[FINALE] Awakening Compassion at Work - Monica Worline (Replay) (POY 68)

Well, the time has come for me to end the Plural of youf podcast, but before I go, I'd like to talk a little bit about why I'm ending it, what I've learned from 10 years of talking to helpers. And then I'd like to replay the conversation I had that probably affected me the most. I'm Josh Morgan. That conversation is coming up next on the Plural of youf podcast about people helping people. I'm gonna I am an applied sociologist and aspiring helper living in Huntsville, Alabama, and I'm on a mission to promote two beliefs in my life that humans are social beings and because of that, we all benefit when we help one another. I previously published this podcast on the 15th of every month to share how we can all be better helpers for those that we care about. But like I mentioned at the top, this will be the last episode of the Plural of youf for real this time. I say that because I started this project back in November 2014, which I've said before, and that was back when podcasting was picking up some steam and they weren't as prolific as they are now. It's kind of like the new blogging, if you're around for that, but I took a five year break to deal with some personal issues, but then I came back to the plural view in November 2023 and recorded roughly 20 more episodes. So there are several reasons why I'm ending the podcast, mostly because I think I've reached the ceiling of what I can do with it. The best way I can put it, while being kind to myself, is that I think my personality and my interests would be better suited for some other creative endeavor. I'm not sure what that is yet, but I don't want to waste my time, or your time, or my guest's time if this isn't catching on like I'd hoped. That's not to say I didn't enjoy working on the poor old view. I certainly did. But yeah, I think it's just time. But I've learned so much from doing a podcast. I got used to the sound of my own voice, which was weird at first. I learned about marketing both how to carry it too far and obsess over it, and how to do it more casually and comfortably. I also matured as a content creator. I learned how to approach people, ask them to be guests on the podcasts, and how to ask better questions of them than just tell me about yourself, which I did way too much in the beginning. I also learned how to be what I would consider to be a better person from doing this podcast. Or a better helper, if you want to put it that way. Over the course of, you know, 67 episodes, this one's number 68 I learned a few common themes about helping others that I'm going to carry with me for the rest of my life. I learned that sometimes being a helper just means showing up and sharing your presence with someone else. I learned that it's better to meet people where they are, not where we want them to be if you really want to help other people. I learned it's possible to forgive people, but not their actions. I learned that one of the simplest ways to help people is to let them go in front of you, whether that's in line at the grocery store or in traffic, if you're driving, whatever the case may be. And then I also learned it's okay to be content with only helping your loved ones and most of all, taking care of yourself first. Because if you're not taking care of yourself, you can't properly help others. So this isn't the last creative project I'll do. Like the Plural of youf. I'm sure I'll come up with something before too long to fill the void in my heart, because I still love helping people. So if you want to follow me online, the best place is probably bluesky. So if you go there and search for the username Monarch Jogs, it's an anagram of my name. It's all one word. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram with that name, but who knows for how long, given how Meta is treating its users. And then I'm also on LinkedIn as Josh C. Morgan. You can look for me there as well if you'd like to connect there. But yeah, send me a friend request if you haven't already. That's the main thing I always wanted from this podcast was to connect with people like you, and I made some lifelong friends from doing this that I otherwise would have never met. So if you decide to send me a friend request, thanks in advance and thanks for listening all these years. One more thing before I go. I thought I'd play the conversation that shaped my beliefs about helping people the most. This month, I'd like to reintroduce you to Monica Worlein. In case you don't remember her, she's a research scientist who studies compassion and altruism at Stanford, and she's also the executive director of Compassion Lab, which is the world's leading research group focused on studying compassion specifically in the workplace. She also wrote a book back in 2016, I believe 2017 called Awakening Compassion at Work, the quiet power that elevates people and organizations. So when I taught with her back in 2017, I picked up her model from this book about how to be more compassionate in the workplace. But what I found pretty quickly is that it works very well for any setting. It doesn't have to be just the workplace. It can be situation just out in the world, even at home. And I really have found a lot of value in this model, not only in how I interact with people, but how I interact with myself as well. Just learning to listen. Like I won't spoil the model if you haven't heard it before, but it did a lot to help me in my life. So I thought I'd play that conversation again and I'll let the 2017 version of me take over from here. So here we go.

I follow a lot of compassion experts and research organizations online, and Monica and I connected recently over Twitter, and I'm happy we did for a few reasons. The first is that she's a really nice person, so I'm glad to see her updates in my news feed. The second one is that before I learned more about her and her work, it never occurred to me that compassion can inform all sorts of human endeavors and result in something new. The trick is to add the word compassionate in front of other concepts so you can wind up with like compassionate engineering or compassionate accounting. You could probably go nuts with it if you wanted to make up compassionate kayaking or compassionate needlepoint or pretty much any variant of some other thing, but that would enable people to help one another. Another reason I like Monica in her work is that she's pioneering something she calls compassionate architecture, which isn't related as much to physical buildings as it is the building of human organizations. The premise I gleaned from reading Awakening Compassion at Work is that compassionate workplaces should be designed to reduce suffering, specifically among the people who work in them. Monica and her co author Jane Dutton, have been studying what it means to reduce suffering at work, as well as the effects that workers in more compassionate workplace cultures experience over those who aren't. I'll let her talk about those in a bit, but I'll go ahead and spoil it for you. They're all positive. The final reason I'm glad I discovered Monica and her work is because I've been wondering for years what Americans can do about how they're treated at their jobs. The stats I've seen on the percentages of Americans who would say that they're happy at work haven't been consistent between surveys, and surveys like these don't always separate relationship quality between employees from how fulfilled their jobs make them feel. The short answer is that most workplaces are probably fine to be around, at least in small doses. But what we can all agree on is that some organizations are better to work around than others. As far as compassion goes, whenever I hear about someone having a tough time at work, or when I read an article about workers being abused in the US or elsewhere, I always wish I knew what I could do about it. I like to think Awakening Compassion at Work is a manual on how to address this problem. I read it before talking with Monica and I think it has something for everyone on how to reduce suffering in our workplaces, especially those of us in positions of leadership. I really am proud that I was able to talk with Monica. This is one of those conversations that's going to stick with me for a while, and I hope you'll get some good ideas from it too. You can learn more about the book and about what Monica and Jane are up [email protected] here's Monica Werlein, co author of Awakening Compassion at Work. What do you find so compelling about studying compassion? I mean, you've been at it for 15 years now and you have lots of different roles in your life that you play where you're engaging with others about compassion, particularly in the workplace. So I was just wondering, what do you like about it so much?

One thing that I really like about studying compassion is that I've been fascinated by the human side of the workplace. And when you study compassion, you really have to open up the complexity of the human condition at work because you're talking about suffering and how to be with suffering. You're talking about fostering compassion by fostering good relationships and the good things that are helpful in organizations. It's such a complex way of thinking about how to be with other people at work that I think that's why I can keep studying it for so long and I continue to see new things.

Did you start out studying compassion specifically or, or is this something maybe you were working on something else and this kind of caught your attention later?

I got started studying compassion as a graduate student. As I said, I was interested very broadly in the human side of the workplace. So I was studying organizational psychology and I was interested in how people in very high demand work environments can make their work sustainable and can keep their interest and Their passion over a long period of time. One of the topics that I found when I was exploring that question was having really great work relationships and building compassion into the workplace. And I was really lucky to get involved with a group of scholars, including my co author, Jane Dutton, who were doing one of the very first research projects that focused explicitly on compassion at work. So we did have a research group that focused just on that as a topic. And I was able to join that group because I was interested. From my larger exploration, what are some.

Of the benefits that you found to having more compassion in the workplace?

Well, this is a question that took and still is taking a long time to answer. So I think, oh, it's ongoing.

That's good to point out.

You know, there's a lot of research still ongoing, but we did a very thorough investigation of all of the evidence that we could find about the impacts of compassion on the workplace. When we were pulling together the research for this book, we found really solid evidence that shows that when people experience more compassion in their workplace, the organization is able to recover more quickly from financial downturns. So there's a resilience in the organization's profitability. We found very solid evidence that when organizations have greater levels of compassion, they have greater levels of employee engagement. Employee engagement is highly correlated with client engagement. So compassion is also related to client engagement and client retention makes sense. And that's across a variety of different studies. We found really solid evidence that greater levels of compassion in people's work interactions feeds into higher quality collaborations. When you have cross functional teams and expertise from a number of fields and you need those people to work together, compassion makes a big difference. We found good evidence that compassion is related to learning and innovation in organizations. And that's a surprising relationship sometimes at first when people hear that. But when you think about how much learning at work requires failing at things and trying out things that don't work, you can start to see that compassion for errors and mistakes and building up relationships that can tolerate the difficulty of failing at things in order to learn and grow. It's a very important part of organizational innovation and people's creativity at work. Then we found a lot of evidence that greater compassion at work is tied to greater retention. People become more committed to workplaces where they feel that they're treated with compassion.

Do you have any favorite examples of workplaces that you've observed where maybe they started out as having a compassionate culture or having more compassion competence?

One of my favorite studies that we've done in relation to compassion and Work was situated in the billing department of a hospital in the Midwestern United States. And they were taking 180 days to collect a dollar when they started this turnaround effort, which is a really long time, right. And they started focusing on performance improvement. But the way that they focused on performance improvement was really ingenious. It was by also focusing on building a community among their employees. They did several things, like, they started using a team structure instead of an individual structure, and that changed the internal dynamics. But the other thing they did that I thought was really interesting is that they borrowed from the manufacturing model and they had a daily meeting. So they had a morning huddle every morning. And in that huddle, they explicitly asked, who's absent today? Who's under the weather today? Who needs special help today? And they used a lot of humor and lightheartedness. But they also made it very safe for people who needed help or were falling behind to ask for help. And they made it obvious where people could direct their effort. So when one person was done with their urgent billing tasks for the day, they could go and help other people in the unit that needed help. And as a consequence of making those meetings spaces where people could talk about what was going on, people started, over time, sharing more about their lives and what was happening in their lives more broadly. They started helping each other outside of work, too. Most of the billing employees were women, and many of them were single mothers. They had a lot of financial hardship, and by the time we concluded our study with them, they had a multitude of practices that they used to keep compassion high in the unit. At the same time, they had gone from taking 180 days to collect a dollar to being an industry leader.

One story that you shared in the book from this group was after the morning meeting, there would be one lady working at a table with just stacks of envelopes. I thought that was a very powerful story that sticks out in my mind.

Yeah, thank you for remembering that story. That actually is a favorite story of mine as well. At this particular study, we spent time in the work unit itself and just observing what was happening there. Our very first day, sitting in the unit, we saw this woman just almost buried under a pile of envelopes. It was more envelopes than I could imagine getting in years all sitting on that table. And that was just one day's mail. And we just watched as everyone who came into the room and saw the pile of envelopes went back to their desks, grabbed a letter opener, came back and took a stack of envelopes. Nobody had to ask it was so coordinated. It was so. It was like, you know, for an organizational researcher, it was like watching the ballet.

It's a good way of putting it.

It's so exciting for us geeky researchers. Some of your listeners might know Teresa Amabile from Harvard, who has done some very well known studies of helping at firms like ideo. She has shown that the more widespread helping behavior is, the higher performing an organization can be, even a creative organization like ideo, and that it's very important that the helping be shared across functions and across levels and that it can come to be taken for granted as a norm. And when that happens, all kinds of beneficial effects happen for the organization.

I've been wondering how much of an organization's compassion competence, how much of that is dependent on leadership? Can a group of co workers like that decide on their own to enact a more compassionate culture and do so sustainably without leadership being involved?

It's a great question. I'm going to start by just saying, for anyone who hasn't read Awakening Compassion at Work, that when we use the term compassion competence, we use it to refer to a collective process shared across people of noticing pain and suffering, interpreting it as worthy of the collective's time and attention, feeling empathy for the well being of other people in the collective, and then taking action to alleviate suffering. And so when you say a higher level of compassion competence, Josh, that means, as you appropriately said, that it has to be shared across a collective. And there are lots of mechanisms of organizational life that make it unique, easier for compassion to be amplified and shared across more than just one or two people. I think that our research would suggest that you can have a relatively high degree of compassion competence that develops among a subgroup of people in an organization, but you can't achieve the highest level of compassion competence without leadership. And it's very difficult, difficult to scale across an entire organization without leadership. Leadership is important in increasing the competence for a couple of reasons. The first is that leaders are powerful symbols for people in the organization. We turn to leaders when times are tough to look for a model of what's an appropriate response and what's an appropriate behavior. If the leaders don't model compassion, it's hard for it to spread. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's hard for it to spread. The other thing that makes leaders powerful is that they often control access to resources. If one small group of people is organizing in the wake of a crisis, or if somebody's ill and people are organizing and rallying to support that person without the support of leadership and to go to bat for additional resources, it may be hard for the scale of the resources to really grow.

I've noticed in doing work on the plural view, and I guess just in general, of trying to balance the good and the bad in the world, that some people, they tend to treat compassion and kindness as almost a form of weakness. Because I feel like a lot of people, they see it as almost a vulnerability. Like, if they're nice to someone, it could be a risk because they might take advantage. I'm just wondering, wondering, how do we get around that?

Yeah. In fact, there's a researcher in the UK named Paul Gilbert who has done a lot of studies about what gets in the way of the expression of compassion and what are people's fears about compassion. And the number one fear is the one you just named, that if I am kind or compassionate to someone else, they will think I am weak and they will take advantage of me. And so I think we do have to recognize in work organizations that that fear is very widespread. Part of changing a culture or creating a space where people can entertain the idea of compassion at work is acknowledging those fears, also calling out, telling stories and celebrating the instances where compassion happens. And it does alleviate suffering, and no one is taken advantage of in the process. You know, one thing that happens when we get into cultures and social systems where there's a lot of negativity, that we lose sight of the possibility of positive things, and we don't have a lot of good examples easily available around us. So I do think acknowledging the fear and sharing instances where compassion makes a difference at work is a way of ameliorating the fear and giving the positive example.

You and Jane included several blueprints in the book for ways that readers can assess compassion in their own workplaces or in their own lives. And there was one that stuck out to me in particular about missed opportunities for compassion, where if a person reading can remember an opportunity that they may have had in their lives to show compassion for someone else, and they didn't take it, and maybe there's a sense of regret about that, that they could feel out this template or the blueprint, I should say, and that would help them in the future to be more mindful of those opportunities. And I was reading that, and it made me wonder if you had ever had an experience like that and how it's affected you and your research. So have you ever had a missed opportunity that's stuck with you?

Oh, gosh, so many.

I guess I should have Realized that.

When I asked the question, definitely, I don't want to make any claim that I'm a paragon of compassion. I do have a practice of working to recognize other people and to be with them in their suffering, but I make mistakes all the time, as do many people, and they can feel really hurtful because when we make mistakes around offering compassion or withholding compassion, we can actually compound the suffering that already exists. So I'll give you one really recent example that's top of mind for me. I have a colleague that I work with closely, and we were working on a website redesign project that had gotten really stalled, and we were working with a vendor who had gotten really frustrated at the delay, and we were sorting through those problems together, and we were doing a fine job of working it together. And then I got called into some other urgent kind of work, and I took my eye off the ball of this web design project, and I assumed that my colleague would reach out to me if she really needed me. And I forgot to check in with her, and she was really getting buried by this project, and it was getting worse and worse instead of better, but I didn't know because I wasn't paying close enough attention. So then when I finally did reach out, I kind of heaped on about something else that wasn't working, and she was already handling more than her share. And she basically was kindly said, why are you bringing me yet another problem when I'm actually still managing this other whole bundle of problems?

Oh, yeah.

And that it just suddenly reminded me it creates a lot of pain when processes don't work well. And. And then people start to get interpersonally irritated with each other. So she was carrying that pain, and then my adding demands and adding load to what was already an overloaded plate was creating another form of pain. And I was doing it because I was being inattentive. Right. Like, I was assuming that if she needed help, she would ask me, and if she didn't ask me, everything was fine. To me, that's an example that I think almost everybody who does any kind of work can relate to. An example like that, where you just lose focus on the other person and how much of the burden they're carrying, and then you can inadvertently create more pain and harm because you're just not paying close enough attention.

And again, it goes. The notion of compassion being weakness. Asking for help can be seen as a sign of weakness. Some people, it sounds like that may have been what happened in this situation.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it all came from good intentions. But, you know, my colleague wasn't reaching out to me for help because she was trying to be kind to me, and she knew that I was really busy and that I had taken on this other set of urgent issues. So communication breakdowns and process breakdowns are a space where work itself creates suffering for people and misunderstandings can compound on each other, and we can exacerbate the pain of those really easily. And that's something that I think it's distinctive in our study of compassion at work. A lot of other people are studying compassion, as you know, but we have found that the work context is a really important one to study because work itself creates pain. For a lot of people who spend a significant amount of their time at work every day, it can be either a space where we just kind of have to grit our teeth and get through it however we can, or it can be a space where we learn some of the biggest lessons of our lives. When you approach work as if it is going to teach you some of the biggest lessons of your life by how you do the work, that's when I think what we learn in how we do our work has resonance for how we live all the rest of our lives.

It makes total sense that how you behave at work will affect how you behave at home and elsewhere. You have the research to back it up now?

Yeah. And, you know, this is again, where we have often, as you well know, doing the Plural Review podcast. We humans have a tilt toward paying a lot of attention to negative information and disregarding a bit of the positive.

Right.

For a long time, researchers have studied how the negative spillovers of work can have negative effects on life outside of work. Like, if you're stressed at work and come home and you take it out on your kids or your family. But it's only more recently that people have started to look at what I call positive spillover. Like, if there's something in my work that gives me resources and a new way of thinking about how to be a more compassionate colleague or how to be a more compassionate listener, I can use that same set of skills when I go home and I have to try to deal with my teenager, or I need to really listen to my elderly parent and try to discern their wishes, that kind of positive spillover of work is, I think, something really important to pay attention to in the future.

Going back to your story about the misunderstanding between you and your coworker, did you make amends?

Yes, I did. My 50% of making amends.

Okay.

And I think it's Ongoing. You know, I think that repair and healing from these kinds of misunderstandings can sometimes take time. So I definitely acknowledged my role in the misunderstanding and I did not try to justify my behavior. I just tried to see it from her point of view and I apologize for my part in the situation. The other trick about this is that I think I have to let her have the time that she needs to figure out if there's something more that she needs to say or process with me. And I also have to be a little bit compassionate with myself because I was busy and I was distracted and doing my best. And we in the, especially in the Western world, what the research shows is that we can be really hard on ourselves. And in fact that's usually our a number one go to response when something goes wrong is to be harsh with ourselves because that's how we're going to improve it for the future.

That's true.

And that's especially the Tibetan scholars have pointed out that that's not a universally shared pattern. It's a very distinctive pattern in the United States especially, but throughout the West. And so that has given rise to this whole topic of study called self compassion, where we can learn to actually be kind toward ourselves. And I hope that part of what we do in offering this book to people in the workplace is help them be more compassionate to the times like this when you know when you will fail. It's not because you don't want to be a compassionate person and it's not because you're trying to create pain. It's just a complex, difficult world out.

There if someone's listening and they're interested in being more compassionate at work or helping establish a more compassionate culture among their co workers. You mentioned the four step process before that started with noticing. Would noticing be the first step to work on or would you recommend something.

Else to start, we do two different things in this book. I think it's really fun to think of it as kind of a four plus four. When we talk about the definition of compassion as an interpersonal experience between people, we talk about four parts that I mentioned. Noticing, suffering, interpreting it as the person is worthy of compassion, feeling empathic concern and wanting for their well being and then taking action to alleviate that suffering. So that's the first four. Those four things are what any of us can do in any kind of role that we occupy in any kind of community we are in, in any kind of social system. You can start with those four things to create a more immediate, compassionate environment around you. And then we have plus four more things so if you're really interested in compassion more broadly in your organization, we talk about look at the networks of people and how people are connected to each other. Look for who gets left out or where information about suffering doesn't flow. And that's a way to start spreading more compassion. Then we talk about looking at your culture and values, and if there are places where your values aren't aligned with compassion, you can start a conversation about aligning them. If there are places where the culture isn't being lived out, you can start a discussion about where can we live our values and our culture more fully. The third thing we talk about is looking at the way you define roles and realizing that any role in any organization could be redefined with more compassion and inviting people to craft their roles and their role definitions in a more compassionate way. And then looking at the organization's routines is the fourth so by routines I mean any way that tasks actually get accomplished. And you can think of tasks like selecting members and hiring and onboarding. You can think of work tasks like expense reporting or performance management. You can think of project management tasks and decision making routines and problem solving routines. And then you can even think about off boarding routines or ways that you create connections beyond the immediate members of your organization. And every single one of those routines can be reimagined to create more compassion. So if you take the first four interpersonal parts of compassion and you layer them into that structure and culture point of view, you get four plus four ways of really building compassion into any system.

There's a good quote from the book I wanted to share, if it's okay.

Sure.

I think it's appropriate here. While words like wonder, beauty, and compassion aren't usually lauded as part of worker.

Leadership, they should be.

It's interesting to think that you can reimagine all sorts of tasks. Like you said, expense reports. Who would think to reimagine that as something that could be used as a tool to be more compassionate?

Thank you so much Josh for selecting that quote about beauty and wonderful. Because I do think that when we can create compassionate spaces together, we do create the best of the human condition. And I deeply hope that people get to have more of that experience in their work lives. Because as we've talked about, suffering is so widespread and there are so many difficulties in work life that this form of beauty is a wonderful counterpoint to that suffering.

Where would be the best place to find the book?

Online.

The book is published by Barrett Kohler, publisher. So if you want to order directly from Barrett Kohler. You can do that. It's also available on Amazon, and it should be widely distributed and available through any of your favorite bookstores or your favorite online book sites. And we also have a chapter available on awakeningcompassionatwork.com now, what if we wanted.

To follow you and your work elsewhere? Where would be the best place to do that?

You can follow onicawarline on Twitter or on Facebook. There's a public Monica Warline page that's available, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn Monica Warline as well. And Jane and I will be doing a lot of updating on awakeningcompassionetwork.com is.

There anything I haven't asked that you'd like to talk about?

We touched on this, but I think it's important to acknowledge that compassion is a complex and difficult subject. And when you start wading into the terrain of human suffering, as you said, it's vulnerable and sometimes it's scary. Very often people are stopped from being compassionate because they feel like they don't know what to do or they don't know what to say.

Right, Right.

And my final word would be that in our research time and again, what we have discovered is that when you don't know what to do or you don't know what to say, the best answer is do something. Or say, I'm so sorry for what you're going through, and just start there by being with the person or the people who are. Because mostly you can't fix people's suffering anyway. So it's really important to just be with people and let them know that you're there. And that's sometimes the most powerful compassion move you can make. If you don't show up because you're too scared that you won't know what to say or you won't know what to do, which I'm guilty of. I have definitely done that at times in my life where something was scary and I thought that I didn't know how to handle it.

Yeah, me too.

I look back and I think, gosh, you know, it's too bad that I missed that opportunity because I might not have known what to say, but just being there and not saying anything would have been fine.

I really do feel like this book is going to make a big difference in my life going forward in my career, and I just wanted to thank you for writing it. And I also wanted to say that I'm looking forward to following you on Twitter. I've really been enjoying your updates thank.

You for saying that. You know, that's everything that you hope for when you're going through all the work of writing the book, is that it has the potential to really be of use. And I likewise think we're buddies now for as long as Twitter lasts anyway, because I love following you on Twitter. I love seeing what you're up to, and I love your website. So I will be following you right back.

Great. I'm glad to hear that.

That.

Take care, Monica. Hope you have a good night.

Good night.

This is the plural of you. I'm Josh Morgan, and the show's website is pluraloview. Org. That's all I have for now.

Thank you for being kind today.

Take care.