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Originally found at Financial Times, by Andrew Hill.

It is now a given that the pressure cooker of coronavirus accelerates corporate change. But the crisis also boils sensible management ideas into leadership clichés in record time.

Take humanity, empathy and compassion. By the end of last year, almost every chief executive I interviewed was humble-bragging about how the crisis had taught them to appreciate the stress staff were under and to lead with a human touch. It made me wonder why they had not used these ingredients before the pandemic struck.

Tough decisions can be taken in humane and decent ways. “Kindness isn’t softness,” observes Kira Schabram of University of Washington, who has studied the relationship between compassion and burnout. “But for a long time we assumed there was no room for it in the workplace.”

A few years ago I took gentle issue with an internal job advert seeking candidates who “exuded kindness”. Now leaders are sloshing the K-word about in such quantities that their claims risk diluting its impact, in the same way casual overuse of “purpose” invites suspicion of what should be unimpeachable goals.

One concern is that some of these managers will pat themselves on the back for having weathered the storm, shelve compassion, and revert to their old ways as they lead their teams into the pandemic aftermath this year.

Another is that lieutenants of leaders who are struggling might be reluctant to raise their personal concerns, to the possible long-term detriment of their own well being. I see this as a workplace equivalent of people choosing to ignore symptoms of potentially life-threatening conditions for fear of adding to the burden on pandemic-hit hospitals.

At the healthcare frontline, the pressure remains relentless. But there are already lessons to be drawn about burnout in wider society. A new study in the journal Occupational Medicine found 45 per cent of doctors, nurses and other staff in English intensive care units reported symptoms of significant mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety or depression, or problem drinking, during the first phase of the pandemic last year.

The study points to ways senior ICU staff trained in mental health help their teams through regular conversations. They also lead reflective sessions, where team members can, for example, express their emotions about “moral injury”, such as the death of Covid-19 patients despite their efforts.

It would be understandable if “compassion fatigue” were also a factor in wearing out empathetic colleagues. Here, though, Prof Schabram and her fellow researcher Yu Tse Heng have good news. Their separate study of social service providers and business students, just published by the Academy of Management Journal, confirms being compassionate to others can be good for you. Above all, performing acts of kindness helps reduce cynicism, one of three linked elements of burnout, the others being exhaustion and “inefficacy”, or dwindling performance. The kindness pool, in other words, is not finite. It can even be replenished.

Continue reading the original article at Financial Times.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Journal.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Kira Schabram, University of Washington
  
• Yu Tse Heng, University of Washington