Leaders in action - White Water Group

In search of the All-Weather Leader

François Moscovici — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 08:00:05 +0000

As part of our White Water Insights research series, we are introducing a new white paper on leadership. Over the last 10 years – and in our previous careers – we have worked with
hundreds of successful as well as struggling executives, and we have continuously refined our understanding of what makes great leaders. This White Paper tests the concept of the Balanced Leader through a survey of business leaders and HR directors. To get your free copy, simply complete the form below:

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Leading Millennials is exciting

Natasha Lancaster — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 15:47:47 +0000

I’m quite partial to millennials… Are you?

Today the Telegraph interviews Averil and other experts on how to lead millennials. Views range from the ‘received wisdom’ of the Entitled Generation to more subtle cues on getting the best out of them…

Where some see uncommitted workers, Averil discusses more entrepreneurial workers seeking a fuller life: “They want to find ways to incorporate real relationships, be hands on in bringing up their kids, keep up external interests and be fit and healthy.” This is facilitated by the fact that “They grew up with technology so they know how to work remotely and cannot see why sitting in a building is required. They don’t ‘go to work’, they just work.”

“There are countless examples of unhappy baby boomers who, for their whole career, have been absent, workaholic, and money-focused because they perhaps felt they had no choice. Indeed, if we were to design a business all over again to suit human nature, allowing people the chance to use their strengths for fair reward and have a satisfying home life, wouldn’t we want this, too?”

Read on in this article by Tanith Carey

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But how do you really feel?

Natasha Lancaster — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 09:00:00 +0000

It has been a week of strongly held, fiercely expressed and often diametrically opposed emotions. Long repressed fury and grudges have kept pace with eulogies. Whatever your intellectual or political stance one thing has been clear. People have an enormous capacity for emotional reaction and very little ability to be empathic with others.

In every leadership situation, how people feel is of critical importance. It has the ability to make or break initiatives and yet emotions are often given the least consideration in the grand scheme of things. Time and time again, leaders have been surprised at the howl of rage that accompanies their announcements. They don’t see it coming: Bob Diamond’s – no doubt logical to him – view that it was time to move on, sent people ravening for blood. People’s feelings were not yet sufficiently appeased to allow them to let go their anger. Cameron’s ill chosen, Michael Winner catch phrase, ‘Calm down, dear’ inevitably provoked a paradoxical reaction.

Strong leadership will provoke strong reactions. Professional leaders seek to recognise the emotions they will engender by their actions and will plan in advance how they can bring people with them by provoking positive and constructive feelings. In every situation, emotions are a data stream – leaders neglect them at their peril. Above all, they should never just hope they won’t happen. In order to be a truly emotionally intelligent leader, you have of course to start with yourself. ‘Aye, there’s the rub’ – Hamlet. Learning to recognise your own feelings, give them legitimacy and then deal with them appropriately is a precursor to being skilled at dealing with other people’s emotionally charged reactions.

Those at the most senior levels have classically been expected to demonstrate stiff upper lipped stoicism, play their cards close to their chests and indulge in what psychologists would usually describe as denial – often because of their fear of how others might perceive their responses. As a result, they can be disfunctional due to lack of emotional literacy.

Science tells us that leads to pretty grim consequences for people’s health, well being and judgment. Recognising and categorising an emotion influences the emotional experience itself. For example correctly processing emotional reactions to traumatic events – e.g. loss of a job, restricted bonuses, delayed promotion – leads to health benefits, more adaptive behaviours, better relationships, faster results and better working memory.

Being able to label feelings, makes people more magnanimous towards others. All of which contribute to success. Social psychologist James Pennebaker describes verbally labelling an emotion as much like applying a digital technology (language) to an analogue signal (emotion and the emotional experience). If an emotion remains in analogue form, it cannot be understood or conceptually tied to the meaning of an event. Once an experience is translated into language then it can be processed in a conceptual manner. It can be assigned meaning, coherence and structure. The traumatic event can therefore be assimilated, resolved and eventually forgotten.
If this process does not happen, incomplete emotional processing has a deleterious effect on well-being, judgment and decision making. If you have time, catch the fascinating programme on Radio 4 on iPlayer to hear about Pennebaker’s work on Expressive writing.

What we are not suggesting is that you let it all hang out. Quite the opposite! We think you owe it to yourself to take positive action to master a practical emotional approach to processing emotion and events.

If you want to hear more about what you can do in fifteen minutes a day over four days to improve your emotional resilience, give us a call – 020 7036 8899 or drop us a line by return.

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Don’t step on my Blue Suede Shoes (but don’t mind if I step on yours…)

François Moscovici — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 08:00:00 +0000

What do Wynonie Harris, Arthur Crudup and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton have in common? – They all did the hard work but Elvis got the credit (and the royalties).

In the 50s, black american rock and blues music was segregated to the R&B charts. These served as test markets for new songs. The songs were then covered by white artists who would generate sales volumes. So Wynonie recorded Good Rocking Tonight, Arthur That’s All Right and Big Mama Hound Dog. In most cases the original performer withered or at least never made it to the level of their imitator.

There are countless parallels in the corporate world: if you Google “My Boss takes the credit” you will find dozens of business agony aunts dispensing advice to anguished, helpless or simply angry ‘victims’. Some organisations reinforce this type of behaviour: they see it as part of apprenticeship: “one day, you will be a Partner and you too will be allowed to steal ideas from your subordinates…” Obviously, this is not purely a corporate issue: “One day you will have Tenure and you will be able to steal ideas from your students (and you won’t even have to pay them)…”

From a leadership perspective, what should be done about this situation? I see this as a two questions:

(i) is giving credit desirable?

And (ii) if it is, how do you make it happen?

Both questions find their answer in good old Behavioural Psychology: Everything we know about reinforcement is that positive feedback, particularly public feedback is the most effective way to both motivate and develop people. So if you simply want to squeeze the lemon and not develop the person, then go ahead, keep the credit aligned with the hierarchy. A situation where it would be easy to do would be any form of internship for example. However, in the ongoing War for Talent, development is the key to retention.

Only the rarefied salaries at companies like Goldman Sachs can hope to compete using money as the sole motivator. And money is only one of 9 key career motivators, so you would be wrong about 88% of the time! For the rest of us, development and credit are key to building a healthy talent pool. So how do you stop a bad habit? Again, Behavioural Psychology provides the answer: ruthlessly reward the ‘right’ behaviour and consistently punish its absence. Do it often enough and everybody will get the message. Gold stars and red cards should not be limited to the classroom or the football pitch. Our advice to our client is to design an appropriatebehavioural programme, including hard metrics for senior people such as linking their bonus to desirable behaviours. For them too, positive reinforcement just works!

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Choosing an executive coach for women

Natasha Lancaster — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 08:00:00 +0000

I believe all senior women should have executive coaches. They have complex lives and are still likely to be so in the minority at the highest levels that a trusted relationship is essential. Yet women take up developmental opportunities less than men – often because of the many demands on their time, sometimes because they don’t shout as loud for what they are entitled to and often because they expect to be able to do it all themselves. In the interviews we conducted for our book, Coaching Women to Lead, many women talked about how a very male model of coaching had proved unhelpful. As one woman said, ‘He walked in and asked me about my 5 year plan. It was so stressful as he obviously didn’t have a clue what I was juggling in my life!’ Women probably need to plan their lives more than they do, but any career plan will have to encompass the many different roles that women want to incorporate. Coaching needs to take in the realities of women’s lives in all their difference and complexity. Your coach doesn’t need to be a woman. He or she does have to have some important characteristics in addition to the more obvious standards we have written about before. So when you decide to find a coach, (and really I think you should take this very seriously and start looking right now as it is one of the things that our respondents said helped them accelerate their careers) here are a few things to consider. Choose someone who:

Does not assume they know what your personal environment comprises. Many organisations were designed by and for men. As a result, women face very different challenges and experiences.
Understands that organisations are not gender neutral. Traits and characteristics associated with maleness are more likely to be accepted as the norm. While many allegedly female skills are discussed and endorsed, they aren’t actually rewarded in day to day behaviour.
Is conscious of their own unconscious bias . . .and the organisation’s. I was gender blind for years, accepting as the norm that senior people were usually male. What beliefs have potential coaches challenged in their own attitude to gender diversity. If they say they treat everyone the same, there may be a lack of insight into the issues.
Realises that men and women may be differently motivated. Women are more likely to say that they want advancement so that they can make a difference rather than so they can gain status or power. Now, that may just be what the ‘good girl’ in us thinks is more acceptable but it may actually touch on a very real difference. So a coach needs to discover what motivates the individual.
Questions the veracity of 360 feedback because he or she knows that labels like ‘aggressive’ are used differently for men and women and need careful exploration before setting off to remedy or tone down behaviour.
Is smart enough to know that none of the above may apply to you rather than making assumptions about what ‘all women’ are like because the wonderful thing about women is that they are themselves so diverse that they will all want to do everything differently!

So, choose well, engage in coaching and become the best, most authentic, all-round version of who you want to be .

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Loving in the workplace

Natasha Lancaster — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 10:00:00 +0000

As all the red roses droop, the hearts and balloons are put away for another year and the public displays of intimacy are past, we are thinking about what it takes for leaders to foster true relationships in the workplace. Do we set a calendar date to tell people how much they matter to us, how much we appreciate them, what we think are their sublime qualities or do we just wait for the appraisal date and contemplate devices as crude as the ‘feedback sandwich’?

Engagement is a worldwide issue for large businesses. A 2012 Towers Watson global survey of 32,000 employees finds that ⅔ of employees are either disengaged or feel unsupported by the business. Once you realised that the truly engaged are sprinkled from the top to the bottom of the organisation you begin to wonder how companies stay in business. 26% are disengaged – the living dead going through enough of the motions to avoid detection (but then again – who is looking closely enough?) or the c.v. pedlars who just can’t wait to get out. Some of those by the way are the most senior people who talk about their ‘running away fund’ – as soon as the mortgage is paid, the children’s school fees organised, whatever… they promise themselves they’ll be off. Between these extremes you find everything from the almost catatonic, to the ones that could be boosted into highly engaged with the slightest encouragement.

Triage on the battlefield or A & E means that in an emergency you ignore those who will live or die anyway and you put your focus on those who could go either way. If you could increase engagement of the moderately engaged by even 10%, what commercial advantage could this give you? People are really complex but also quite simple. The human condition demands that in order to grow into fully formed adults we need to connect, belong, form attachments, receive recognition. Anything else leads to psychopathy. Our organisations are human systems. How do we make them humane as well? We hear a lot of theory about Emotional Intelligence but somehow behaving in an emotionally intelligent way becomes awfully difficult when you have been encouraged for years to leave your feelings at the door as you clock in. So the emotions talked about most in the corporate world are anxiety, stress, fear, frustration. The positive, life enhancing feelings like excitement, joy, love, fascination, inspiration are a little less obvious.

We also hear quite a lot of talk from senior people about their need to develop intimacy with people at work. Yet, when we work in groups with clients, every time they approach what could be an intimate moment of genuine thought or self-disclosure, some wise guy cracks a joke or uses another displacement device to avoid the fearsome risk of embarrassment. When you then put them into a structured exercise that requires to go beyond the usual mundanities of the weather, the best back roads or the budget, and give them the opportunity to engage in deep and meaningful topics, they take to it like ducks to water. Often people feel constrained about talking about anything personal with work colleagues. Of course, professional communication should be planned and purposeful but in order to really know your people, understand their drivers it is critical to be comfortable having some of those deep and meaningful conversations in ordinary time not just when big life events intrude.

When working with leaders to enable them to become emotionally connected and inspirational, we often start with heroic leadership styles – Henry V, Tim Collins, and the like, to challenge and refresh stale, jargonised linguistics but then it always has to move on to emotional openness and self revelation. That takes guts but, when, from a position of perceived strength, they open up about their own doubts and fears they transmogrify into the type of leader people might actually want to follow.

Top tips:

1) Response contingent positive reinforcement – fancy words for ‘catch someone doing something (anything) right and tell them immediately’. Point out what strengths they were using to do it and ask them to find new ways of using those strengths. Every one gives positive feedback, but few do it well or often enough and far too many think it is the mere bread in the sandwich that allows you to tell people the bad stuff.

2) Use selective self-disclosure. A leader who looks perfect (and only you know you are not) or tries to appear perfectly in control at all times is not a good role model. Someone who copes inspires us better. Let them see some of your workings, how you got to this point in your calculations or ability to see the future e.g. I had some real doubts about this path but I overcame them because… I have had my dark nights of the soul, but now…

3) Love people to bits – that’s the White Water mantra. However awkward, difficult or different from you people choose to be, find what is wonderful, unique, special and admirable in them. Focus on that, tell them genuinely what you like and respect about them, reward steps in the right direction and ignore the ‘naughty ‘ behaviour- (works for children too!)

4) Be brave enough to allow greater intimacy. Avoid the instinct to shut down. People are capable of huge and deep thoughts about the meaning of life. See where that goes instead.

Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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(De)-focused leadership?

Natasha Lancaster — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the moments before I took the call asking me to speak on BBC Radio about Focus, I had been:

commenting on a family WhatsApp conversation,
checking my phone messages,
updating Facebook,
reading e-mails,
catching up on LinkedIn; and
feeling guilty about not tweeting enough.

All fabulously entertaining distractions. Psychologists get very suspicious about this kind of behaviour, assuming that there is some displacement, i.e. the avoidance of a more challenging task, something bigger that we can’t face. So we mop up all the smaller tasks available, distracting ourselves from our true purpose. Habitual behaviours – like obsessionally checking all your social media or even your business e-mails – seem rational but repeatedly breaks concentration and shifts your attention from the important to the merely urgent. It is easy to blame open plan offices, gadgets or meetings for reduced focus, but the biggest single problem is likely to be yourself. Intrusive thoughts such as doubts about your ability or the enormity of the task destroy concentration and lead to avoidance. This problem gets amplified in the next generation: research on students by Larry Rosen has shown that they were only able to focus for a shocking average of 3 minutes and most of their distractions came from technology. Even when all the alerts were switched off- so no beeps or vibrations, they were still distracted, wondering about what messages had accrued. The best students were unsurprisingly those who could concentrate for longest and the worst were those who worked on several tasks at once and consumed more media. However, those who could exercise ‘Metacognitions’ – make insightful judgements about how to handle interruptions to their focus, did better. So self -awareness is the first step if you want to train new patterns of behaviour. Be honest about where the interruptions to your focus come from, remove them wherever you can and make informed decisions.

Focused leadership

We know from our own leadership model that a key attribute of successful leaders is Drive, and that Drive is a combination of energy (Zest) and the ability to focus despite high volumes of distraction, a desire for detail, competing demands and lack of certainty. They seem to exert a consistently high degree of self-control. Furthermore, successful leaders need what to focus on. Daniel Goleman – of Emotional Intelligence fame – claims that leaders need to use focus:

on themselves: to be aware of their own feelings, values and intuitions;
on people: to read them well, manage relationships; and
on the big picture: to understand the larger forces and systems and to determine the best strategy going forward.

Some basic tips

We all vary in our ability to focus but individually experience a wide range of levels of concentration. What can we do to consistently operate at the top of that range?

Don’t even think about multi tasking. If you want to know why, try walking behind someone who is walking and texting, especially if you are in a hurry – they end up not doing either thing very well. Science has shown that multi tasking doesn’t work. If you need to focus on more than one thing, do what is called switch tasking. Concentrate fully on the one thing for a period of time and then on the other. Some of us love to be spinning plates all the time, perhaps because we are terrified of getting bored. Multi-taskers just love the excitement. Successful people learn to focus when they have to.
Learn to deal with distractions. The obvious external distractions are people interrupting – in person, phone, e-mail etc. Shut the door. Tell them you need 30 minutes and to come back later . Most things can wait that long. Often we allow things to break our focus because we really don’t want to do the task in hand. That’s probably because of the internal distractions – thoughts like, ‘it’s too difficult’ ‘too complicated’, ‘I’m not smart enough’ or even ‘what do I want for tea?’ These thoughts intrude if you let them. Keep drawing your attention back and politely telling yourself to shut up because it will probably be fine. I have already had two people walk in and start talking while I was trying to write this. Although I asked them (nicely) to leave me alone, it took minutes to get my focus back because of point 1 – I wanted to be in the middle of the plates. Now concentrate!
Exercise your focus muscle – when you need to concentrate, check all your messages- phone, e-mails, Facebook and then switch everything off while you focus for 10 minutes. Each day, do a few minutes more without all the distraction. Gradually wean yourself off the constant stimulation. Make set times when you gorge yourself on all the social media stuff and then get back to focussing.
If something’s worth doing, it is worth doing any way you can. It is easy to scare yourself out of focussing by setting the standard too high. Stop trying to do a perfect job. Settle down and have a go at ‘doing it badly’. Give that permission and you will get started.
Focus on your dreams We often maintain we can’t focus on our important aspirations because we just don’t have the time. You never will, so don’t put it off. Just take 15 minutes at a time to have a go at doing something in bite-sized chunks. I’ve written 5 books now and I never had any time to do it so once I planned the content, it was 10 minutes when I got up, 20 minutes at the airport, 15 minutes before lunch and before I knew it I had thousands of words.

Ok, got that off my chest; now I can allow myself to tweet! Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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Leadership and Resilience: Sometimes we just need the proof

François Moscovici — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000

There are many ways to convince somebody that changing a behaviour might be a good idea. In most cases the simple rational argument is not enough; nor are appeals to emotions or shock tactics. Usually a combination of several factors lines up and we move from ‘pre-contemplation’ to action fairly rapidly. What seems to work for me is the Big Number Convincing Statistic: the simple key figure that will simplify a complex choice. For example, when I was a smoker many moons ago I often tried to distinguish between ‘inconvenience’ i.e. diminished sense of smell and taste, shorter breath, etc. from the real risk of smoking. And then one day I picked up the key stat: 50%. There is roughly one chance in two of dying at a younger age from a smoking related ailment. Was I prepared to bet on 50%? – Not really… Here is another one: 80% squared is the benefit of wearing a helmet as a cyclist. 80% of cyclists deaths are due to head injuries + in populations where you have a valid measurement, wearing a helmet reduces head injuries in accidents by 80%. Again a BNCS… So what is the connection with leadership and resilience? Many clients come to us with an issue around long-term resilience. Our programmes cover physical, psychological and social resilience but, until now, I hadn’t found a good BNCS comparable to the examples above. Cue Dr. Evans, a Professor at McGill University. His analysis of the impact of moderate exercise is particularly insightful because he has managed to extract the message from the noise of conflicting research, usually sponsored by drugs manufacturers. He shows a series of BNCSs and come up with a number of his own: 23.5 hours. Watch the video below to find out why…

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Go with the flow?

Natasha Lancaster — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 23:00:00 +0000

Sounds a bit too hippy and laid back for modern leadership? According to positive psychologists, achieving a state of flow is the real key to effectiveness, creativity and sheer joy in your work. In flow, you have total concentration, time flies and you know you are functioning at your very best. You may be working hard but are quite unconscious of that as so caught up in the moment. You are not particularly aware of your emotions, happy or sad – just in the zone. Andy Murray described exactly that state when he won the Men’s singles at Wimbledon last week to the point that he had no memory of the winning point. Now that is real focus! In the white water turmoil of daily life, it can be hard to find those perfect moments of flow – when nothing else seems to matter but the effortless balance of your skills, perfectly matched to the current challenge. These are the moments that are often later recalled as some of your best experiences. The positive psychologist, Csikszentmhalyi (‘Cheeks sent me high’, to you), who has carried out the definitive research on flow, found that these periods of flow were most likely to happen when people truly played to their own signature strengths, without let or hindrance, without interruption or interference. Yet we often find that people have either never been really sure what their true strengths are or have lost sight of them as they climbed up through the organisation. People are also pretty useless at setting aside uninterrupted time. Knowing your strengths We ask clients to write a story telling us about the last time they were absolutely at their best. We call it a positive introduction. It allows us to access their strengths and to help them to find ways to confidently use the strengths in novel ways every day. As a result, they build more of these flow moments into their working life for maximum benefit. Our clients describe very different flow situations: for one it might be the construction of a perfect spreadsheet, for another the exquisite delivery of a fascinating presentation, for some of us it is the deep focus we achieve in a three-hour coaching session. Each to their own and each to their strengths. Sadly, all too often, people can only recall events outside work or that happened many years ago. Life has become so busily at the beck and call of external demands and internal interruption that flow and hence satisfaction and performance are both limited. Focus and concentration hold the key to achieving flow. Distraction interrupts flow. It can take hours to recover the peace of mind needed to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose yourself in it, and the easier it is to be distracted. 90 minutes for flow Only too often we are disturbed by internal or external distraction and so never truly find ourselves in flow – interruptions, self-doubt and lack of control make sure of that. We all pride ourselves on multitasking when, in fact, that never really works. (Test it out: try walking behind someone who is attempting to walk and text – both activities slow down dramatically and are inefficient and frustrating.) We encourage clients to plan for 90 uninterrupted minutes to get each major task done. Without phone calls, texts, e-mails and people to distract, there is almost no other choice but to achieve some kind of flow. The more flow you experience the greater the happiness people report so it has a fundamental role in both achieving your best and feeling good about it. Passing it on Once you have increased your own experience of flow, it is time to develop the conditions for team flow in order to ensure your people’s engagement. Start by knowing their strengths and allowing them to exercise these in clear uninterrupted time slots. Minimise distraction. Maximise harmony and flow to develop the happiest and most productive team. Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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Compassionate Leaders

Natasha Lancaster — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 23:00:00 +0000

‘There is always pain in the room’ (Frost 2003) This week alone I have heard that someone’s frail elderly Mother is going through surgery, a city broker is dealing with a heart problem and has more tests to endure, a banker is despairing about yet more indecision about the rationalisation of her team with the implications for relocation for all the families. Suffering is pervasive in organisations. Yet it is often either ignored or inexpertly handled. Some gruesome examples from real life:

• A Father dies and a manager is asked –‘How long do you think it will take to get over this? Three weeks, maybe?’ The answer was unprintable.

• The young woman widowed after 11 months of marriage. ‘You are young. You will love again’ The result – horror that she might be so fickle.

• The miscarriage. No-one ever mentions it again.

They avoid her in the corridor. The consequence – disengagement and a slowing of recovery. And, of course, no one ever talks to the desolate Father-to-be. We differ from each other in our ability to be compassionate. People often mean well, don’t know what to do, want to know how they can fix things or are worried that they will say the wrong thing. All of which makes them appear utterly lacking in compassion. How important is it for a leader to foster compassion in an organisation? On the one hand there is the humane argument about the right thing to do and, on the other, the blindingly obvious fact that all you have are your people. Until robots are able to replace them, you are stuck with these real life problems. The research shows that compassion at work matters because it impacts on resilience and builds a positive identity within the business. People are healthier and happier. It connects people to each other, it connects them to the organisation through loyalty and commitment and it connects them to their own humanity. Above all, research shows it builds trust in the workplace. Without trust, your workforce will be less engaged. Witnessing compassion elevates and inspires more compassion, giving and caring. Compassion is contagious. It is a virtuous circle. Where the whole person is valued, they are not expected to leave their personal identity at reception every morning. Some of the current working conditions in our organisations expose people to incivility, disrespect, injustice, corrosive politics, constant reorganisation and incompetence on a daily basis. Becoming compassionate involves noticing, feeling, interpreting and responding to the other’s pain. Being a compassionate leader involves building an environment where mere self – interest is not the norm, where high quality connections are encouraged between people, where the whole person is valued and shown care and respect. Sometimes there is a need for the more formal support of coaches or counsellors but more often compassion is shown in the small, inconsequential aspects of behaviour that reinforce how people are cherished and also in the way that bullies and the insensitive are handled and given the chance to develop higher skills of emotional intelligence. Organisational habits can work against this. No trust means no-one will admit to human weakness until it is impossible to hide. No expression of emotion can lead to dangerous repression. Fear of crossing professional-personal boundaries can stultify people’s more caring responses. Concerns about fairness-‘well, if I do it for one, I have to do it for everyone’ – can eliminate concern. Ineptitude leads to avoidance. Leading the way in compassion involves being able to:

• pay attention – compassionate leaders know what their people are going through

• Empathise – compassionate leaders realise that emotion is a data stream they cannot afford to ignore and they become literate in their reading of feelings

• Feel – and to let others see those emotions through careful self disclosure • suspend judgment – a compassionate leader understands that how they tackle challenges may not be feasible for all

• Be rather than do – you can’t always fix what people are going through. It would be arrogant to think you could find a ‘solution’ for some of the complexities of life. On occasions, being compassionate is the best and only thing you can offer. You can tell whether an organisation has compassion by the stories that are told by its employees about the way people have been treated, the care they have been shown and the values that have been lived. Leaders can create and support compassion – enabling routines rather than old, more psychopathic ways of treating people. They can ensure those high quality connections get built. They can foster real values in action by demonstrating good compassionate behaviour themselves. Averil, François and all at White Water Group

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