In this video Noelle Russell expands on how compassion and empathy function as core virtues for mindful leaders. She explains that leaders can deepen trust by actively imagining themselves in their team members’ shoes, recalling the challenges and questions those members face, and responding as they would wish to be treated. She stresses that everyone makes mistakes, urging leaders to avoid quick judgments about lateness or personal issues and instead respond with kindness and awareness of the human element. Russell highlights the importance of uncovering unconscious bias—such as gender‑based assumptions in homogenous meetings—by cultivating self‑awareness early in the communication cycle. She then outlines how compassion can be woven into coaching and feedback: delivering growth‑focused input with concern, encouraging peer‑to‑peer feedback, and removing “glasses” of bias when evaluating others. Finally, she frames these practices as a long‑term cultural investment, noting that high‑performing teams thrive when members genuinely like and support each other, and that consistent, modeled empathy will gradually raise team performance.
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Hello and welcome back. Thanks for joining us. We are continuing our discussion on compassion and empathy as a mindful leader, as a virtue for a mindful leader. So we were talking in the previous video about building trust in your team, and that's really very, very important. It allows us to really connect with each other. One thing you can do to help encourage that connection is when you're talking to someone, like, try to remember what it was like to be them. Typically as leaders, we tend to be maybe more, more, have more experience or have been in the industry longer or in the career longer and, or maybe even just further along in life. And so it's very useful as a tool, for me anyway, to remember what it was like to have those kind of questions, right? To be in their shoes, to be doing that walk, walking that walk, and having the challenges that they may be having. And then thinking to myself, if I was them and I had a leader who cared, what would I want them to know? How would I, like, what would I want them to say? And I try to emulate that. And again, it's very much my individualized experience, but I have found that when I do this for my team, they're grateful, and it does help build pretty significant trust in our team, allowing us to work faster, to work harder. Another thing that I think is really important to remember, and I hear this from some of the best leaders that I know, is is to remember that we're human, right? That we all make mistakes. We all show up late to a meeting. We all have no-showed, right, a meeting we should have been at. Like, and if you haven't, you probably will. And then it doesn't define who that person is, right? That, I mean, obviously if it's a pattern and it's a problem, we need to talk about it. But try not to pass judgment on people quickly. Try to use compassion and empathy to stay the tendency that we have to judge people. You know, like, "Oh, that person's always late," or, "Oh, that person has family trouble. They must, you know, they're not committed to their work." Try to think about what it's like to be in their position. Realize that we're human. Realize that we all make mistakes and be just kind about that and really aware of how you're communicating with that person. I do think also that it's important to think about and really analyze your own unconscious bias, right? Is there, you know, I know that just being vocally self-critical, that if I walk into a room with all men and I'm the only female, I instantly have a bias. I instantly know, like, sense that I won't be easily heard, that I'll have to fight to get my voice heard at the table. It's not necessarily true, but I do feel myself go, "All right, let's go," right? Like, I kind of put on the armor and get ready to, like, really push for whatever I'm, you know, in. Where if I'm in a room maybe that's not— that's maybe more diverse, that has men, women, older, younger, right, all different nationalities in it, that I maybe don't feel that sense of like, all right, I'm up against them, right? It's me versus them or us versus them. I don't feel that way in a very diverse audience. And so, but that's, you know, I realize that in hindsight, but when I'm in the meeting, you know, I'm like, I only, I look back on that meeting, I'm like, oh my gosh, like I was totally like Roar! Up for a fight. And it was unnecessary. And why was I like that? Oh, it was probably because I sensed that it was all men and I was gonna have to somehow accommodate something. So just very interesting to try and create a level of self-awareness that allows you to really understand what kind of biases you might have based on who you are, who you were, where you've been, experiences that you've had. I find that it's really important to develop this self-awareness so that we can kind of squash these types of tendencies as early in the communication cycle as possible. The last two things I want to mention in this video is around ways to help your team. So using compassion and empathy can be very impactful when you are using it in the context of coaching your team and providing feedback to your team. It's also really important when you're encouraging your team to provide feedback on each other and really coaching and mentoring them in the spirit of let's be compassionate towards each other. Yes, we want each other to grow, and yes, we want to provide really valuable feedback, but we want, we want to do it in a way that is, that is compassionate, right? That is kind, that is concerned about their growth. Because if we're not careful, it might not be interpreted the way we want it to, right? So I always say, like, put on, you know, try to take off the glasses in which you're seeing through, like those glasses that is a woman in IT, or those glasses that might be, you know, a minority, you know, Hispanic or Latina management. It's just, I'm in a huge minority, does that affect the way I think? Well, I try not to let it, um, by just identifying that maybe because of that fact I'm changing the way I'm approaching a situation. So just become, like I said, more self-aware, um, really look to create opportunities in coaching and feedback loops to present information that'll help my team also use compassion and empathy in their communication style and in their feedback. That they're providing. So just a few things. I mean, we went through a lot of stuff in these two sections. We talked about not only, you know, earning trust, which is a huge part, but also just the concept of compassion and empathy, how you can practice it, how you can encourage it on your teams. And like I said, I just think it's super important that— and what you really want, right? You want a high-performing team. And the reality is the highest performing teams like each other, like live together, hang out, like enjoy each other's company. So try to cultivate this. It's not an overnight success, right? It will be something that you have to work on and cultivate over months and maybe even a year. But if you are diligent about it and you demonstrate it as an example, you'll find that as you build this compassion and empathy into your team, your team will become an even better performer.
