Just before the holidays last year, Rosa, the head of customer service at a health insurance company, canceled her monthly town hall meeting. She thought that since employees were scrambling to hit their year-end targets, they would welcome that extra hour. In the moment, her move was completely rational. But it backfired. One of her trusted managers told her that employees were grumbling in the breakroom about how “higher-ups constantly put numbers before people.” Rosa later told us: “I blew it. I thought I was being compassionate by removing some demands on their time. But with their pressure to deliver results, the message they heard was ‘keep your heads down.’”
Leaders Don’t Have to Choose Between Compassion and Performance
How to deliver results while also supporting your employees’ needs.
February 16, 2022
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Summary.
Leaders are experiencing extreme demands for compassion at a time when there’s no room for compromising on outcomes. As a result, many leaders have fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of a binary choice between compassion or performance. They know that both are essential but are finding it hard to drive performance in a way that also maximizes support of their employees. This dual need for increased compassion and higher performance is hitting while Covid fatigue has employees, leaders, and customers alike running on fumes. This problem of extreme demands isn’t going away. To deliver both compassion and performance in a sustainable way, leaders need data, prioritization, setup, and collaboration.