Episode 121: How To Be a More Compassionate Leader (Interview With Rasmus Hougaard)
Rasmus Hougaard, Founder and CEO of global research, leadership development and consulting firm Potential Project, is on a mission to create a more human way of working and leading. Recently co-authoring the book Compassionate Leadership: How to do hard things in a human way, Rasmus is going to be sharing his valuable insights into how we can become more effective leaders through the power of compassion, with David Green. The conversation will also cover topics such as
The difference between empathy and compassion
How to unlock your compassionate side
The difference in leadership expectations between generations
The difference between men and women regarding compassionate leadership
Support for this podcast comes from Charthop. You can learn more by visiting: charthop.com/digitalhr
You can listen to this week's episode below.
David Green: Hi, I'm David Green, and welcome back to the Digital HR Leaders podcast after our summer sojourn. I'm certainly feeling revitalised after my family holiday in the Greek Cyclades Islands. I hope you had a wonderful summer too, and are ready to get back into work mode after a well-deserved break.
At the Digital HR Leaders podcast, it is our mission to share valuable insights from global HR thought leaders on how, as people leaders, we can enhance our workforce and add more business value. Now, we all know great leadership isn't just about allocating tasks and excellent project management; it's about how we treat our employees and how we inspire them to be the best they can be. So, in today's show, I'm delighted to invite Rasmus Hougaard, Founder and CEO of Potential Project and co-author of Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, to talk to us about how we can become more effective leaders through the power of compassion.
Rasmus Hougaard: Compassion cannot stand alone. It has to go together with what we call wisdom. So, you basically need the compassion together with the drive, or the compassion together with the courage. Leaders who have both of those skills have more than double the positive impact in terms of work/life balance, so it's really important that you basically mix the heart with the human. If you have both, it's really the silver bullet.
David Green: Rasmus and his organisation, Potential Projects, are on a mission to create a more human way of working and leading. If you haven't come across Potential Projects yet, they have done some fantastic work with the likes of Accenture, Ikea and Lego by helping them unlock organisational performance through compassionate leadership.
So, to start off our discussion, I asked Rasmus to share with us a little bit about his background and how he came to start his global research, leadership development and consulting firm.
Rasmus Hougaard: I'll keep it short! We're a research and leadership development firm based in some 30 countries with some 250 folks around the world, helping big clients like Accenture, McKinsey, Microsoft, Cisco, and so on to really create ultimately a more human world at work by utilising research and research-based leadership interventions.
That's the short story.
I came about starting the organisation some 14 years ago, when I had spent many, many years in monasteries around the world, really learning and practising the art of meditation, how to harness the full potential of the mind, really becoming clear-minded, focused, and I would say a kinder person. Then I became a researcher, then I ended up in the corporate world, and I just realised that people were not really living up to their potential, that people were not as kind as they could be, not as creative and certainly not as happy as I felt they could be. And with all the techniques and tools that I practised in the monasteries, I realised that was really a treasure trove that everybody should have access to, and that's when I decided to try to bring these methods into the corporate world.
David Green: Well, it's a perfect topic for our audience today, mostly HR leaders, HR professionals, generally tasked with helping our organisations and their leaders lead better. And obviously, the last two years has really shown the importance of good leadership, and certainly, we're going to be talking a lot about that.
So, your new book, or relatively new book, Compassionate Leadership, I know you're the co-author of that with Jacqueline, How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, which I think we've definitely had to go through in the last couple of years. And I guess some people will immediately think doing hard things is simply incompatible with compassion. So, how do you start the ball rolling in breaking down that way of thinking?
Rasmus Hougaard: It's an excellent question, and it points to the big issue that many leaders are thinking they're facing, which is a false dichotomy, that either you have to choose to be a strong, good and effective leader or a nice, soft human being, and that is an absolutely false dichotomy and a terrible choice to have to make because then we're bringing humanity out of our leadership.
So, it's really about realising that those two can very well go together, and that is what our whole research project leading up to the group was about, figuring out how, from a data perspective and how, from an anecdotal perspective, can we create a roadmap for bringing those two together, so it's not doing hard things or being a nice person, but it's really bringing them together.
The reason why it's so fundamentally important is because in leadership, the name of the game is to do hard things. Leaders are the ones that have to make the difficult decisions, whether that's a restructure, whether that's giving tough feedback, whether that's laying people off to save the whole company, whatever it is; that's the role of leadership.
And if leaders can't manage to bring humanity and kindness, compassion into that, organisations will be ruthless, bad places. So, it's really, really important, and especially with a very uncertain, volatile world, as we're experiencing for the past years, it is even more important that before.
David Green: We're hearing the word compassion here, and we hear a lot about empathy. I read a great article that you published recently in Harvard Business Review.
So how do you define compassion, and what is the difference between compassion and empathy; I think listeners would welcome understanding that.
Rasmus Hougaard: They are very different, even though we often think of them as the same.
If you imagine a chart where on the x-axis, you have the understanding of people's problems, suffering, and on the y-axis, you have the willingness to actually jump in and help people when you see they're suffering. All the way down on the bottom left, you have pity. You know that people are suffering, but you don't really care much, and you don't do much about it. If you take one step up the ladder, you come to sympathy. One more step, you're in empathy. You really recognise how people feel, and you're willing to step into action.
But there is one more step, which is compassion, which is where you basically take empathy and add action. So, empathy, that is literally when we experience when we take on the suffering of someone that we meet that is suffering because of what is called mirror neurons in our brain. When we see someone that is suffering, we can see it in their facial expressions because we recognise it from our ourselves, and then we feel that; that's empathy.
Compassion is when we take empathy of that spark of, "I feel what you feel", and then you take a step back and ask, "How can I help?" and then you move into action and do something that actually alleviates the suffering, rather than just sitting and feeling the pain with the person, which is noble and beautiful and very human; but especially in leadership, doesn't drive any results for yourself, because you can suffer from burnout if you do that a lot, it doesn't help the person, and it doesn't help the organisation. So, we need to connect with empathy but lead with compassion.
David Green: The next question is, how do we help our leaders become more compassionate?
Is compassion something that everyone that's listening to this can unlock; is it something that can be taught or learned?
Rasmus Hougaard: I think it's a bit of both. On the one hand, some of us are obviously born with a stronger sense of both empathy and compassion; while empathy is a little harder to train, compassion is easier to train because compassion is that intent to be of benefit. So, we can absolutely train in compassion, there are lots of practices that help that, and ultimately, it's simply about applying compassion to how you engage with other people. The more you do that, the more you become a compassionate person.
What neuroscience has shown is that the part in the brain just behind the prefrontal cortex that is associated with having positive intents for others, grows; it literally gets bigger the more you apply compassion to your way of going about people.
David Green: And is there a link between emotional intelligence and compassion?
Did you see that in some of the research and the data that you pulled out?
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, absolutely. If people have very little emotional intelligence, you also have very little empathy. When you have little empathy, you don't see that other people are suffering, and therefore you don't feel compelled to go into action, which is compassion. So, yes, a very strong correlation.
David Green: And I suppose you can look at it; an empathetic leader might listen a lot.
So again, if we think about a lot of the audience here, HR professionals, employee listening has stepped up, particularly in the last two years, for obvious reasons; but listening is one thing, and taking action is another. Would you draw the same parallel between empathy and compassion: empathy is listening, but compassion is listening and taking action and communicating that you're taking action is as well?
Rasmus Hougaard: That's exactly the correct definition, yeah. Empathy's when we listen and it's a beautiful thing to do.
People will appreciate it, but at the end of the day, they won't feel that they got any help. Compassion is when we move into action, we actually help change the problems, either by listening or coaching or by handing it over to them and empowering them to fix it themselves, whatever it is; compassion is when we actually solve things.
David Green: Staying with leadership, for the time being, if you stop someone on the street and maybe some of the listeners here and ask them to name a current business leader, you'll probably hear names like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. I wouldn't say any of them are particularly synonymous with compassion, or maybe empathy as well maybe. I could be wrong; I apologise, Elon, Jeff and Mark, if I'm wrong. Are they outliers, though, because I can think of many other leaders: Satya Nadella obviously is a good example. I think that seems to exhibit empathy and compassion.
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, I think Satya is a great example of possibly the opposite of the ones you mentioned first, taking empathy and basically saying, "That's a superpower of leadership". Or, you'll find the CEO of Cisco who says, "Empathy is the way to lead and the way to run a business". You'll find the CEO of Southwest Airlines, who would say the same, so there are just a lot of CEOs out there that really these days propagate for the need for both empathy and certainly compassion.
The CEO of Southwest Airlines, he literally has an office just next to his office where there are three people sitting day and night and tracking any significant difficult situation in any of the 70,000 employees' lives. So, anybody experiencing a significant loss, a divorce, an accident, anything that is very difficult, they will track that, and they will immediately get the background of that person and what happened. That will then be brought to his office where he will do a handwritten note that will be directly express-mailed to the people so that within 24 hours, they have a direct message from their own CEO of 70,000 people, basically expressing his support and if there's anything that can be done.
I think that is such a beautiful example of walking the talk. You don't just talk about compassion, but you bring it into systems in your organisation; everybody's seen, nobody's left behind.
David Green: Wow, I mean, that is an amazing story, and I know Southwest Airlines is a particularly successful airline in comparison to some of its competitors. And, I don't know if you saw in the data that some of the benefits of compassionate leaders, on business outcomes, but also people outcomes as well, I don't know if you can talk to some of those?
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, if we just stay with Southwest Airlines, because it is an exceptional company, and an anecdote that is not coming from our research, but other research that was done a few decades ago. When Southwest Airlines came to the world about 50 years ago, very quickly, they started to take on a lot of clients from their competitors. And for the past 50 years, they've been the fastest growing company on average in history, year on year.
One of the core principles for the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, was compassion. And what researchers found, because basically, all the competitors wanted to check out why is it that they're so successful, and they found out that their turnaround time, which is the time it takes for a plane to land, onboard, board, and get into the air again was significantly faster with Southwest Airlines, and that's where you make money, when you're in the air, not when you're on the ground, so it's very important.
So, all the spies from the other companies came in and tried to figure out how do they do the boarding differently; is it by numbers, by name, by row; how do they do it? They couldn't find anything. It was only ten years later that a sociologist, a senior sociologist, came in and basically started to study Southwest Airlines, and they found that when something bad happened on a plane, like say they couldn't load the luggage, or the people that were loading luggage were a little bit too slow, in a normal airline like Delta or American, or whatever, the captain would take off his hat, put his head out through that little triangular window and shout to people, "Get your finger out, we need to get flying, hurry up!"
In Southwest, the captain would also take his cap off, he would open the door, he would run down, and he would just roll up the sleeves and help. So, there's just that sense of, "We have got each other's back", and when you've got each other's back, everything is more seamless; things just work much faster. So, compassion is just an absolute glue and superpower in organisational life.
David Green: How do leaders actually go about putting it into action; what steps can someone listening do today to help them lead more compassionately and to avoid it just being a slogan and paying lip service to it as well?
Rasmus Hougaard: That's what our whole research project was about; how can you become a more compassionate leader? The first thing that we found in our data, which is an important one, is compassion cannot stand alone. It has to go together with what we call wisdom, or you could say the understanding, the knowledge on how to motivate people and how to drive for performance.
So, you basically need the compassion together with the drive, or the compassion together with the courage.
Leaders who have both of those skills have more than double the positive impact in terms of work/life balance for their followers in terms of job satisfaction, in terms of performance, in terms of burnout and many other things.
So it's really important that you basically mix the heart with the human. If you're just human, you get good results; if you're just heart, you also can get good results. If you have both, it's really the silver bullet. So, how do you do that? In our research and through all these interviews, we found that there were four traits that are really, really important. The first one is, when you do hard things, to bring a quality of caring presence. You need to be really present when you give tough feedback because if you're not present like if you pay attention to your phone or look out the window, or not really present with the person, the person will know that you don't care.
That doesn't work. So, caring presence, step number one.
Step number two is caring courage, which is to develop the courage to move into uncomfortable, confrontational, difficult situations, like giving tough feedback. When we have caring courage, we can then move into the third step, which is caring candour, which is the ability of getting to the point, saying what needs to be said, and is very different from brutal honesty and radical candour, which is about, "Just get the shit out and just speak your mind". That's not what it's about; it's about being very, very skilful about how you present things, but still do it in a very direct way because direct is faster.
Then, when you have the caring candour, you move to the fourth step, which is caring transparency; basically treating people like adults by telling them as much as you can, telling the whole story, so they can make choices about their own life. And, when you can go through, what we call "The flywheel of wise compassion", caring presence, caring courage, candour and transparency, you're basically creating a culture of psychological safety and trust, and thereby unleashing performance. But those are really the four elemental steps.
David Green: So, there's quite a link between your work and also Amy Edmondson, obviously, who's written and researched a lot of work around psychological safety. What you've been talking about and what Amy's talking about, clearly there are synergies, and clearly even more important in the current environment that we're in as well.
Rasmus Hougaard: Absolutely, yeah. Amy and I are good friends and have worked on a number of clients together, and definitely very inspired by her; I would say, groundbreaking and fantastic work.
David Green: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, because I mean, we won't talk about politics today, of course, but when you look around the world, and you look at leaders, it's not obvious that many of them have compassion or empathy, and hopefully, we can start, through our organisations, which if you look at things like the Edelman Trust Barometer, people actually trust their organisations more than they trust governments at the moment, maybe part of that's down to leadership perhaps?
Rasmus Hougaard: I absolutely think that it is, and I think the best example of that, and without talking anything about politics, but we saw that for decades if we talk about the US, politicians who were, say, the guardians of morals and ethics. Then came Trump, and suddenly that reversed, and it became companies, the big companies, that started to stand up for what was right, and we still see that movement rolling through the world. So, I definitely think that there is a big power and movement in companies standing up for what is morally and ethically right.
David Green: I'd be really interested; what data did you collect to understand these leaders in places like Unilever and Southwestern that we're doing; I'd love to hear that. I just think maybe it will inspire some of the people analytics practitioners that are listening to the episode to maybe go and do some of the work in their organisation as well.
Rasmus Hougaard: So, there were two sets of data points for this study. One was just a ton of data. We had more than 2 million data points that came out of a big study we launched together with Forbes and Harvard Business Review. So, we had some 75,000 leaders answering, and now I have to think that would have been around 150 questions around compassion and wisdom in leadership, including empathy. So, that data, which we have then crunched together with Harvard's, together with Columbia, together with Berkeley, Haas, together with Rotman, and together with Amsterdam Business School. That was one part of the data.
The other one was these more, I don't want to say anecdotal, but we had a very strict interview guide, which we took through these 350 executives in large global organisations. So, it's basically all of this that came together, and if anybody wants to know more details of that, they can go to our website and go into the science section.
There's what we call The Human Leader Infographics, which give these very short explanations of all the data that we are not sharing in the book.
David Green: And that's potentialproject.com. Is it, the website?
Rasmus Hougaard: That's correct.
David Green: We will come to that at the end, but just if someone's listening to this bit and then presses pause to go and find, it's probably helpful to do that! Really interesting stuff, fascinating, massive study.
It must have been fun to do and to analyse through the data points as well and get the story out.
So, your research has found that a large percentage of employees now expect leaders to speak out on societal issues, whether that's racial injustice, social inequality or similar, or maybe currently what's happening in Ukraine.
Why's that happening now, do you think, because I don't think 20 years ago, if I think back to 20 years ago when I was a lot younger obviously, and in the workforce, I don't think people would have necessarily expected that of their leaders?
Rasmus Hougaard: It is certainly a different world now than it was even a decade ago, certainly two decades ago, and the big movement has been going on for a few decades, but especially the last three years, with the social injustice, the racial injustice, and then came COVID and now a war in Europe. I think the simple answer is, when the world gets hard, people are feeling more vulnerable, more insecure, and therefore looking for those people that are responsible for their wellbeing, meaning their leaders, to actually take a stance in the world.
Fortunately, we are seeing that big time, I mean, the most beautiful example is all the companies that have just pulled out of Russia, almost on day one of the war, so there is that very strong -- if you want to retain and attract good talent, you have to bring ethics and morale into how you lead, how you speak out. Companies can no longer be neutral in both their political and global voices.
David Green: Yeah, and it's interesting because if we think back about three years, the business roundtable in the US, which I think is, what, 180-plus of the biggest organisations that are headquartered there, they came out with that statement and said that no longer was it just about generating profit for shareholders, it was about giving benefit to all stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers, communities, which was quite interesting, and shareholders.
Some could argue that was just lip service, that was a statement, but I like to think glass half full and think they wouldn't say that unless they meant it or were prepared to put some steps in place to achieve that. And that requires a very different approach to leadership than perhaps in the past, and where compassion and wisdom is even more important, particularly as we think about how decision-making starts to flow through the organisation rather than coming from the top. I'd love to hear if some of the research you did really drew some of that out and your own views on that as well.
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, it was not particularly part of our research, but working with some 200 large Fortune, let's say, 2,000 companies, we definitely see this, and it is not just lip service. Back then, at the roundtable, I'm sure there were a few of them that did lip service, but a lot of them did not, and we see that in how companies are taking a very different approach to really caring for people. I think HR functions over the past few years have become incredibly focused on the mental health of people.
Go on LinkedIn now and just look at the number of CHROs, CLOs, and so on that talk about the importance of mental health and really taking it seriously.
So, I think the whole goal of ethics in HR has just absolutely boomed, and I have to say, in my position, where 14 years ago this was not the case, and now I'm sitting in the middle of all of these organisations, it's a real joy to see.
David Green: And I know, I mean we've had CHROs from companies like The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, Donna Morris, Kathleen Hogan, who I think you and Jacqueline have written an article a few years ago at Microsoft, and you're right; all of those organisations, it's one of the first things that you hear from a CHRO, talking about how they've really focused on wellbeing, particularly obviously in the last two years.
But I think this was happening anyway; it's hardly been accelerated by the pandemic.
Maybe for the benefit of listeners, I know you co-wrote an article with Kathleen, as I said, in HBR, and that really talked about the ecosystem that Microsoft has built around listening to employees. I mean, if you could share that, that would be great as well.
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah. So Microsoft, when Satya took over, he took over a culture that was very different than it is today. It was an engineering and sales company. Many would say it was a bit of a cut-throat culture, and he really wanted to put a stop to that. He introduced, as I mentioned at the beginning, empathy as a core principle for how people should lead, and it's incredible to see the changes that have been made, him and Kathleen have made in the organisation, including that total commitment to listening and listening and listening to employees' needs.
It just published a statement that they are doubling on the benefits to people to compensate for the inflation that we're seeing in basically the prices of food and so on right now. So, Microsoft just goes straight in and covers for their employees. I think it's just what we need to see and what we see more and more of.
David Green: Another thing that we haven't talked about yet is around climate and sustainability, and there's enough data out there to suggest that employees are expecting their companies to have a position on that as well. I don't know if you've got any examples of companies that are really pushing forward with that, based on showing that leadership with compassion around as well.
Rasmus Hougaard: There is this annual report that comes out with, "What are the most climate-sustainable companies in the world, or the biggest fighters for climate?" and it's generally Patagonia, Unilever and Ikea at the top of that. Everybody knows Patagonia's doing that; many people know that of Unilever. Ikea's a bit of the surprise for many because you think it's just a big furniture manufacturer in the world. But having spent quite a lot of time with Ikea and with Jesper Brodin, the CEO, their commitment to the climate is probably the most committed company in the world.
The amount and we're talking billions, of euros they spend every year to make Ikea a climate-positive company. As an example, every single warehouse has solar panels on the roof.
All they produce, they're constantly, every year, reducing carbon on every single product; that's just a rule they have. And then, on top of that, the level of humanitarian work they do. And it's funny because these things are not known out in the public, but it's happening.
Ikea is sponsoring, I think it's seven big villages or refugee camps in different parts of the world. Where other organisations have not been able to support because of political reasons or whatever, Ikea can go in because they have a lot of money and because they have this commitment, basically building these massive camps for thousands and thousands and thousands of people, providing them food, shelter, healthcare and everything. So, I think Ikea is a real shining light of a company that is taking unbelievable responsibility in the world, both with the climate and for people.
David Green: And it's interesting because it's the right thing to do; but also, ultimately, it's going to help attract, develop and retain the right talent, which obviously helps the organisation as well. I'm not saying that's why they do it, but that's a great side effect of investing in initiatives like that.
Rasmus Hougaard: It is. And I think the other thing, it's not just internal; it's external clients. We know that consumers these days are looking equally to if products are produced with human rights and climate in mind, as to the price, and Ikea is, of course, a very moral, ethical company, but they're also very smart. They know that in a few years, people will look a lot to that, and if they can't live up to that, they can lose customers. So, it's also just a matter of doing good business, and I think that's the beauty of good business going hand-in-hand with doing good things in the world; they go together.
David Green: It's going to be interesting how, going back to the business roundtable, it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the next five to ten years, as things like climate and sustainability become even more important topics than they already are.
This is always a tricky subject to touch on, but you've certainly got a lot of data, and you've analysed a lot of leaders there.
What does the research say about any differences between men and women when it comes to being compassionate leaders?
Rasmus Hougaard: All right, David, so given that you and I are both men, should I tell the truth, which you're not going to be happy for us?
David Green: Tell me the truth because I suspect it will prove my hypothesis; we shall see!
Rasmus Hougaard: So, let's start at the top. I mean, the data is so conclusive, and there is so much data and different interesting points on this, on gender and leadership and compassion.
So, first of all, top line, females are better leaders than males, period, and it's significant. If you look at the four different constellations of leadership, that can be a female to a female, a female to a male, a male to a female and a male to a male, the best of those four constellations is when a female leads a female; the second is a female leading a male; the third is a male leading a female and the fourth is a male leading a male, and you can add up what's the throughline of that.
Basically, females make things a little bit smoother, and I'm really apologising for my own gender and all the males out there hearing this. But if we move a little further, females are more compassionate and men are more empathetic, which was a total surprise to us, but basically meaning men are a little bit more sentimental in how they lead, whereas females are generally more action-driven, "Okay, here's a person that's suffered, what can I do?" rather than just sit down and listen. That was a real surprise, but again, the data is conclusive.
A third thing that we found was that females are generally rating themselves as low on compassion and low on wisdom, and males rate themselves as high on compassion and high on wisdom. The followers of females rate the females high, and the followers of males rate them low, so it's just a direct opposite, a complete mismatch, in both males' and females' minds.
So, overall I would say the conclusion, for those of you that are females out there listening to this, trust yourself much more than you do and really become aware of the benefits you bring to the people you lead on average. And to the males, try and have a little bit more humility and modesty in how you see yourselves. Then, there was one thing that was also conclusive for anybody that wants to be a more compassionate and wise leader, practising mindfulness is like a real silver bullet because it helps you to be more self-aware and thereby act in the most positive manner moment by moment, so mindfulness helps both males and females.
David Green: So, there's a hope, isn't there, that as we seem to be moving into a world where we have more female leaders, both in politics and in organisations, that hopefully, we'll have a more compassionate world; and some of us men that aren't so compassionate will be drawn along with that because ultimately we'll need to do that to be effective leaders?
Rasmus Hougaard: I think that's so true. And one of those infographics that I talked about just before that you can find on our website is actually putting dollar numbers under the cost of having male leaders versus female leaders, and it's quite amazing numbers we have there. I think an anecdotal just proof point here is if you look at politicians, like world leaders in politics right now, just look at the juxtaposition between genders, and who do you see as inspiring like in Germany or in New Zealand, and so on, versus Russia, Turkey, Brazil, China, whatever. I mean, there are so many great examples of that.
David Green: I'd add the United Kingdom to your second list there as well!
Rasmus Hougaard: Okay, I didn't want to offend anyone there!
David Green: I can say that, but we won't dwell on it, I don't think! But yeah, it's really interesting, actually, and I think if you're a male leader, you might want to dig into some of that and learn a little bit. But I don't know if there was anything in the data which showed where an organisation has a balance of gender at leadership team level, whether the compassion was higher versus, I'm guessing, organisations that have all-male leadership teams, the compassion would be lower; I don't know if you dug into the data like that as well?
Rasmus Hougaard: Not in that way, but there was an indirect one which showed industries, and you can correlate industries with how their gender diversity is. And in tech, which is where there are more male leaders, the leaders are scored as absolutely at the bottom of all industries; where healthcare and governments are the ones that are on top, where there is generally a more even distribution.
David Green: So, if we're looking at a large organisation, and obviously you work with a lot of large organisations, as you've said, at what level does compassion help the most? Does it need to be embodied by the CEO; is it HR's responsibility, middle management, or everyone's?
Rasmus Hougaard: Well, first of all, it is obviously everyone's.
But if you are in a company that doesn't have a CEO or top management or a culture that supports it, it's really hard to be acknowledged and maybe even be effective as a compassionate leader.
There are cultures in some industries, like banking, where it is sometimes better to not even worry about these things because it can be career suicide.
David Green: And if we think again back to the story you outlined about Satya and how he changed the culture at Microsoft, you want to change the culture within an organisation, then really it needs to come from the top, I guess, with the CEO embodying that throughout?
Rasmus Hougaard: Yeah, and that's also what we see with almost all of our clients. And again, in really large companies, it is the CEO that really moves the needle, simply by how they act, how we help them to act, and also how they speak out about these things.
David Green: What is the role of HR in this; what can HR do to help their organisations become more compassionate, and how can they measure that?
Rasmus Hougaard: Maybe they want to take a step back and say, "Why is the compassion important?" It is important because compassion is the most direct and fast way of creating a more human world at work, and a more human world at work is where there's equality, where people can be themselves. We develop as humans by being in contact with our companies.
That's why it's really important because just achieving human potential, compassion is the fastest way of doing that.
So, how can HR people help these movements?
I think, first of all, introducing it in the values and the behaviours of the company; and more so introducing it in any kind of leadership training and culture development; and thirdly, especially in top team programmes, top team development, bringing it in there. So, that's on the developmental side. Then, there's also something around the systems, like how do you recruit; what are the questions you ask, what are the profiles you're looking for? How do you compensate, like what are bonuses based on? Is it based on just results, or is it also based on behaviour?
So, there's a whole lot of system aspects that should be thought into it as well. But the human side is the most important, so basically, training programmes, and culture change programmes to create more human and more compassionate organisations.
David Green: You talked about some CHROs that you'd interviewed for the book as well. Is there an extra challenge for a CHRO who's really trying to instil some of this into their organisation? Is it more challenging, or is it too early to say? You know, if you're managing a remote team, for example, what are some of the things, whether you're HR or not, what a leader can do to try and bring that compassion through?
Rasmus Hougaard: It is not more difficult, but it is more important. In a hybrid world, people feel less connected to others. Therefore, the way leaders show up with a genuine sense of care is more important. If you only see your manager once a week and it's on a Zoom call, the way they show up matters ten times more than if you were in an office. So, being very deliberate about how you train your people, your leaders to show care and compassion in how they show up in a virtual reality is much more important, but not more difficult.
David Green: So, this is a question, Rasmus, we're asking everyone on this series of the podcast, and actually, you touched on it a little bit earlier: what do you think the role of ethics is in HR?
Rasmus Hougaard: Ethics in HR is fundamentally important.
We all spend a lot of hours at work, generally more than half of our waking hours. If those hours are not meaningful, experienced as an experience of care and concern and humanness, we as HR leaders are really doing a disservice to people and creating companies and societies that are just not living up to their potential.
I think a great example of this is Ellyn Shook, the CHRO of Accenture, one of the biggest companies in the world with 700,000 people. When she started there, it was a very, very different consulting culture, very hard, very male-dominated; and she just made the commitment, together with her former CEO, Pierre Nanterme, and her current CEO, Julie Sweet, to create the most truly human organisation in the world. And it has been fascinating to be on that journey with them, to see how she's really taking a stance on ethics, and everybody in the organisation has to feel a strong sense of belonging, a strong sense of care.
That is a massive undertaking that I'm deeply impressed by, and really taking a stance on what HR is in the world. And I should just say, of course, Accenture's not perfect, they are not there yet, and you'll never be there because humans are imperfect. But it's incredible to see someone like Ellyn take such a major stance.
David Green: Rasmus, it's been a fascinating conversation.
I've learnt a lot, and I have started your book; I will be reading it. Again, before I ask you how people can stay in touch with you, summarise the book very quickly and what people can take away from it.
Rasmus Hougaard: The very quick summary of the book is leadership requires that we do hard things. Doing hard things is against our human nature because we want to be good, and we want to do good. So, we need to learn to do the hard things in a human way so that we can feel congruence with ourselves and so that we can be effective while being good. And then it's basically outlining the path of how you become a leader that does the hard in a human way, with what we call "the wise compassion flywheel", caring presence, caring courage, caring candour and caring transparency.
David Green: It's a great summary. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about Potential Project?
Rasmus Hougaard: Sure, yeah. Go to our website, potentialproject.com, and if you want to see the research, then go to the insights part. You can follow me on LinkedIn, that's where I share what I do, and I think that's about it.
David Green: That's great. Well, thank you very much, Rasmus; it's been great to speak to you.
Rasmus Hougaard: Wonderful; thank you so much for inviting me.