“Compassion doesn’t weaken leadership; it makes it stronger.”
--Rudy Giuliani
Despite his recent travails and, candidly, his stunning and tragic fall from grace, Rudy Giuliani at one time was a pillar of strong leadership, a true role model. As mayor of New York City when the 9/11 attacks occurred, his actions immediately after that devastating event, and for months afterward were nothing short of brilliant. He was clearly the right person for the role at the time, under those catastrophic circumstances. He repeatedly demonstrated decisiveness, boldness, and he was inspiring. He lifted a city up when it was unimaginably down and desperate, and he was compassionate. In my mind it was one of the finest examples of crisis leadership in this country history.
But this is not a story about Rudy Giuliani. His quote above was simply too good to pass on, as it nails the power of compassionate leadership.
No, this blog is inspired by a New York Times article this week about Walmart’s focus on compassionate leadership (“Walmart Wants to Teach Store Managers Compassion,” by Jordyn Holman, published March 12, 2024). I was delighted to read what this global retail behemoth was investing in developing leaders at its Manager Academy, flying about 50 managers in nearly weekly to “…mak[e] sure that our people are the first line of what a manager should think about,” according to Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer. The goal is to make all its workers, especially at the lower end of the hierarchy, feel connected to and contributing toward the bigger corporate mission.
I write about vulnerability, and what compassion has to do with vulnerability is as follows: boiled down to its essence, vulnerable leaders have two indispensable qualities: self-awareness and empathy. Self-awareness is understanding how we reflect onto other people, based on whether we’re good listeners, our body language, our tone of voice, our reaction to bad news, the attention we pay to others we’re engaged with, and so forth. It also enables us to discover our blind spots—things about us that other people are aware of that we’re not. Do we fidget, maintain poor eye contact, say “Uh” a lot when presenting, finish people’s sentences for them, etc. Only by being aware of our blind spots can we take action to address them.
Empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, to understand what they’re feeling, to understand their perspective, to imagine yourself in someone else’s situation. Empathy results from a true seek-to-understand effort on your part on behalf of someone else, and it requires suspending judgment, which is hard for most of us, as we’re all biased to some extent. Bias is part of being human.
Both skills—self-awareness and empathy—enable one to be vulnerable. It’s hard to be so without them. And vulnerability leads to engagement, the basis of relationships, and trust between the leaders and the led. Leaders who let those they lead peek under the tent flap of who they are as human beings, strengths, weaknesses, likes/dislikes, emotions, and all, are the most trustworthy and engaging.
Empathy is rooted in feeling, and compassion is usually based on taking action. Empathy leads to understanding another’s situation, and compassion leads to action and helping behaviors, so the two are critically linked. Compassion is an altruistic response to suffering, but without empathy one will not likely get to that place. And without the skill of knowing how to be vulnerable, one won’t understand how to be empathetic. This is something Giuliani understood well, as his ability to be vulnerable led to his empathetic feelings for his fellow New Yorkers—he felt their pain and suffering—which led to the multitude of compassionate actions he took after 9/11 to try and alleviate their suffering. New Yorkers felt that he was with them, and that generated remarkable popularity for him in the crisis. He was at the time the most admired leader in America.
Again, I applaud Walmart for its focus on teaching its managers how to be compassionate leaders, a synonym for servant leadership, which has its basis in vulnerability. For a company the size of Walmart, with its nearly $650B in revenue last year, 2.3M employees, more than 10,500 stores and clubs in 24 countries, investing in its people will have a huge impact not only on Walmart but throughout other companies as employees and leaders move on to other opportunities. Millennials change jobs more frequently than any other demographic, for a variety of reasons, and they likely make up the bulk of Walmart’s store managers. Carrying on what they learn from Walmart’s Manager Academy about leadership in general and compassion and vulnerability in particular will only enhance the work experience for many others outside of Walmart. That’s a good thing.