Why Compassion Is One of a Leader's Greatest Strengths
Compassion isn't the opposite of good leadership. It's part of it.
When I was early in my HR career, I had a mentor warn me that I'd get hardened over time.
She didn't mean it cruelly. She meant it as preparation. After enough terminations, investigations, difficult conversations, employees crying in your office, and leaders behaving badly behind closed doors, she told me I'd eventually build armor.
Fifteen-plus years later, that hasn't happened. And honestly, I hope it never does.
What Compassion Actually Looks Like
When I talk about compassion, I don't mean avoiding conflict or difficult decisions. I don't mean being unable to make hard calls. I've had to terminate employees. I've had difficult conversations with executives. I've delivered news that changed people's careers. Hard conversations are part of this work, and I'm not afraid of them.
What I do mean is this: I never want to lose sight of the person sitting across from me. I never want difficult conversations to become routine. I never want to deliver hard news in a way that makes someone feel like a transaction instead of a human being.
To me, compassion means holding onto your empathy, even when the work is hard
The COVID Story
In early 2020, I was at a company that had to make significant cuts. Like so many HR leaders and business owners at the time, we were making incredibly difficult decisions with incomplete information. We did a reduction in force. It was one of the hardest things I've had to be part of.
What I'm most proud of isn't that we had to make those decisions. It's how we handled them. We handled those conversations with as much care, honesty, and respect as we possibly could. Within twelve months, six of the people we'd let go came back. I personally reached out as roles opened up and said, "We'd love to have you back. We've been thinking about you. Here's what's available."
And they said yes.
Think about what that says about how those conversations were handled. They could have been angry. They could have gone somewhere else and never looked back. Instead, they came back.
People rarely remember your best day as a company. They remember how you handled their hardest one.
And of course there were business benefits. We welcomed back experienced employees who already knew our business and our culture. But to me, that wasn't the biggest takeaway. The story was that people trusted us enough to come back.
That experience reinforced something I've believed ever since: how you treat people during their hardest moments doesn't just define your culture. It becomes your culture.
That's what compassionate leadership looks like to me. It doesn't make difficult decisions easier, but it changes how people experience them. And sometimes, that makes all the difference.
What Compassion Fatigue Is, and What It Isn't
People sometimes ask whether this work ever makes me stop caring. The assumption is that doing this work for a long time will eventually wring out your ability to care. That at some point, you have to stop feeling things or you'll burn out.
I don't think that's actually true.
What I do think is true is that if you don't take care of yourself, this work will burn you out. If you absorb everyone's emotional weight without ever putting it down, you will get crushed. That part is real.
But the answer isn't to stop feeling. The answer is to learn how to feel and recover.
For me, that looks like walking after hard calls. Watching period dramas on PBS. Sometimes putting on a sad playlist when I know I need to cry, yes, on purpose, because crying is a release and I don't want to hold it. I don't process by armoring up. I process by letting it through.
This is also, by the way, why fractional works for me. I get to code-switch between clients. I get to walk away from one situation and into a completely different one. I have built-in distance that an in-house HR leader doesn't get. That's not a bug. That's how I've stayed in this work as long as I have without losing the parts of me that make me good at it.
Why Managers Should Care About This
Whether you're an HR leader, a founder, or a people manager, this applies to you.
The way you handle the hardest moments in your company is the way your team will remember the company. The good days aren't the marker. The terminations, layoffs, public failures, deaths in the family, maternity leaves, moments when someone is struggling, unexpected resignations...those are the moments people remember, whether they realize it or not.
If you handle them well, with clarity, care, and humanity, you build a team that will run through walls for you. If you handle them like transactions, you build a team that will leave the second a better offer comes along.
That's not just compassion. That's leadership.
A Final Thought for Leaders
If you've been telling yourself you need to be tougher as a leader, I'd encourage you to think about it differently.
The best leaders I've ever worked with aren't the toughest ones. They're the ones who never lost their empathy. They stayed grounded enough to make difficult decisions and compassionate enough to make people feel respected through them. Those qualities aren't in tension. They strengthen each other.
Compassion and accountability aren't opposites. In my experience, they make each other stronger. If you're still figuring out what that looks like in your own leadership, that's a conversation worth having.
