What if there was one thing you could bring to your organization — be it corporate, ministry, or non-profit — that would be guaranteed to lower blood pressure, strengthen immune systems, fuel innovation, improve service quality, foster adaptability, and increase retention?
Sound like an impossible dream?
Today’s featured author would disagree. She believes that compassion is a vital and powerful tool that every organization should be wielding. People are under enough stress these days, from physical suffering and relational discord, to national and global conflict, and the workplace does not need to add its own contribution to the list. Nurturing a compassionate atmosphere among employees — not only noticing others’ suffering but actually taking action to alleviate the pain — can ease tension, short-circuit stressors, and boost success rates for individuals and the organization as a whole.
Meet the Author — Monica Worline
Monica C. Worline, Ph.D., is founder and CEO of EnlivenWork, an innovation organization that teaches businesses and others how to tap into courageous thinking, compassionate leadership, and the curiosity to bring their best work to life. She is a research scientist at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, where she engages in action research projects with organizations seeking to activate their social architecture of compassion. She loves working with “compassion architects” — the people in organizations who understand the power of connection and care and spread it wherever they can.
Monica is also the Executive Director of CompassionLab, the world’s leading research collaboratory focused on compassion at work. CompassionLab was co-founded with Jane Dutton, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, and the late Peter Frost of University of British Columbia. With a home base at the University of Michigan, they draw compassion and organization researchers from around the world into dialogue about creating more compassionate workplaces.
Monica holds a lectureship at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and is affiliate faculty at the Center for Positive Organizations. She is one of the lead instructors for an innovative immersion learning course entitled “Magnify,” which helps undergraduates interested in business and organizations see how to magnify the potential for excellence in any system.
Want to connect with Monica? Find her on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or send her an email.
Discover the Book — Awakening Compassion at Work
Suffering in the workplace can rob us of humanity, dignity, and motivation. Often silent and left unaddressed, suffering is a costly drain on organization productivity and potential. Marshaling evidence from two decades of research with organizations in a variety of industries and sectors, scholars and consultants Monica Worline and Jane Dutton show us how small actions can have big effects. Offering a view of compassion that is grounded in the best of social science research and the new science of compassion, this book teaches four ways that anyone, regardless of position or role, can bring more compassion to their work lives.
Going beyond each individual’s role in awakening compassion at work, Monica and Jane also reveal how managers, leaders, and change agents can diagnose the social architecture for compassion in their organizations. This work belongs on every organization’s strategic agenda, because creating conditions that draw out our capacity for compassion at work confers measurable competitive advantages in areas like innovation, collaboration, service quality, talent attraction and retention, and adaptability. Ultimately, as Monica and Jane write, “Compassion is an irreplaceable dimension of excellence for any organization that wants to make the most of its human capabilities.”
Intrigued? Visit the book site to download a free chapter, add it to your Goodreads shelf, or buy a copy on Amazon.
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Visit AwakeningCompassion.com to learn more about the book and its authors, or download a free sample chapter. While there, you can also join the community of compassion architects, read the blog for compassion wisdom, or share your story of compassion in the workplace.
Elizabeth Johnson loves the color yellow, strong {black} coffee, editing, and exploring the mountains in rural Wyoming and Utah, where she and her husband serve as church planters. In her free time, she enjoys learning new things, hand-lettering and acrylic painting, and gaming with her husband.