Compassion @ Work: Tending to Suffering as a Radical Path to Flourishing
Does compassion belong in the workplace? Clearly, the answer has to be “no” if you subscribe to mythologised interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory (which theorised the biological concept of fitness) as synonymous with the economicised theorisation of survival of the fittest popularised by Herbert Spencer. Because it’s likely then that you associate compassion with expressing a form of kindness that is often associated with being a doormat, or being naïve, or being a coward. If, however, you subscribe to the interpretive lineage from ancient ethical traditions that compassion is the essence of what it means to be human, then the answer is clearly, “yes”. Because it’s likely then that you understand and experience compassion as a natural desire for the suffering of another to cease so that they may be well and flourish.
I am not here to persuade you either way. That decision lies at the door of your conscience. Instead, I am here to share why I am persuaded to respond to the question with a “yes”. Should then an affinity be evoked as you partake in this sharing, I hope you will open your heart and imagination to the curiosity knocking at your door.
Let me begin by offering why it matters that we wrestle with a response to this question. Firstly, given many of us work in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-national environments, it is likely that we experience daily clashes of competing ideologies. And given modern humans had largely been acculturated to equate ideology with identity, it has become commonplace to perceive ideological disagreements as attacks on identities. This may be why a great many good intentioned DEI / unconscious bias / anti-harassment initiatives become, tragically, weaponised. Organisational DEI definitions become ideological cesspools of identity politics, largely because only one definition is ‘right’, and any counter-interpretation is regarded as non-compliance with ‘company culture’. Confirmation bias rhetoric is the ‘hack’ of the season, smugly yielded against others during meetings and conversations in (unconscious) defence of one’s own confirmation bias. Anti-harassment policies become a substitute for mutually constructive performance conversations, invoked too often when two colleagues no longer know how to talk to each other.
Secondly, when we spend much of our adult life at work, and with the boundaries between personal and professional becoming fuzzier with technology, much of our emotional life unfolds at work, i.e., consciously or unconsciously, we are processing our emotions during “work hours”. Thirdly, it is likely that all of us, at some point of our working life, have experienced some form of incivility, harassment, or bullying at work. And more likely than not, many of these incidents were not managed as well as they could have been. All of which to say that the modern workplace is governed by a democracy of suffering. Yet, many are stoically insistent on ignoring the lumbering elephants of suffering in the room. Too often thus, these elephants remain wild invisible intimates of their human companion, and it is rare to see any being acknowledged, let alone treated with tenderness and care. Ignored and invisible, these elephants grow ever larger as they feed generously on the abundance of collusive silence. But, why does it matter that these “elephants” (aka emotions) are attended to?
I would like to propose that it is because each of these emotions point to a fundamental unmet need. For just as chronic hunger deforms the body, chronic unmet needs deform the soul. And in both instances of bodily hunger and soul hunger, is the presence of suffering, for physical hunger is sensed through somatic pain whilst soul hunger is sensed through emotional pain. It is thus, as a simple matter of logic, categorically impossible to be desirous of well-being (be it for one’s own self or another) without as well desiring the absence of suffering, for well-being and flourishing is possible only when the fundamental needs of our soul are being met. In other words, just as food is to the nourishment of the body, compassion is to the flourishing of the soul. Therefore, when one claims in corporate speak that “we encourage you to bring your whole self to work”, does it also mean that suffering, and all that it entails, belongs equally at work?
Unfortunately, I have observed that while many want to say “yes”, they are concerned about the Pandora’s box that it would open at work. At other times, the “yes” is tentative and circumscribed by institutional legacy of fears. Some may even genuinely say and mean “yes”, but they don’t know how to operationalise that desire at work.
While no one during my two decades of working with organisations, has explicitly shared with me that “suffering does not belong in the workplace”, I imagine there are some who sincerely believe that it doesn’t. I may therefore only hazard the following guesses as to why such a belief works for them. First is the equating of professionalism with rationality, the latter being widely regarded as the hallmark of that which distinguishes humans from animals. And given emotions are antithetical to rationality, they are to be discouraged, i.e., emotions compromise professionalism. Second, even when emotions are permissible at work, only those that advance corporate objectives may be encouraged, i.e., certain emotions are frowned upon because it compromises ambition. Third, ‘negative’ emotions run the risk of creating unsafe workplaces thereby hindering the ability of some to fully express themselves, i.e., negativity compromises authenticity.
All three reasons are legitimate because it is no doubt based on the lived experience of those who hold these beliefs. People sustain specific beliefs and behaviours because at some fundamental level, it fulfils the needs of their souls. But perhaps not the needs of other souls.
Let me now suggest that compassion is perhaps the most radical ‘tool’ capable of sustaining the satiation of all needs, and one that we can all readily access. Radical in the etymological sense of ‘root’ and that which is vital to life, because compassion is a natural human desire that arises in the face of suffering, be it our own, or that of another, for the suffering to cease. But if compassion is a natural instinct, you may wonder why then are we not all doing more of it? In part because compassion as a natural desire means that it is incipient, i.e., both socialisation and cultivation of one’s compassionate instinct is necessary for one to become virtuous. This is to say that while the compassionate instinct naturally, and unconsciously, arises when one is witnessing or imagining suffering, a choice is involved as to whether to ignore or express that instinct. What then is understood about why the compassionate instinct is expressed or ignored?
The mechanism activating our instinctive desire for another’s suffering to cease is believed to be the ability to identify with the other’s suffering, as if it is our own. Meaning, we feel pain in our body when we witness the suffering of another sentient being, and sometimes even of inanimate objects unto which we ascribe human qualities.
Nascent neuroscientific research of mirror neurons seems to bear out ancient philosophical and religious observations postulating that human nature is good, and Darwin’s speculations that compassion is really old. However, without cultivation, identification can too easily become internalisation, meaning that we make the pain of another our own, and then find ourselves floundering in both our own pain and that of the other. In which case, it is completely natural and understandable that people, in general, want to avoid feeling pain. In other words, humans generally fear pain, and will often go to great lengths to shield themselves and their loved ones from pain. Therefore, without intentionally cultivating the skills to separate identification from internalisation, we become habituated to privilege pain avoidance behaviours which invariably involves ignoring our compassionate instinct when it arises. So, what does it mean to cultivate our compassionate instinct?
As the path of compassion begins with feeling pain, in order that compassion may be safely experienced by both the giver and receiver, and such that it contributes to the well-being and flourishing of both parties, it is necessary to cultivate three virtues simultaneously:
When all three virtues work in unison, compassion becomes a life affirming energy for both the giver and receiver. But, is it really necessary to cultivate all three virtues? Allow me to propose that without courage, compassion may be pity in disguise. In which case, the helping is premised on a relationship of superiority and domination. Without wisdom, compassion may become self- serving. In which case, the helping may only be symptomatic and not address the root cause. Without helpfulness, compassion on the part of the giver may become overwhelming. In which case, the helping leaves the helper worse off. There are of course, other attending virtues such as curiosity (the desire to seek out the unknown), humility (the ability to accept that one may not wrong), and generosity (the willingness to sustain one’s giving over a long period of time) in compassion’s universe, but it is this triad of virtues which I believe makes compassion tangible.
Aside from pity, which Buddhists regard as compassion’s near enemy (that which so closely resembles an object that it is often mistaken for the object itself), compassion has other near enemies in the workplace, of which three appear to be rampant as represented by the following archetypes:
Such near enemies of compassion, being transactional in nature, unfortunately contaminate the socialisation of compassion. Humans are driven to bond, and are wired for sociality, for safety is to be found in numbers. Civilisations are possible only because the human species can collaborate, and has refined the ability to coordinate complex undertakings. It is human sociality that is the bedrock of human becoming, be it flourishing or tragedy. History is replete with examples of societies that very successfully socialised the natural good out of humans, as well as socialised the amplification of humanity’s natural good. This concept is elegantly captured in the first eight verses of the Three Character Classics (三字經, sān zì jīng), an ancient classical Chinese text dating back to 1280 (Song dynasty) that is learnt by heart by children:
人之初 (rén zhī chū)
性本善 (xìng běn shàn)
性相近 (xìng xiāng jìn)
習相遠 (xí xiāng yuǎn)
苟不教 (gǒu bù jiāo)
性乃迁 (xìng nǎi qiān)
教之道 (jiāo zhī dào)
贵以专 (guì yǐ zhuān)
People at birth,
Are naturally good.
Their natures are near,
Their habits are far.
If not taught,
Their natures will move.
To be taught,
Concentration is precious.
In an organisational context, far more powerful than workshops in terms of effective socialisation are governance structures in the form of policies, procedures, and guidelines as embodied by an organisation’s leaders and decision-makers. Too often, an organisation’s policies, procedures, and guidelines are read by, at best, only three people, the person who wrote it, the person who reviewed it, and the person who approved it. This may in part be due to the fact that the policies were written with the intention of protecting the organisation’s interests, hence the legalistic tone. But it need not be so. Policies and procedures can be written to reflect what an organisation aspires to, and become an organisation’s north star, lighthouse, and oasis. Governance matters because it speaks to what matters to the organisation, and how to operationalise it. Governance is culture’s container. Governance is the foundation upon which a leader orchestrates socialisation.
I have worked with enough organisations and leaders to know that without encoding compassion into an organisation’s governance structure, compassion will only ever be the flavour of the month. Because it is humanly impossible to expect any one individual to sustain compassionate behaviour when little in their environment makes it easy.
Vulnerability to emotional pain is an innate condition of being human, for it may be an evolutionary alarm alerting us when our needs are not being met. This may therefore explain the existence of our compassionate instinct which, in predisposing humans to naturally desire the absence of pain, has seemingly wired us to instinctively contribute to the alleviation of pain as a way to ensure that our own needs are being met. And when many of us spend the majority of our adult life at work, and interact more frequently with our colleagues, it seems morally legitimate to ask whether workplaces are spaces where the human soul flourishes or becomes deformed. In wrestling thus with the question of whether compassion belongs at work, one necessarily has to have a position vis-à-vis suffering. Which is another way of asking, “what is your ethical stance when it comes to how to be in relationship with a fellow human being?”
The cultivation of our naturally arising compassionate instincts is essentially ethics in action: Cultivating presence signals our commitment to acknowledge another’s humanity as equal to our own. Cultivating mindfulness signals our commitment to taking a step back and fully recognising our choices. Cultivating doing / wu-wei / mamnoon signals our commitment to doing-right by the sufferer.
Meaning that even when we don’t like the sufferer and/or find it difficult to connect with them, we are still able to respond in ways that affirm the dignity of the sufferer’s humanity. Even when we are gripped by anger or fear, we may still hold the intention to do no harm as a way to not aggravate the suffering. Even when our circumstances prevent us from “doing” anything, we may still consciously emanate a deep desire for the alleviation of the other’s suffering. This is why the practise of compassion is necessarily constitutive of ethics. It is also why compassion is not synonymous with, but encompassive of, empathy, sympathy, kindness, and mindfulness: empathy does not necessarily evoke a moral response, sympathy is the intellectual ability to understand but often does not elicit an emotional response, kindness can be expressed absent suffering, and mindfulness is too cerebral to animate the heart when the going gets tough.
In other words, compassion is at once an emotional, cognitive, and moral state of being whence we dethrone ourselves from the centre of the universe in an act of solidarity that affirms the humanity that binds us all. Compassion is the sensibility of togetherness, the technology of collegiality, the embodiment of ethics.
So yes, I believe compassion belongs in the workplace, because the workplace is governed by a democracy of suffering, and suffering is a potent energy. Anyone who is willing to compassionately engage with that energy so as to fulfil the unmet need that is the essence of that suffering, will be tapping into the source of life affirming energy which sustains us all. When met with compassion, suffering can be alchemised into flourishing, not just on the part of the sufferer, but as well the giver. Left unattended, suffering metastasises into toxic behaviours that too often spreads like wildfire. Lest our cultural imagination be further hollowed out by ideologised cliches of compassion, or hijacked by doctrinal contestations, or further colonised by its near enemies, there is no better time than now, and no better space than the workplace, to resurrect compassion’s radical nature. I am insistent that we have enough moral imagination to create workplaces that ennoble the human soul. What about you?
Does compassion belong in the workplace? Clearly, the answer has to be “no” if you subscribe to mythologised interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory (which theorised the biological concept of fitness) as synonymous with the economicised theorisation of survival of the fittest popularised by Herbert Spencer. Because it’s likely then that you associate compassion with expressing a form of kindness that is often associated with being a doormat, or being naïve, or being a coward. If, however, you subscribe to the interpretive lineage from ancient ethical traditions that compassion is the essence of what it means to be human, then the answer is clearly, “yes”. Because it’s likely then that you understand and experience compassion as a natural desire for the suffering of another to cease so that they may be well and flourish.
I am not here to persuade you either way. That decision lies at the door of your conscience. Instead, I am here to share why I am persuaded to respond to the question with a “yes”. Should then an affinity be evoked as you partake in this sharing, I hope you will open your heart and imagination to the curiosity knocking at your door.
Let me begin by offering why it matters that we wrestle with a response to this question. Firstly, given many of us work in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-national environments, it is likely that we experience daily clashes of competing ideologies. And given modern humans had largely been acculturated to equate ideology with identity, it has become commonplace to perceive ideological disagreements as attacks on identities. This may be why a great many good intentioned DEI / unconscious bias / anti-harassment initiatives become, tragically, weaponised. Organisational DEI definitions become ideological cesspools of identity politics, largely because only one definition is ‘right’, and any counter-interpretation is regarded as non-compliance with ‘company culture’. Confirmation bias rhetoric is the ‘hack’ of the season, smugly yielded against others during meetings and conversations in (unconscious) defence of one’s own confirmation bias. Anti-harassment policies become a substitute for mutually constructive performance conversations, invoked too often when two colleagues no longer know how to talk to each other.
Secondly, when we spend much of our adult life at work, and with the boundaries between personal and professional becoming fuzzier with technology, much of our emotional life unfolds at work, i.e., consciously or unconsciously, we are processing our emotions during “work hours”. Thirdly, it is likely that all of us, at some point of our working life, have experienced some form of incivility, harassment, or bullying at work. And more likely than not, many of these incidents were not managed as well as they could have been. All of which to say that the modern workplace is governed by a democracy of suffering. Yet, many are stoically insistent on ignoring the lumbering elephants of suffering in the room. Too often thus, these elephants remain wild invisible intimates of their human companion, and it is rare to see any being acknowledged, let alone treated with tenderness and care. Ignored and invisible, these elephants grow ever larger as they feed generously on the abundance of collusive silence. But, why does it matter that these “elephants” (aka emotions) are attended to?
I would like to propose that it is because each of these emotions point to a fundamental unmet need. For just as chronic hunger deforms the body, chronic unmet needs deform the soul. And in both instances of bodily hunger and soul hunger, is the presence of suffering, for physical hunger is sensed through somatic pain whilst soul hunger is sensed through emotional pain. It is thus, as a simple matter of logic, categorically impossible to be desirous of well-being (be it for one’s own self or another) without as well desiring the absence of suffering, for well-being and flourishing is possible only when the fundamental needs of our soul are being met. In other words, just as food is to the nourishment of the body, compassion is to the flourishing of the soul. Therefore, when one claims in corporate speak that “we encourage you to bring your whole self to work”, does it also mean that suffering, and all that it entails, belongs equally at work?
Unfortunately, I have observed that while many want to say “yes”, they are concerned about the Pandora’s box that it would open at work. At other times, the “yes” is tentative and circumscribed by institutional legacy of fears. Some may even genuinely say and mean “yes”, but they don’t know how to operationalise that desire at work.
While no one during my two decades of working with organisations, has explicitly shared with me that “suffering does not belong in the workplace”, I imagine there are some who sincerely believe that it doesn’t. I may therefore only hazard the following guesses as to why such a belief works for them. First is the equating of professionalism with rationality, the latter being widely regarded as the hallmark of that which distinguishes humans from animals. And given emotions are antithetical to rationality, they are to be discouraged, i.e., emotions compromise professionalism. Second, even when emotions are permissible at work, only those that advance corporate objectives may be encouraged, i.e., certain emotions are frowned upon because it compromises ambition. Third, ‘negative’ emotions run the risk of creating unsafe workplaces thereby hindering the ability of some to fully express themselves, i.e., negativity compromises authenticity.
All three reasons are legitimate because it is no doubt based on the lived experience of those who hold these beliefs. People sustain specific beliefs and behaviours because at some fundamental level, it fulfils the needs of their souls. But perhaps not the needs of other souls.
Let me now suggest that compassion is perhaps the most radical ‘tool’ capable of sustaining the satiation of all needs, and one that we can all readily access. Radical in the etymological sense of ‘root’ and that which is vital to life, because compassion is a natural human desire that arises in the face of suffering, be it our own, or that of another, for the suffering to cease. But if compassion is a natural instinct, you may wonder why then are we not all doing more of it? In part because compassion as a natural desire means that it is incipient, i.e., both socialisation and cultivation of one’s compassionate instinct is necessary for one to become virtuous. This is to say that while the compassionate instinct naturally, and unconsciously, arises when one is witnessing or imagining suffering, a choice is involved as to whether to ignore or express that instinct. What then is understood about why the compassionate instinct is expressed or ignored?
The mechanism activating our instinctive desire for another’s suffering to cease is believed to be the ability to identify with the other’s suffering, as if it is our own. Meaning, we feel pain in our body when we witness the suffering of another sentient being, and sometimes even of inanimate objects unto which we ascribe human qualities.
Nascent neuroscientific research of mirror neurons seems to bear out ancient philosophical and religious observations postulating that human nature is good, and Darwin’s speculations that compassion is really old. However, without cultivation, identification can too easily become internalisation, meaning that we make the pain of another our own, and then find ourselves floundering in both our own pain and that of the other. In which case, it is completely natural and understandable that people, in general, want to avoid feeling pain. In other words, humans generally fear pain, and will often go to great lengths to shield themselves and their loved ones from pain. Therefore, without intentionally cultivating the skills to separate identification from internalisation, we become habituated to privilege pain avoidance behaviours which invariably involves ignoring our compassionate instinct when it arises. So, what does it mean to cultivate our compassionate instinct?
As the path of compassion begins with feeling pain, in order that compassion may be safely experienced by both the giver and receiver, and such that it contributes to the well-being and flourishing of both parties, it is necessary to cultivate three virtues simultaneously:
- Courage, compassion’s heart – The capacious willingness to embrace fully all that is present, even as the heart trembles in the face of suffering, even as the knees tremble as we walk towards the pain. It emboldens our certitude about that which is right and just. For this reason, compassion is one of the fiercest acts of courage. The pathway to courage is presence, for when we are truly present to another being in their suffering, it is almost inevitable that we will regard their dignity as equally worthy as our own.
- Wisdom, compassion’s mind – The openness of be-ing that connects us to a deeper knowing beyond thought and enables us to at once discern the true dimensions of reality whilst recognising the filter that is our own ego and bias. Wisdom is as much the guardian of our choices as it is that which grounds us in grace. The pathway to wisdom is mindfulness, for the ability to focus our attention, to quiet our wandering mind, and to still our somatic responses, enables our gaze to make sacred that which it beholds.
- Helpfulness, compassion’s hand – The respectful offering of our service to bring about the well-being of another, no matter how small. This includes both non-doing (elegantly captured in Chinese philosophy as the concept of wú wéi, 無爲, which roughly translates as non-action) when our helping may not be helpful, and asking for help as a way of empowering the other (sublimely captured in the Arabic philosophical concept of mamnoon, ممنون , which loosely translates as “the request that blesses the giver”).
When all three virtues work in unison, compassion becomes a life affirming energy for both the giver and receiver. But, is it really necessary to cultivate all three virtues? Allow me to propose that without courage, compassion may be pity in disguise. In which case, the helping is premised on a relationship of superiority and domination. Without wisdom, compassion may become self- serving. In which case, the helping may only be symptomatic and not address the root cause. Without helpfulness, compassion on the part of the giver may become overwhelming. In which case, the helping leaves the helper worse off. There are of course, other attending virtues such as curiosity (the desire to seek out the unknown), humility (the ability to accept that one may not wrong), and generosity (the willingness to sustain one’s giving over a long period of time) in compassion’s universe, but it is this triad of virtues which I believe makes compassion tangible.
Aside from pity, which Buddhists regard as compassion’s near enemy (that which so closely resembles an object that it is often mistaken for the object itself), compassion has other near enemies in the workplace, of which three appear to be rampant as represented by the following archetypes:
- Superhero – The colleague who expresses genuine care by offering unsolicited advice about how to think and solve your problems because they are smarter, older, more experienced, more connected, more senior, or more powerful. Superheroes love to rescue those in distress, because that is how they maintain their sense of superiority and reason for being. Such behaviour risks robbing from the sufferer, a sense of agency.
- Cheerleader – The colleague who genuinely wants the sufferer to stop suffering by immediately launching into pep talks about “focusing on your strengths”, or “looking on the bright side of things” or “believing that there’s a silver lining”. Cheerleaders love to, well, be cheery, and don’t like dealing with negative emotions because, well, it rains on their parade. Such behaviour risks merely distracting the sufferer for a short moment.
- Buddy – The colleague who always has time to listen to you and unfailingly has similar painful stories to share, and though you no longer feel that alone in your suffering, you do sometimes wonder who the conversation is about. Buddies love to be ‘just like you’, and believe that because misery loves company, the best antidote to suffering is, well, more suffering. Such behaviour risks entrenching the sufferer’s victim mindset.
Such near enemies of compassion, being transactional in nature, unfortunately contaminate the socialisation of compassion. Humans are driven to bond, and are wired for sociality, for safety is to be found in numbers. Civilisations are possible only because the human species can collaborate, and has refined the ability to coordinate complex undertakings. It is human sociality that is the bedrock of human becoming, be it flourishing or tragedy. History is replete with examples of societies that very successfully socialised the natural good out of humans, as well as socialised the amplification of humanity’s natural good. This concept is elegantly captured in the first eight verses of the Three Character Classics (三字經, sān zì jīng), an ancient classical Chinese text dating back to 1280 (Song dynasty) that is learnt by heart by children:
人之初 (rén zhī chū)
性本善 (xìng běn shàn)
性相近 (xìng xiāng jìn)
習相遠 (xí xiāng yuǎn)
苟不教 (gǒu bù jiāo)
性乃迁 (xìng nǎi qiān)
教之道 (jiāo zhī dào)
贵以专 (guì yǐ zhuān)
People at birth,
Are naturally good.
Their natures are near,
Their habits are far.
If not taught,
Their natures will move.
To be taught,
Concentration is precious.
In an organisational context, far more powerful than workshops in terms of effective socialisation are governance structures in the form of policies, procedures, and guidelines as embodied by an organisation’s leaders and decision-makers. Too often, an organisation’s policies, procedures, and guidelines are read by, at best, only three people, the person who wrote it, the person who reviewed it, and the person who approved it. This may in part be due to the fact that the policies were written with the intention of protecting the organisation’s interests, hence the legalistic tone. But it need not be so. Policies and procedures can be written to reflect what an organisation aspires to, and become an organisation’s north star, lighthouse, and oasis. Governance matters because it speaks to what matters to the organisation, and how to operationalise it. Governance is culture’s container. Governance is the foundation upon which a leader orchestrates socialisation.
I have worked with enough organisations and leaders to know that without encoding compassion into an organisation’s governance structure, compassion will only ever be the flavour of the month. Because it is humanly impossible to expect any one individual to sustain compassionate behaviour when little in their environment makes it easy.
Vulnerability to emotional pain is an innate condition of being human, for it may be an evolutionary alarm alerting us when our needs are not being met. This may therefore explain the existence of our compassionate instinct which, in predisposing humans to naturally desire the absence of pain, has seemingly wired us to instinctively contribute to the alleviation of pain as a way to ensure that our own needs are being met. And when many of us spend the majority of our adult life at work, and interact more frequently with our colleagues, it seems morally legitimate to ask whether workplaces are spaces where the human soul flourishes or becomes deformed. In wrestling thus with the question of whether compassion belongs at work, one necessarily has to have a position vis-à-vis suffering. Which is another way of asking, “what is your ethical stance when it comes to how to be in relationship with a fellow human being?”
The cultivation of our naturally arising compassionate instincts is essentially ethics in action: Cultivating presence signals our commitment to acknowledge another’s humanity as equal to our own. Cultivating mindfulness signals our commitment to taking a step back and fully recognising our choices. Cultivating doing / wu-wei / mamnoon signals our commitment to doing-right by the sufferer.
Meaning that even when we don’t like the sufferer and/or find it difficult to connect with them, we are still able to respond in ways that affirm the dignity of the sufferer’s humanity. Even when we are gripped by anger or fear, we may still hold the intention to do no harm as a way to not aggravate the suffering. Even when our circumstances prevent us from “doing” anything, we may still consciously emanate a deep desire for the alleviation of the other’s suffering. This is why the practise of compassion is necessarily constitutive of ethics. It is also why compassion is not synonymous with, but encompassive of, empathy, sympathy, kindness, and mindfulness: empathy does not necessarily evoke a moral response, sympathy is the intellectual ability to understand but often does not elicit an emotional response, kindness can be expressed absent suffering, and mindfulness is too cerebral to animate the heart when the going gets tough.
In other words, compassion is at once an emotional, cognitive, and moral state of being whence we dethrone ourselves from the centre of the universe in an act of solidarity that affirms the humanity that binds us all. Compassion is the sensibility of togetherness, the technology of collegiality, the embodiment of ethics.
So yes, I believe compassion belongs in the workplace, because the workplace is governed by a democracy of suffering, and suffering is a potent energy. Anyone who is willing to compassionately engage with that energy so as to fulfil the unmet need that is the essence of that suffering, will be tapping into the source of life affirming energy which sustains us all. When met with compassion, suffering can be alchemised into flourishing, not just on the part of the sufferer, but as well the giver. Left unattended, suffering metastasises into toxic behaviours that too often spreads like wildfire. Lest our cultural imagination be further hollowed out by ideologised cliches of compassion, or hijacked by doctrinal contestations, or further colonised by its near enemies, there is no better time than now, and no better space than the workplace, to resurrect compassion’s radical nature. I am insistent that we have enough moral imagination to create workplaces that ennoble the human soul. What about you?