The essential role of compassion in leadership

At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous. 

It is common – and in some quarters fashionable – to view businesses as ruthless and amoral entities single-mindedly fixated on maximising profits. In this view, the environment is a resource to plunder, customers are means to the end of profit, and employees are just cogs in a vast and impersonal machine.   

Certainly, some businesses act in a way that vindicates this conception. But at their best, businesses are far more than this. All organisations are essentially human endeavours. They can thus be, and indeed should be, humane entities that produce economic, social, and psychological value for their customers, shareholders, and employees alike.   

At Nous, we believe in the importance of compassion at work as a way of recognising the humanity and dignity of all our employees, clients and stakeholders. Compassion is one of thirteen tenets of the Nous Leadership Way, our organisation’s leadership model and philosophy.   

But what is compassionate leadership, why is it important, and what does it look like in practice? If these questions seem simple, they are only deceptively so.

At its core, compassion involves treating one’s colleagues as ends in themselves, rather than as mere means. Treating workplace relationships and interactions as transactional is antithetical to compassion.   

Compassion also involves a recognition that people have complex lives outside of work: their own idiosyncrasies, identities, communities and personal histories. We should respond to these complexities with genuine concern about their personal and professional lives.   

In these ways, compassion involves a recognition of others’ humanity. It is intrinsically good. It requires no further justification – in the workplace, or in any other setting.   

But compassion also has many desirable consequences for workplaces:    

• It is a powerful value proposition for prospective employees. The vast majority of us, after all, want to work in and contribute to organisations that have a heart and a soul.  
• It promotes engagement and commitment among existing employees. People tend to respond positively to colleagues that show genuine interest in them as people.  
• It engenders many forms of trust: trust that your circumstances will always be taken into account; trust that you will be treated fairly and truly listened to; trust that your ideas will be taken seriously when you speak up; trust that if you are struggling, genuine care and support will be forthcoming.   
• It tends to be self-perpetuating. When people are treated with compassion they tend to pay it forward. It makes them more likely to show genuine concern for other colleagues.  
• It aligns people around common goals and a sense of shared purpose. By emphasising our common humanity, compassion supports effective collaboration, both with colleagues and clients.   

None of this is to say that compassion is the only good that a workplace should aspire to. It is not by itself sufficient. For example, at Nous Group, if our people are only compassionate, not competent, they will not deliver great outcomes for their clients, nor will they maintain the respect of their colleagues (who will quickly tire of picking up the slack for well-intentioned, but poor performing peers).   

But far from being supererogatory – something that is nice to have but which may be forsaken when the going gets tough – compassion is a necessary foundation in workplaces. It fuels high performance.

For all the reasons cited above, everyone in an organisation should treat their colleagues with compassion. But it is an especially important ideal for leaders to embody. This is true for several reasons: 

• Leaders have a significant impact on organisational cultures. An organisational norm of treating colleagues compassionately will be quickly undone by the heartless or selfish actions of senior leaders. If leaders expect compassion from other colleagues, they must model it themselves.  
• Leaders regularly have to make difficult and significant decisions under pressure. This requires them to navigate trade-offs and balance competing interests to make ethical decisions. Compassion allows leaders to care about the impact of decisions for people without narrowly focusing on the interests of a single individual or a small group.  
• Leaders are best placed to foster the contexts required for individuals and teams to succeed. When they listen actively and show genuine care for junior colleagues, they can foster an environment where team members feel comfortable to speak up, share ideas, and admit mistakes. When they notice that colleagues are struggling, leaders usually have resources at their disposal to remedy the situation.   

It is easy to pay lip service to being compassionate in the workplace but much harder to realise it in practice. Like many abstract ideals, compassion is situational and context specific. You know it when you see it. While it is hard to give concrete guidance on cultivating compassion, we can still make some genuine remarks about what it is and isn’t.   

1. First, compassion involves genuine care. Motivational states matter. If a leader is strategically kind or benevolent to secure some personal advantage from their colleagues, they are not really being compassionate. Authentic care is a necessary component of compassionate leadership.  
2. Second, compassion is not quite the same as empathy or sympathy. While all these terms involve an emotional connection with others’ feelings, compassion does not involve being swept up in those feelings. One feels for someone, not as someone. It is a more dispassionate affective state.  
3. Third, compassion needs to be balanced against other ideals to enable effective leadership. An excess of compassion unmitigated by other concerns – ambition to achieve, concern for high performance, good strategic sense, and so on – is a recipe for disaster. To take one example, leaders sometimes need to give their colleagues hard feedback that they do not want to hear. An excessive concern for others’ emotional states might cause them to refrain from providing feedback that supports growth.  

In modern workplaces, the importance of emotional intelligence and ethical integrity among leaders is increasingly recognised. There are many principles, concepts, and words that organisations can choose to give voice to the idea that it is important how a leader treats their people.   

At Nous, we have found that compassion is what we expect from our leaders in this regard. The word captures the idea that leaders should cultivate humane workplaces, demonstrate genuine care for one’s colleagues, and foster an emotional connection with their people that enables high performance.   

Many of the rewards that compassion brings are long-term and intangible, but it can be an enormous strength for organisations. It is an effective remedy for a lack of humanity that can afflict businesses and cause their people to feel like cogs in a machine.   

Get in touch to discuss how you can experience the full benefits of compassionate leadership within your organisational context.

Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.

This is the seventh article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 5 August 2025.

Read the other pieces in the series:

• Strong leadership requires a foundational philosophy – what’s yours?
• Leadership is an individual and an organisational phenomenon
• The gift of bigness: Aligning ambition with the collective good
• Embodying the leadership your organisation's needs
• How leaders can cultivate trust in organisations
• Agency: A high-wire act for leaders