hard distinction to make as the same thing can be personal for one person in one situation and private in another context. What makes the difference is ensuring our own needs are not taking priority.
Feeling compassion, or loving kindness, towards others clearly makes us better at our jobs and enables us to be more effective professionals: I hope you are convinced of that!
Getting the balance right
But it's complicated getting the balance right so we need to talk about it and reflect regularly to ensure our emotions and our actions are always shared in the best interests of the other person. The only way we can really protect against slipping into private, or holding back on personal (and so holding back compassion) is by reflecting and talking.
So let's remove the barriers to talking about compassion and love within the context of our work and see the difference it could make. I would love to hear what happens when you start talking about love in your team.
