The real heart of leadership -3

Happy Eid Mubarak to all my Moslem readers. May the lessons and blessings of the experience be translated to ‘ibadah’ for you all.

A compassionate leader is driven by a fixation on the picture of a desirable and desired outcome and the inherent possibilities rather than on present limitations. He stands in the present but operates in the future. His primary preoccupation is making the status quo fit the ideal that he has seen in his mind.

Optimism is the fuel of hope. A compassionate leader is a peddler of hope. As an incurable optimist, he able to critically interrogate the present but accentuates, articulates and celebrates the future. For him, the glass is always half full. When all that others can see is a dark cloud, he only sees the silver lining.

His concern for others makes him a caring leader who worms himself into the hearts of his followers by the depth of love and care that he demonstrates towards them. As the saying goes, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Compassionate leadership never takes people and their feelings for granted. True compassion begins with the ability to empathize. While sympathy may evoke feelings of concern about a situation, empathy engages the situation, assumes responsibility for it and proceeds to do something about it. When you sympathize with someone and simply move past them, leaving them in the lurch, it is because you never asked, “What if this was happening to me, how would I feel?” Compassion makes miracles easy because it makes every gesture of mercy and kindness seem like divine intervention to the recipient. When his followers can see their leader as a God-sent, it provokes in them a sense of obligation. This is what makes them almost blindly loyal to him. Loyalty is the reward a leader gets when his followers know that he will always get their backs because he not only inspires, he cares. Loyalty is sustainable only when it is inspired rather than enforced. Even when he rebukes them, they know that he is motivated by the love he has for them rather than a desire to judge them. True compassion has no time to judge people because it is more focused on healing them. It judges the offence but is focused on helping the offender out of the quagmire of the negative consequences of his indiscretion. This however, does not make such leader a weakling. Compassion is firm and tough on misery that desires no change!

A compassionate lawyer will see more clients left off the hook than his dispassionate colleagues. A compassionate Manager will make it faster to the board room than the work who treats people like he does statistics.

Some doctors can make a simple headache sound like a death sentence while can make a terminal ailment sound like a walk in the park! The difference is compassion. A compassionate doctor will see more patients healed than a mere ‘professional’ donning a white overall with a stethoscope in his pocket!

The leader’s heart is bound to reflect in his followers and by extension, the organization that he leads. Great organizations are products of great vision. It is therefore doubtful if anyone can be truly compassionate without being visionary. It is equally doubtful that a person can be truly visionary without being compassionate.

On one of his marathon teaching sessions, Jesus observed the crowd that had been his audience for three days without bothering to disperse even to get food. As the scripture puts it, He saw them forlorn as sheep without shepherd. Even when there did not seem to be any hope of providing food for the five thousand men, not counting the women and the children present, He bent over backwards to ensure that they were fed. It turned out that only five loaves of bread and two fish were available. His disciples tried to discourage him from doing anything because there was not enough money to buy food for the multitude. So they suggested a simple way out. Send the crowd away to go look for their own food. However, compassionate leaders never settle for the path of least resistance. This is what fires up their creativity and resourcefulness. Jesus simply took what was available to produce what was required. The compassionate leader has an uncanny ability to unlock potentials and possibilities hitherto unimagined.

Resourceful organizations are built by leaders who care so much about the desired outcome that they will stop at nothing to use available means to meet required objectives. A leader without compassion will use people to accumulate resources. A compassionate leader on the other hand, will use resources to build people. Until you build people, it is fruitless building structures. A people you don’t build will destroy the structure you are using them to build.

Compassionate leaders build customer-centric organizations. They don’t make or sell products. They raise customers. The implication of this is that everyone in the organization is taught to enthrone the customer and bend over backwards to ensure his satisfaction through the provision of superlative service. This culture of service in customer relations is epitomized by the leadership through role-modeling. The way the leader treats his own staff will largely determine how they treat customers.

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Customer-centric organizations are driven by advocacy in the formulation and implementation of their strategy. This is rooted in the culture of compassion-driven problem-solving. In enterprise, only products that help a significant number of people to solve problems command significant brand and market equity. Buzz and razzmatazz may create an attraction to a product but only solutions guarantee customer loyalty. When a compassionate leader heads an organization, the advocacy mindset deliberately designs services and products that are primarily targeted at problems, not people. When this happens, price is never an issue. People will always find the money to purchase anything that helps them to solve a problem. Advocacy-driven organizations thrive therefore because people readily part with money and are glad doing so when problems are solved.

Having sold a product or service that targets a customer’s problem before his pocket, advocacy-oriented organizations usually follow up through the creation of an effective feedback system that helps to measure the customers’ satisfaction.

Compassionate leaders build cohesive organizations and strong teams because they are systems-thinkers who always see the bigger picture. While most people focus on and nitpick about snapshots of isolated events, compassion-driven leaders consider issues from a holistic perspective that takes into account the interconnectedness of people, processes and products.

Leading from the heart is about demonstrating compassion. Power bereft of compassion will only produce oppression. Oppressors lead by compulsion. True leaders lead by compassion. Without compassion, the leader comes across as an insensitive despot who merely uses others to accomplish a selfish agenda that benefits only himself and impoverishes others around him. Such leadership is detached, scary and above all, unsustainable. If your desire as a leader is to positively influence your followers and by extension, the organization, lead from the heart.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!

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