Jane Dutton's research Focuses on Ho

types of incentives often backfire and create what sociologists would call ‘emotional labor’, where people feel like they have to put on a show as if they are compassionate, when they don't actually feel connected to other people, they don't automatically feel that their suffering is recognized or that they could be authentically compassionate toward other people. So that there's a downside of that form of thinking about extrinsic incentivizing of compassion. This is a very difficult area that has to be thought through very carefully

JD: Like Monica I am a real believer in the quality of the social fabric, independent of the size of an organization as being a major determinant for the potential for compassion in an organization. But one of the surprises in our research has been the growing interest in the field of entrepreneurship and the importance of compassion. Dean Sheppard who is at Indiana has written to a recent editorial call for more work on compassion and entrepreneurship, and there's some indication that what really drives the development of new businesses and help sustain entrepreneurs you know when they're not making money and they don't have the investment they need, is believing that the innovation that they're developing or the businesses that they are developing is really meeting some human need. And the human needs that come from human suffering can be a really important source of innovation and creativity in the development of new businesses. So I think that there's actually probably a size disadvantage to compassion but we don't have any systematic research to show that.

IJ: If I go to work today, and I want to do one thing differently that will add to the social fabric of compassion in the workplace, what could that be?

MW: One thing I could do differently if I want to create more compassion around me is to be deliberate in noticing more about the state of other people that I work with. As we talked about earlier, sometimes people try to hide or put their suffering underneath the surface of work, because they don't want to be a burden to other people and they don't want to draw attention to themselves. That's appropriate and sometimes that's very helpful for keeping the keeping things going in the workplace, and at other times it's not helpful and it gets in the way of not only our being able to be compassionate but also our being able to find flexible solutions when somebody is really grieving and may need some accommodations in the workplace. So the more that we can actually notice and inquire about the condition of other people the more we can create compassion around us.

JD:  I believe first moments matter a lot, and so I was thinking more about organizational routines for selecting people and onboarding them. I think that it is really important for organisations to spend time selecting people based their relational capabilities. That helps to determine the composition of a group that is going to be more oriented towards each other but also more effective in dealing with each other. We write in our book about a case that I did on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an example of an organization that selects on the basis of compassion. The case they use when they are selecting people, instead of being a traditional business economic case, is about what would you do if an employee had a baby that was born with problems and they had to go to the hospital. They are purposely looking for the degree to which someone values care and compassion. On the selection side, valuing people who tend to be more caring and more competent in relational kinds of work, would be an important thing to pay attention to. It is also important how companies onboard\ people. Because what happens when people first start in an organization is so consequential in terms of their orientation. I'll give you an example of an extensive study we did of this. A sales guy in Israel who works for a high-tech company had a bad bike accident, and what this organization did at the local, regional and global level for this low level sales person who only worked for this organization for something like 18 months was amazing. The story of that compassion is actually told at corporate headquarters when people are being on boarded. It's an example where someone's first entry an organization really inculcates them how the company values compassion by giving them a story model of what compassion can look like in the organization.

MW: It is also really important to take stock of what happens in your organization when somebody makes a mistake or when an error occurs. Because some of the most damaging moments in the workplace occur in the wake of mistakes and errors. That is a moment in the organization, where if you treat it with compassion, you can turn it into a learning process and fostering people's growth even in the midst of anger or sadness or people feeling like they've failed and dealing with the difficulty of that. So compassion in the wake of error can really change what's otherwise a source of potential toxicity and negativity in the workplace into a source of potential source of learning and growth. But it's very hard to do, especially for people who manage others or for people who are in charge of processes or projects or collaborative practices. When something goes wrong it's frustrating. People get impatient with each other. It has to be managed well, because you have to fix the mistakes- it's not as if you can just let it all go. So you have to figure out how to have compassion at the same time that you introduce learning and you remedy the errors. And that’s one place where I feel like the way organizations handle mistakes can create a great deal of suffering or when done with compassion it can actually create a great opportunity for learning and growth.