A Chance Encounter Leads Me To A Mind-Opening and Spirit-Confirming Book
I was walking out of one of the Sloan Kettering buildings with Francie a couple of weeks ago, following a chemotherapy session, and encountered this sign: “Kindness Matters.” It struck me deeply for I have always believed that. I posted a photograph of this poster on my Facebook page. I have had over 300 responses, all of them affirming belief in this conviction.
Then I received a note from the head of learning at P&G. She recommended a book to me: Compassionomics: Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes A Difference, written by Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli. I read it in two days. It will go down as one of the handful of books that changed the way I think the most. It did this by providing compelling scientific data based on 1,000 scientific abstacts and 250 research papers that caring really does matter.
This research takes something I’ve long recognized experientially—the impact that caring has on another person and also the person providing that caring—to a biological level. It shows that practicing compassion can change our brains—our brainwaves, brain structure and brain function. The research shows that this in turn can actually change our behavior in meaningful ways as well as the perception of our caring as seen by the receiver’s perspective. And there is a reciprocal, cumulative effect that comes from that behavior, as C. S. Lewis once observed, “When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him.”
The research shows the impact on a person exhibiting compassion on health care patients, health care providers and the health care culture. What struck me as I went through all of these data is how relevant the conclusions are to the business world. I refer here to the influence compassion, i.e. connecting to another person in a way that shows you care, matters to their own expectations of success (or failure) and the formation of trust--the great liberator of an individual’s willingness and ability to act and be their authentic selves.
One of the things that makes this book so powerful is the way it uses carefully designed research studies to show differences in outcomes, including physiological impacts on the patient (heart rate, blood pressure, survival rates after trauma) and psychological effects.
In showing that compassion builds trust in patient experience, the studies go on to show a lower incidence of serious complications from, for example, diabetes.
The research underscores the importance of “non-verbal immediacy” in building trust and evidencing compassion. This underscores the importance of not only being physically close as one is talking to an employee, but it helps me better understand why the most memorable instances of people providing trust (and confidence) in me were not obviously planned but were, rather, spontaneous.
For example, I recall Jack Clagett, my first two-up boss, telling Francie, after I had only been in the company for four or five years, that he wouldn’t be surprised if “someday, all of us might be working for John.”
Or, I recall, Ed Harness passing me in the hall one day and telling me in the most friendly voice, “you better take care of yourself, a lot of people are going to be depending on you.” Or something as simple as John Smale turning to me in a car asking me “what do you think of that idea?”.
The research also shows the importance of a person having a purpose in life to their recovery from disease and, therefore, how important it is that a physician take the time to know what a person’s purpose is.
The authors address the response: “But I don’t have enough time to exhibit compassion.” They use sample conversations to show how compassion can be exhibited in less than a minute. I actually believe, and I think they recognize, that the development of a trusting relationship will take longer than that, but it needn’t take long if it is authentic and genuine.
The book also underscores the importance of workplace culture. While they do this in a health care setting, it is obviously relevant to a business setting.
Bearing on this is an article written by Emma Seppala, the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. “A new field of research,” she writes, “is suggesting that when organizations promote an ethic of compassion rather than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an improved bottom-line. Consider the important—but often overlooked—issue of workplace culture. Employees in positive moods are more willing to help peers and to provide customer service on their own accord. In doing so, they boost co-workers’ productivity levels and increase co-workers’ feelings of social connection as well as their commitment to the workplace and their levels of engagement with their job.”
The truth of this is reflected in elements in our P&G employee attitude studies which probe employees’ satisfaction with their workplace, their respect and regard for their boss and their intention to continue to work at P&G.
Just as I have often made the point that the quality of mutual trust is vital in one-to-one relationships, it is vital that it become a characteristic of the entire culture. This is well-documented in this book as applying to a health care environment. A workplace culture, a part of which involves a caring attitude in one another and where senior leadership is seen as caring about the welfare of fellow employees on a personal level, will produce better results than one that doesn’t do this.
The authors also offer compelling evidence that compassion can be learned.
Turning again to the business environment, this suggests that showcasing the fact that having caring relationships in a caring environment improves outcomes would be worthwhile. Most important would be providing examples of exactly what caring behavior looks like.
In total, the authors make a persuasive case that compassion matters in not only meaningful ways, but also in measureable ways. Compassionate care is more effective than health care without compassion, by virtue of the fact that human connection confers distinct and measureable benefits. The authors argue that it is important to know that the conclusions of this book are not based on what the authors think nor that what they believe. Rather, they are based on what they found clinically and statistically.
The authors conclude by writing that “this book was aimed to change your mind, to help open your eyes to the scientific basis of what you already know to be the right thing to do.” The book did that for me. It has affirmed and brought greater commitment to my longstanding belief that the most important thing we leave behind is not what we said, what we wrote, even what we did but, rather, how we made other people feel.
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