Key Points
- Compassionate leadership is essential for ensuring a healthy and efficient working environment.
- Inclusive leadership means ensuring that all team members have a space to contribute.
- Inclusive leadership should also include challenging adversity, listening to underrepresented voices, and championing your team members.
- Compassion and inclusivity should be combined in leadership to create psychologically safe work environments
- Compassionate leaders should agree on goals with their team members, encourage team members to participate in setting meetings, and manage conflicts deftly and calmly.
- It is essential that compassionate leaders address and report bullying and discrimination, and set up forums to hear concerns.
- Compassionate leaders should try to follow the 3 pillars: Cognitive Understanding, Emotional Understanding, and Motivational Connection.
- Physicians looking to become compassionate leaders should consider a Leadership and Management, or Train the Trainers course.
Introduction
Compassionate and inclusive leadership is essential in healthcare, as it fosters workplaces where staff feel valued and respected. By combining empathy, allyship, and clear goals, leaders can contribute to the creation of a psychologically safe space where team performance is enhanced through increased staff well-being and higher-quality patient care.
In the NHS and wider healthcare settings, applying these leadership principles ensures that care is patient-centred while promoting collaboration and professional development.
In this comprehensive guide on compassionate leadership and inclusive leadership, we will cover definitions, discuss how compassionate and inclusive leadership impacts medical organisations, and show you how you can develop your leadership skills.
What is compassionate leadership?
The largest empirical evidence base on compassionate leadership tends to be in the health sector (Hodges, Paech, and Bennett 2020).
Compassion and respect are fundamental to an efficient workplace, especially when delivering patient-centred care. Whilst it’s easy to get swept up in spreadsheets and the pressure of deadlines, it is important to understand that incorporating compassion into your approach can alleviate the stress of these circumstances.
As a leader, it is essential to complete critical tasks and empower your teams to feel capable of doing the same.
What is inclusive leadership?
Inclusive leadership focuses on creating environments where everyone feels valued and respected. Inclusivity in healthcare means moving beyond diversity in recruitment to actively create space for each team member to share their perspectives and contribute equitably to patient care and service delivery.
Inclusive leadership demonstrates allyship in healthcare by listening to underrepresented voices, challenging adversity, and using your influence as a leader to remove barriers that prevent peers from reaching their potential. The essence of inclusive leadership is about building an organisational culture formed through connection, embracing diversity and enabling staff to work effectively together to deliver the best care possible.
Why do both inclusive and compassionate leadership matter?
For leadership to be effective, it must combine compassion with inclusivity.
Compassion focuses on connection through empathy, respect and trust, which are all essential elements of inclusive leadership. By enshrining these values, you contribute to the creation of a psychologically safe space where diversity is valued, and team members feel empowered to contribute effectively to care delivery.
Despite ongoing efforts, the NHS has struggled to sustain this approach. The general consensus from staff surveys suggests that on a local level, the NHS is most successful at making team members and departments feel seen due to the ease of everyday interaction.
However, on a wider scale, it is easier to lose these conversational efforts, which is why staff members must remember the principles of compassionate leadership and inclusive leadership and apply them to create allyship in healthcare through critical conversations.
Compassionate and inclusive leadership isn’t just essential for staff wellbeing; your approach directly impacts the quality of care patients receive. When staff are treated with compassion, they are better equipped to provide care and support to others (Goetz et al., 2010). This often translates into higher-quality care and increased patient satisfaction (West and Dawson, 2012; West et al., 2011) in contrast to these situations where inclusive leadership are not demonstrated patient satisfaction tends to be lower (West et al., 2022), the quality of care diminishes, and in acute care settings, patient mortality rates are higher (West and Dawson, 2012; West et al., 2011)
For organisations where compassionate leadership is evident, healthcare outcomes tend to be significantly improved.
This is likely due to the psychologically safe environment in which teams feel more engaged and are therefore more productive in delivering service as well as improving patient care. This culture can help improve staff retention, as well as boost team morale and resilience.
Ultimately, inclusive and compassionate leadership can enhance both team performance and organisational efficacy in healthcare.
Behaviours of compassionate and inclusive leaders
1. Agreeing on goals
In order to achieve goals as a team, a leader must discuss with each individual how they work best. When you understand how individuals prefer to achieve goals, you can arrange regular one-to-one feedback meetings with plans for the future and reflections on the past.
Ensure everyone has an understanding of who does what and how best to work together through shared discussions and clearly assigned tasks.
2. Allyship in Healthcare
As well as being a principle of inclusive leadership, allyship in healthcare can be applied through critical conversations. Encourage your team members to take an active role, such as setting meeting agendas or taking the lead in team discussions.
Create shared spaces where your staff can raise concerns, suggest changes and collaborate. This approach fosters inclusivity in healthcare and promotes allyship by ensuring all voices are heard.
3. Effectively manage difficulties
Unfortunately, challenges in the workplace occur, so it is important to handle them responsibly and fairly.
When something goes wrong, give your team the space to explain the circumstance. While they explain – stay calm. Remember, your composure will influence how the team responds.
After they have explained the situation, reflect on the key points of the scenarios to ensure understanding. From there, focus on what can be done next, addressing your team and encouraging them to come up with solutions.
Inform your team of the support available, such as discussion groups and employee assistance programmes.
4. Fostering inclusivity
By creating collaborative conversations with active steps for positive change, you foster space for inclusivity in healthcare.
Address unfair treatment, report bullying and discrimination, and listen to concerns with compassion. If the aforementioned forums are not set up or are not resolving conflicts, suggest ways for improvement.
This could include establishing new forums or setting up a Diverse and Inclusion Group (D&I group) to amplify lived experiences and influence policies, ensuring your staff feel safe, respected and capable of contributing to a positive culture and efficient workplace.
3 Pillars of compassionate Leadership
1. Cognitive Understanding
Effective leaders understand the challenges and decisions their teams and peers face in the scenarios they are presented with. A significant part of being a leader is having empathy, connecting with your colleagues in a way that fosters trust, allowing you both to tackle stressful situations effectively.
2. Emotional Understanding
This empathy should be enshrined in your approach to your team’s emotions. Whilst situations require a logical approach based on facts, it is important to balance these with the mindset of your team to ensure morale isn’t jeopardised. It is also essential to assess whether your team is feeling overwhelmed, disengaged, or energised.
By evaluating these emotions, you can utilise their mindset to its full potential. If they are struggling or seem stressed, see how you can support them with time management or delegation.
If they are motivated, channel that energy into more productivity, giving them greater responsibility or helping others with a crowded work schedule. When a team member is feeling disengaged, this could be due to too much work, not enough, or something external.
It is critical to approach each individual’s circumstance separately, understanding their needs, personality, and the needs of the workflow to ensure efficiency.
3. Motivational Connection
Like you, your team wants to succeed. Demonstrating that their professional growth and personal development are a part of your priorities builds a reliable rapport. When you have your team’s best interests at heart, this allows them to feel empowered in their approach to work, enriching their sense of purpose and drive.
The essence of the 3 pillars of compassionate leadership is a shift in mindset from I to Us. Leadership is not about individual success, but about how the team achieves together.
How to become a compassionate and inclusive leader
The characteristics needed of a compassionate leader can take time and patience to acquire, and include:
- Understanding how to remain calm in a stressful situation
- Understanding the views of others which conflict with your own
- Creating an environment which empowers everyone
One of the first steps is self-awareness. You must first recognise your own emotions, biases, and triggers and then manage them effectively before expecting them of someone else. Through self-awareness and identifying triggers, you will begin to develop resilience and adaptability.
When things go wrong in a high-pressure environment, it is easy to get distracted by the damage. In these moments, take a step back and see what can be done towards a solution, following correct processes and implementing new ones where necessary.
These actions are consolidated through continuous learning and reflection, seeking feedback from higher-ups and peers, reflecting on mistakes, and improving practices. Fundamentally, it comes down to communication; conflict is easier to avoid when clear expectations are set, and people feel understood.
What is compassion fatigue?
Compassion fatigue is the theory that healthcare professionals may operate in a defensive cycle, as a result of the constant pressure within their role. C de Zulutea uses a model of three emotional regulation systems to explore this content:
- The Threat System: The Threat System is where real or perceived threats take hold.
- The Drive System: The Drive System is where individuals might seek out resources that can serve as a reward or pleasure.
- The Soothing System: The Soothing System is linked to feelings of contentment and safety.
Within demanding environments where pressure is continuously applied, the soothing system often remains underdeveloped. This can lead to issues like emotional exhaustion and stress, which compassionate leaders must be able to address by fostering a workplace community and sense of belonging, alongside prioritising the psychological safety of their teams.
What training do you need to be a compassionate leader?
Our medical training courses are designed to help doctors and healthcare professionals advance their skills, support career progression and enhance patient care through practical, evidence-based learning.
Training toward being an inclusive leader is a testament to your passion for patient care, personal development and the future of healthcare. If you are looking to develop your skills as a compassionate and inclusive leader, we would recommend taking the following Medset courses:
Medical leadership and management course
This CPD-accredited Medical Leadership and Management course (12 points) equips doctors and healthcare professionals with the skills to lead teams to drive change and improve NHS services.
Developed by experienced clinical leaders, it combines theory with real-world studies for practical application. Covering clinical leadership, different communication styles, quality improvement and change management, this course aligns with GMC Good Medical Practices and NHS Leadership Frameworks.
Study online at your own pace, complete reflective exercises, and receive a downloadable CPD certification to support appraisals and career progression.
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Train the Trainers Course
Our train-the-trainers course enables a variety of healthcare professions to teach, assess and inspire with confidence.
Written by experienced medical educators and consultant trainers, this 13 CPD-accredited course allows you to utilise educational frameworks approved by the GMC, the Domains of Teaching Supervision and assessment, tailored to NHS training. Suitable for doctors, dentists, nurses, as well as managers, this course provides portfolio-ready evidence for speciality interviews, job applications and CCT.
Choose from online, self-paced study or live tutor-led sessions for interactive learning and feedback.
Develop your training skills with our Train The Trainers Course
Conclusion
Compassionate and inclusive leadership is an approach that ensures psychological safety, encouraging teams to collaborate and allowing organisations to deliver effective patient-centred care. Applying these principles in healthcare drives better outcomes for patients, develops stronger teams and a culture of continuous improvement.
