The Compassionate Leader's Playbook - Steven Hargreaves

Awaken the power of compassionate leadership 

The Compassionate Leader's Playbook provides a powerful and pragmatic approach for leaders everywhere who are inspired to build a more compassionate and inclusive world of work, where everyone can thrive, achieve, and stay well. In this important and timely book, Leader, Coach and Founder of The Compassionate Leadership Company, Steven Hargreaves, demonstrates how leading with compassion is great for business, culture, and the bottom line, and how when we lead with compassion everyone benefits.

The Compassionate Leader's Playbook is accessible, practical, and full of tools, tips, and insights to support leaders to awaken and leverage the power of compassion. It introduces the reader to the 360° of Compassion Framework™. A powerful, holistic framework which the author has developed to identify the values, qualities, skills, and competencies, which are required of leaders and their teams to build and sustain a more compassionate workplace. It is informed by contemporary writing and research into compassion, leadership, wellbeing, and high performing teams, along with the authors own perspective, leadership experience and time he has spent coaching leaders and their teams in how to develop a more relational, connected, collaborative and compassionate approach to their life and work. The framework is also an accountability structure to ensure that the leader, their team, and the wider organisation work in such a way as to honour those values. It provides a solid foundation and guide to leading with compassion.

The book explores in depth each of the component parts of the 360° of Compassion Framework - Self-compassion, Attention, Humility, Fairness, Respect, Integrity, Empathy and Courage - to support leaders to tap into and leverage the resources they already have in abundance, whilst helping them generate new insight, perspective, and learning, supporting them to work effectively and with agility within and across these 360° of Compassion, enabling greater performance, productivity, engagement, inclusion and wellbeing across the teams and organisations they lead.

The book contains the new 360° of Compassionate Leadership Self-Diagnostic Tool to enable readers to identify where they are on their journey to awaken their own compassion potential, along with what steps can be taken to elevate their leadership to a more compassionate level. The diagnostic process takes the shape of a series of themed self-reflection exercises for the reader to complete, which build by the end of the book into a complete 360° of Compassion Self-Diagnostic™. This is designed to help the reader to build self-awareness and to self-assess where they are on their journey towards awakening and optimising their compassion potential.

The author believes that the contemporary workplace is one where relationships, connectivity, wellbeing, and purpose now take centre stage and believes it is time for us to seize this moment. For leaders to lead with renewed energy, enhanced kindness, integrity, and empathy. For a more connected, personal, and relational approach to leadership to emerge and become business-as-normal for everyone. The author believes that what people need and want from leadership has changed, and leaders and organisations need to maintain pace with those changes and create the optimal conditions for everyone to be their best and to do their best.

This book provides a response to that leadership 'call to action' and to bring compassionate leadership to life as a definable, tangible, and practical approach to the day-to-day leadership of the self and others. To explain why compassion in leadership matters, what compassion is and how leaders can bring it to life in their everyday leadership, in order to enhance the value they bring to a modern, more relational world of work.