The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results
Donato Tramuto & Tami Booth Corwin
320 pages, Fast Company Press, 2022
We’ve been living in unprecedented times. As a result of the pandemic and political and social upheaval, trends that were emerging have quickly accelerated: a move toward remote work and flexible hours, the need for greater adaptability that allows businesses to pivot quickly in changing conditions, and leadership that prioritizes workers’ humanity. Moreover, a generational shift in the workplace means five generations make up the workforce for the first time, as the youngest generations enter and older workers delay their retirement. New generations have different attitudes, priorities, and work styles, and it’s essential for leaders to understand what motivates each generation, and how to harness diversity to create stronger teams. During the widespread exodus from the workforce—what many have called “the great resignation”—I would describe the “great reflection” during which workers reevaluated their priorities, resulting in many of them opting to leave their jobs to find healthier and more satisfying work and lives.
To succeed in this new world, leaders need to shift their mindsets and upgrade their skills. They need to prioritize communication, adaptability, and employees’ well-being. They need to embrace diversity and inclusion, create stronger teams, and take responsibility for the impact they have on their communities and the world. And as we see how recent events have affected our families, employees, and coworkers, we need to embrace empathy and compassion. But while empathy has been widely discussed in leadership circles, it's not enough on its own. In this excerpt from The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results, I describe why empathy isn’t sufficient (and can even make things worse) and importantly how empathy paired with action can lead to more powerful results.—Donato Tramuto
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Empathy is today’s leadership buzzword, and it’s often confused with compassion. In this chapter I’m going to show you that empathy isn’t enough, and that it can even backfire if leaders’ actions don’t back up their words.
Empathy can be a confusing concept because it suggests more feeling than doing. The key to having compassionate leadership—which includes empathy—is making empathy actionable. I’ll show what empathy is, its critical place in a workplace or organization, and how today we’re seeing a gap between stated importance of empathy and the feeling employees have about how empathetic their leaders are. I’ll also caution you on the pitfalls of too much empathy paired with too little action.
One of my most impactful lessons in compassionate leadership came when I was a general manager at what was known at the time as Caremark Home Health in Long Island, New York, which delivered home health care and nutrition to populations that included Crohn’s patients and people with HIV.
Keith Grenz was an assistant on my team at the time. He was in his mid-twenties, very intelligent, and handsome, with an infectious personality and a zest for life. Even when he revealed his stubborn side, his smile and gentle spirit always pulled you back in. It was 1990 when Keith was diagnosed with AIDS.
Keith was an amazing person and accepted his fate with courage. Imagining what this illness would ultimately do to Keith and the discrimination that was coming his way, I felt deep empathy for him. Not all of his colleagues felt the same. Fearful of his disease, they wanted to stay away from him, and I simply could not understand how we could be working in an industry whose medical providers were supposed to be aligned with the Hippocratic Oath yet were unwilling to embrace a population whose own families and communities were shunning them. And it was just wrong that we were making money delivering home health care to AIDS patients in our business yet were ready to turn our back on Keith, who was part of our work family.
There was one colleague of his who came to me and said, “If you don’t get rid of him, I’m going to quit.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to get rid of Keith, so I think you have your answer. You will need to quit because we’re not going to discriminate in this organization.”
This was perhaps the first time I had an opportunity as an operational leader to demonstrate what compassion is—it’s about empathy and action. Yes, I clearly understood the person’s viewpoint and was willing to educate her about how one can contract AIDS; however, I was unwilling to let one person educate an entire office on how to not be compassionate.
From there, I started to educate the entire branch about how you can remain safe when working with someone who has HIV. Not everyone got on board. There was a group of people who actually hated me for that and for other standard operating procedures we would employ to ensure that we had a culture of compassion and empowerment. This small group did everything imaginable to get rid of me. It started first with their efforts to build a coalition of associates who wrote a letter to the corporate office sharing with high-level executives that my leadership approach was wrong for the Long Island branch. Then, it escalated to the point where they managed to enter my office and place cannoli on my desk—a reference to a scene in The Godfather. I was shaken. They even went to the level of hiding my airline tickets when I was supposed to travel to meet with my boss, hoping that I would miss the meeting and get fired.
It got to the point that I considered resigning. News of the situation got around to the entire branch. The next day, ninety-eight percent of the branch wore green, my favorite color, to support me. They said, “We are with you. You are doing the right thing.” I summoned all the courage and fortitude that I could, and I stuck it out.
There were leaders above me in the company who shared my ideals. As a result, I was promoted eight months later and went on to become executive vice president overseeing sixteen other facilities. We were awarded Branch of the Year. I would later launch the Arthur Ashe workplace AIDS program to help educate more people about how to handle AIDS in the workplace. I was fortunate to be introduced to Arthur Ashe, and he shared my ideals about the need to educate employers around how to create a compassionate workplace culture. We were scheduled to launch the program in February of 1993; however, the day we were going to kick it off, Arthur Ashe, my friend and supporter, was rushed to the hospital, and he died the next day. His associates tasked me and my chief of staff at the time, John Doherty, with communicating the news to the many hundreds of people who had gathered for this educational program, without informing anyone of the gravity of his illness. I decided at that moment to carry the torch to help educate others that AIDS needed to “come out of the workplace closet.”
Keith Grenz died on November 3, 1992. He was just twenty-five. I remember to this day receiving the news at six a.m., and the impact this had on me at that moment still stays with me as I now approach my seventh decade. His family asked me to eulogize him at his funeral service. Keith would humor my tendency to always dress in a suit and wing tips. He would joke with me about it and say, “Donato, someday I would love to see you in sneakers.” I eulogized him with sneakers on. The entire church broke into laughter, a moment Keith would have loved.
Empathy With Action
The experience I had supporting Keith and educating my team (and deciding to not resign) was one of the earliest moments in my career that demanded not just sympathy or empathy but real action—and commitment to my values. I’ve long believed that action is a must-have component to empathy. I think it comes from the many years when I couldn’t hear. The way I perceived the world and other people was by observing their actions first. This became the critical link. The compassionate leaders I had in-depth interviews with agreed. Across all of the interviews I conducted, when asked, “What is compassionate leadership?” their answers were consistent: The most defining feature of compassionate leadership is that it combines empathy with action.
Empathy involves not only the art of listening but also understanding what someone else is feeling or experiencing. It’s often cited as “walking a mile in their shoes.” It’s the exercise of actively imagining what it might feel like to experience what they’re going through. Or, as Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
Empathy on its own has important applications in business, education, politics, and relationships. Anyone developing products, services, or solutions needs to understand the experience of the customer or constituency they serve. To deliver a solution to a problem, you have to understand what it feels like to face that problem. Cultivating empathy is essential. Many business leaders know this, and it leads to their success. Satya Nadella of Microsoft, one of the business world’s most passionate proponents of compassionate leadership, said, “Our core business is connected with the customers’ needs, and we will not be able to satisfy them if we don’t have a deep sense of empathy.”
Empathy is also an essential skill when it comes to managing employees. But does everyone apply it in the workplace? The 2020 State of Workplace Empathy study published by benefit company Businessolver found that more than ninety percent of employees, HR professionals, and CEOs believe that empathy is important. Yet this survey also showed a gap in how—or if—empathy is made actionable. For example, ninety-one percent of CEOs said their own company is empathetic, but only sixty-eight percent of employees agreed. Conversely, seventy-six percent of employees believed that an empathetic organization inspires more motivated employees. Yet only about fifty percent of CEOs agreed. A 2020 Gallup poll on the state of the workplace found that only twenty-one percent of employees strongly agree that they’re being managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.
Action is the fuel that brings empathy to life. I believe to bridge this gap between how CEOs see the role of empathy and how employees expect to see empathy show up in their organizations, we must first effectively listen and communicate, then combine empathy with actions that address employees’ specific challenges, hardships, and needs.
Imagine the untapped potential, the enormous upside, if more managers and leaders practiced compassionate leadership! It’s one of the most effective yet underutilized leadership skills that can bridge the gap between leaders and those they lead.
The Pitfalls of Empathy
A few words of caution before diving deeper into what compassionate leadership looks like. In some ways, using empathy without compassion leaves a gap in expectations. It could lead to a situation in which the leaders’ “talk” doesn’t match their “walk,” which in turn leads to disappointment, frustration, or lack of trust. But there are other pitfalls to empathy on its own.
There is a danger of having too much empathy, as it can lead to too much emotional involvement, which can then lead to frustration, sadness, and emotional burnout. Some call it “empathy distress.” This happens when you experience someone else’s pain, really feeling it as if it were your own. This can have an incapacitating impact. A piece from the BBC quoted philosopher Susanne Langer, who called empathy an “involuntary breach of individual separateness.” The piece went on to describe brain scan studies that have shown that when people watched others in pain, their brain activity in the regions associated with pain partially mirrored that of those experiencing the pain. At its worst, people feel “empathic distress,” which can become a barrier to action. Such distress leads to apathy, withdrawal, and feelings of helplessness, and can even be bad for your health.
It’s helpful to draw a distinction between taking on someone else’s pain and experiencing it yourself, between bringing suffering to yourself and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their pain, and then acting to try to help alleviate it (this is compassion). Keeping a bit of distance between yourself and someone else’s pain can help you be of more help to them. You can sometimes tap into your own pain or suffering in order to understand others’ pain and empathize with them.
Turn Pain Into Action
My friend Janine Broussard described how pain she experienced as a teen changed her life and gave her the impetus to help others. She explained, “When I was young, I lost a lot of loved ones, one loved one per year for four years in a row. I lost my brother, my dad, my grandma, and my other grandma. That was a lot of deaths to process when I was sixteen. Then I saw my mom go downhill because of all the despair in her life. But counterintuitively, that inspired me to be more positive, saying, ‘Thank God that I was able to share their lives for that small amount of time I had with them.’ I decided that every single happy moment should be celebrated and not forgotten. Since then, I celebrate everything, like a good phone call, friendships, and moments of kindness. So that was the route from all of those deaths to celebrating life and creating purposeful moments. Then I lived through my mom’s isolation and sadness. She was very depressed, so we had to take care of her. The empathy I felt for my mom led me to care for the elderly. I asked myself, ‘How do we bring the elder along with the younger population and make something significant?’ I founded HUGS, a nonprofit organization that pairs senior volunteers with children who need help reading. The volunteers really enhanced the children’s lives. We’ve run this program for six years. We touched 300 kids and had around 700 volunteer tutors.”
The result of Janine’s empathy-turned-into-action? She described the impact the program has had on the kids: “The parents and teachers tell us the kids are a lot more confident, that they’re raising their hands more, that they’re actually a changed student, many of them. One particular boy, who was in the office in third grade almost every day, was so touched by his tutor, he changed. Everyone just needs a little bit of kindness, a little bit of support, and that’s all he needed. He became an A-plus student, he was actually helping other kids read in school. He went from being in the principal’s office all the time to being a role model for other kids. And the senior volunteers enjoy the program so much, they have formed a community of their own. Some of them even started dating each other!”
Empathy + Action = Impact
In 2020 and 2021, the pandemic and the social and political upheaval that we experienced globally accelerated the shift toward more compassionate leadership and provided us with many examples of those leaders. My good friend Bruce Broussard is a standout among them. Bruce is president and CEO of Humana, one of the largest health-care companies in the United States. At the time of this writing, it’s number fifty-two in the Fortune 500, with $64.8 billion in revenue, 20 million members, and 46,000 employees. In 2020, the company’s growth, revenues, and profits outperformed its industry by a significant margin.
What I find most impressive is that Bruce accomplished this growth while putting stakeholders, members, and employees—people, not numbers—at the top of his priority list. He believes that maximizing shareholder value and the well-being of stakeholders are not mutually exclusive goals, and in fact are well aligned.
Humana is a successful company by financial measures, but it is also ranked number one among health-care providers on Forbes’s The Just 100 list for its treatment of customers; is on DiversityInc’s list of the top companies that promote diversity and inclusion; is in the top fifteen percent of its industry in sustainability performance; is included in the Sustainability Yearbook 2020 by S&P Global; and has been similarly acknowledged by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Hispanic Association for Corporate Responsibility, the National Organization on Disability, and Military Times. Broussard himself was named a Fortune Businessperson of the Year in 2020 and is a past recipient of the RFK Ripple of Hope Award. It can leave you breathless to see how compassion plus action can make a powerful impact.
When the pandemic hit, like all leaders, Bruce had to react and readjust to the quickly changing world we all were living in. He had to ask himself how to best support his employees and members. He also felt a responsibility to help his community.
He told me, “I was reading the Wall Street Journal and saw that Doug [McMillon] at Walmart was opening his parking lots for movie theaters for his customers. I said, ‘Wow, that’s a great idea.’ So, I thought about what we have that’s not being used right now that can help our local community. I thought, We’ve got a bunch of empty spaces in buildings with a bunch of Wi-Fi in Louisville very close to under-resourced communities in the Jefferson School District. We’ve got empty office space, and the community has a problem with unstructured schools as a result of schools going virtual. So I thought, Let’s provide space in our offices to be used as a school and community resource center. I called my colleague Tim Huval, chief human resources officer, and said, ‘Tim, this is what I want to do. I know everyone’s going to tell me that we can’t do this. I need you to get to yes.’ Sure enough, we did it! My team set up a community center that has social services, a medical clinic, special education access, a virtual training area, a place to bring computers to be fixed. It’s a great thing. It’s an amazing little feat.”
Bruce went on to tell me that he thinks business leaders need to take more responsibility for societal issues. He said, “I hear a number of my colleagues really taking this on. They see the need to be much more oriented to a holistic view of their responsibility as opposed to maximizing shareholder value only. Now that defies the Delaware law, it defies corporate governance, defies all the things that I have been trained to do. But I think there is a movement to do this, and the biggest influencer, I feel, is the employer. The employer has the opportunity to bring alive a much more thoughtful view on action.” That was music to my hearing aids!
Bruce made sure Humana was following through on their mission to help improve people’s health. They sent twenty-four million masks to members and employees, made sure there was access to telehealth, shipped one million meals to homebound individuals’ homes, and more. My life partner’s mom and dad, Penny and Jack, were recipients, and Penny can attest firsthand to how this gesture gave her a sense that her Medicare Health Insurer had empathy and took action for seniors who may not have had access to a mask at the onset of the pandemic.
He also made sure employees were supported fully in their work-at-home environments, and he increased the frequency of communication with them to provide transparency and a sense of community. Business metrics showed the positive—and quantifiable—impact. Their net promoter score (a measure of how likely customers would be to recommend them) and their employee engagement scores skyrocketed. Again, more amazing outcomes that compassion plus action produces.
In an interview with JUST Capital, Bruce said, “Happy employees and happy customers are going to be with you for a long time, and that will deliver long-term stakeholder value. We wrap arms around employees, they feel supported, they support customers, and that shows up on the bottom line.”
Bruce is what I would consider a highly evolved compassionate leader who exemplifies that empathy plus action completes the compassionate leadership equation. I’ve seen him demonstrate this for as long as I can remember. I asked him a question that I would go on to ask all the leaders we interviewed. Was he always this compassionate, and if not, how did he master this leadership approach?
He explained that it was an evolution for him. “As I entered my career, I don’t think I had that empathy,” he said. “I think I had more selfishness in my motivation and was more ego-driven and money-driven in my actions. But, as I matured, if I do have a ‘compassion gene,’ it became more evident in what I did, whether it was maturity, whether it was the business I chose. Maybe it was learning that one person doesn’t have to lose for the other person to win.”
Bruce explained further that compassionate actions build on each other, saying, “There’s this reinforcing. When you do something for somebody else it comes back to you. Whether it’s in confidence, whether it’s in someone coming back and doing something on your behalf, or just knowing that you’ve been able to impact others. I think there is a reoccurring or reinforcing aspect to it. Once you start, that wheel gets bigger and bigger.”