Compassion Is Not Nice. It's the Leadership Edge the AI Age Demands
Fear works.
That’s the uncomfortable truth almost nobody in leadership development wants to say out loud. Fear hits deadlines. Shame gets the report turned in. Command-and-control produces results, but only in the short run.
That method also burns people out, destroys trust, and builds cultures that function only by consuming the very people inside them.
I’ve seen this pattern inside dozens of organizations, first as a McKinsey partner and now through our work at Happiness Squad.
Laura Berland and Evan Harrel described the mechanism precisely on The Flourishing Edge podcast: “Fear does work in the short run. Shame will get people to do things in the short run, but it burns them out, it destroys trust.”
Laura and Evan founded the Center for Compassionate Leadership and have trained more than 1,200 leaders across 75 countries. Laura spent four decades as a tech entrepreneur and Fortune 500 executive before becoming a meditation teacher. Evan spent his career in institutional investing. Neither of them is asking leaders to be softer. They are asking leaders to be more effective, and that difference runs through everything they told me.
We Are Asking the Wrong Question About AI
I have come to think about every technology as a knife. In the hand of a surgeon it saves a life. In the hand of a murderer it takes one. AI is no different. Wielded as co-intelligence, it makes each of us superhuman and buys back hours for the work only humans can do. Wielded as a replacement engine, it dehumanizes the workplace one calculation at a time. I can do four times more in a tenth of the time, so why do I need you?
Laura and Evan reframed the whole conversation for me in a single question. “So often they’re asking, what can we use AI to replace,” they told me. “How can we use AI to elevate something?”
That distinction is not semantic. It determines what your organization looks like in three years. Replacement thinking stagnates, because the human element you strip out is what made elevation possible. Elevation thinking compounds. The choice is a leadership one, and most leaders are making it by default rather than on purpose.
So I asked what leadership capability matters most right now. Their answer was recognizing our shared humanity and deep interdependence. “Our deep individualism is a little bit of a mirage,” they said. “None of us did anything alone.”
Thich Nhat Hanh taught that we inter-are. Ubuntu, in Desmond Tutu’s telling, says you are, so I am. Decades of self-reliance rhetoric have robbed leaders of that truth, and the cost is practical. In this much uncertainty, the leader who believes they have to figure it out alone suffers disproportionately. Ten brains beat one brain trying to hold the light for everybody else.
Compassion Is Not Niceness
Plenty of thoughtful leaders hear the word compassion and assume it means a lowered bar, a softened standard, a hard call postponed. Laura and Evan drew the sharpest line I have heard between compassion and what people mistake it for.
“Being nice will oftentimes avoid challenging conversations because nice is sweet, nice is pretty. And at the core is I want you to like me.”
Sit with that. Nice is self-serving. Nice is about my comfort, my likability, my wish to leave the room without friction. It postpones the conversation that would have helped you.
Compassion does the harder thing. Here is a sentence every leader should carry into their next difficult conversation:
It’s not okay for you to do this, and I believe you can do better, and I want to and will help you do better.”
A boundary. A belief. A commitment, all in one breath. Nothing in it is soft. Nothing in it is cruel either. That is the whole point.
Compassionate Feedback Starts Before You Speak
Most feedback fails before anyone opens their mouth.
We walk in carrying anger. Our hearts are closed. Our story is already written. Our ego has appointed us judge, jury and executioner, so we are not listening to understand anything. Very little is possible from there.
What I have learned to do instead asks three things of me.
Ground first. Regulate the nervous system before the conversation rather than during it. Laura describes this as staying inside the window of tolerance, present instead of activated.
Open the heart. Something is not working, which means there is suffering on both sides of the table. Mine as well as theirs.
Trade judgment for curiosity. Get interested in what is missing rather than who is at fault.
“When people can feel that you’re not there to threaten or hammer them,” Laura and Evan told me, “it’s a completely different conversation.”
One Interview Question Changed an Entire Hospital
If you believe culture change requires a mandate from the top, the story that stayed with me longest will change your mind.
A chief medical officer at a large hospital network saw in his data that residents were struggling with staff and patients. He did not commission a transformation program. He added one question to the resident interview:
Name a time you encountered compassion with a patient. How did it arise and what was your experience?”
Successive cohorts came through and the culture of the entire program shifted. The change rippled into the nursing staff, the support staff, all the way to the receptionist at the front door. Hospital rankings rose, measurably.
Here is why this matters for you. That chief medical officer had no authority over the hospital’s culture. He could not change how attending physicians behaved or what his peers decided. He controlled one hiring routine, so he changed the one thing he controlled. The culture moved anyway. Most of us have more room than that and use less of it.
Culture Is a Thousand Small Acts
Laura and Evan build on the work of Monica Worline and Jane Dutton, co-authors of Awakening Compassion at Work and two of the leading researchers in this field.
Their central distinction is between leading with compassion, meaning your individual interactions, and leading for compassion, meaning the system that lets compassion survive contact with the organization. Most organizations are full of kind people and still feel terrible to work in.
That system has four levers.
Roles: Compassion rarely appears in a job description, so you write it in yourself. The roles people picture here are the nurturing ones, coach and mentor. The list also includes boundary setter and disciplinarian. Shaping your role toward compassion often means taking the hard job, not the warm one.
Routines: The repeatable mechanics of how work gets done. Interviews. Standing meetings. Performance reviews. Handoffs. You are not rebuilding them. You are hunting for the single point where a small disruption changes the character of the whole thing, as one interview question did in that hospital.
Networks: The roadways for trust. Some are paved, some are dirt tracks, which is why calling a colleague in another function can feel like an imposition. Networks get built before you need them, and they get built by going first. Laura and Evan told me about a middle manager at a global NGO who convened small support groups in her boss’s office, on his condition that nobody find out. That network reached the CEO, reshaped the organization’s strategy, and carried her into the C-suite.
Culture: The lever you cannot pull directly. Culture is the residue of the other three. Values on the wall in beautiful language, contradicted by daily behavior, make things worse rather than better.
Most leaders I work with believe cultural transformation starts at the top with two or three mega moves. That is not how it happens. Culture changes through a thousand small acts, and research suggests those acts travel at least three degrees of contact. You never see where the third ripple lands.
Three Moves for This Week
Laura and Evan talked about the following three practices you can try this week:
- Open a meeting with a different prompt: “Tell me one way you can be supported or challenged this week.” It gives people permission to name a need without feeling weak for having one.
- Set a boundary you have been avoiding: Do it with kindness and full regard for the other person’s dignity. Compassionate leaders do not skip the hard thing. They do it differently.
- Reach out to one person outside your network: No agenda beyond human connection. One caveat from my own calendar: this only happens if you stop booking yourself back to back and protect thirty minutes for it.
If part of you is thinking there is no space for compassion in your organization, that belief is exactly what this conversation dismantles. Emotions are contagious. Actions are contagious. Start with what you control. The performance still comes, and it comes from amplifying the people around you rather than burning through them.
Learn more and listen to the full conversation
Listen on the Flourishing Edge podcast, there are five things you will take from it: why the right question about AI is what it can elevate rather than replace, why compassion speaks the truth niceness avoids, why regulating yourself before hard feedback changes its outcome, why one small move in a role, routine or network shifts culture more than any mandate from above, and why going first ripples three degrees further than you will ever get to see.
Learn more about Laura Berland and Evan Harrel on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish, Laura Berland and Evan Harrel. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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