An interview with Jane Dutton, PhD

Citation

(2013), "An interview with Jane Dutton, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2013.13620baa.005

An interview with Jane Dutton, PhD

Article Type: Defining Care From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 2

By: Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD; Lead Editor and Interviewer; Professor of Management; Director of MBA Programs; St. Georges University; Grenada, West Indies; Email: kristinekawamura@yahoo.com; Phone: (1) 310 567 7603.

Riane Eisler, JD; Contributing Editor and Interviewer; President, Center for Partnership Studies; Carmel, CA; Email: eisler@partnershipway.org; Phone: (1) 831 624 8337.

Interview Date: 30 November 2012.

Background

Jane Dutton is the Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. Dr Dutton is a prominent leader in the field of positive organization scholarship and explores the ways in which compassion, resilience, and energy can positively affect organizational work environments. She is the author of over one hundred articles and book chapters, as well as of Energize Your Workplace: How to Build and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work (Jossey-Bass, 2003). She has edited 11 books, including Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing Qualitative Research (Copenhagen Business Press, 2011), with Arne Carlson; Using a Positive Lens to Explore Social Change and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (Routledge, 2012), with Karen Golden-Biddle; and Exploring Positive Identity and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (Psychology Press, 2009). She has received many awards, including the Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award, the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award, and the Journal of Management Inquiry Breaking the Frame Award. She has also received the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Scholar Award in the Organization and Management Theory Division, the Organization Development and Change Division, and the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division, and the Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management Award, the Academy’s equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. In recognition of her groundbreaking work, the Ross School of Business granted her the Senior Scholar Award in 2001 and named her Researcher of the Year in 2003 and honored her with a Distinguished University Professorship in 2007.

Summary

Dr Dutton conducts groundbreaking research into thriving at work and the roles that compassion, high-quality connections, and identity processes play in increasing employee and organizational capabilities. She defines compassion as the heart’s response to suffering and emphasizes that suffering, tragedy, and compassion are all natural aspects of human existence. Citing neuroscience research as well as her own organizational studies, she claims that we are as hardwired to be other-serving as we are to be self-serving and that we are born to cooperate. Dr Dutton suggests that the impulse, biology, instinct, and responding of compassion are universal, but that the ways in which compassion expresses itself will be different in different cultures. More work is needed to understand compassion and caring in organizational and cross-cultural management environments.

Interview

You’ve done groundbreaking research on compassion at work and in organizations, and have delivered a rich body of work. How did the compassion work come about?

If you look at the work I’ve done, you’ll see that I rarely work alone. When I started doing the compassion work, I had the opportunity to work with an amazing group of people who wanted to create a new vision of organizations as places for the development and expression of compassion, places for human growth, and places for the development of human strengths.

We started something called the CompassionLab in 1999. The reason we began it was that Peter Frost, my colleague, had been diagnosed with melanoma cancer. He believed that he had gotten it from being a dean – that there was so much toxicity in his job, it had made him ill. In response to that, he experienced firsthand the healing power of compassion in all kinds of ways. He felt personally compelled to tell narratives of compassion that he experienced while ill.

Similarly, I had had a traumatic experience in my family, with our younger daughter. It worked out okay, but at the time it was quite horrible. My husband and I had joint appointments in two departments in the university. We experienced differences in the way the two departments mobilized compassion. One department was really healing to us while the other was not.

So both Peter Frost and I entered this compassion work with a personal commitment to try put stories of compassion out into the discourse of organizational studies, because nobody was talking about this important part of people’s life experiences.

The research we did in the CompassionLab was extremely nourishing to everyone involved in it. When Peter and I joined forces, we created a community of practice where we were trying to live what we were studying. We intentionally committed to a set of life-giving practices for how we conducted ourselves, which included things like “We engage this work in a spirit of joy”, and “We treat our personal stories as serious wisdom”. We created a really bountiful space with really rich soil for doing our work. I would think that any one of us would say that we grew, and we continue to grow, from the soil that we jointly tilled in the garden.

The thing that was interesting was that we began our work thinking we wouldn’t find compassion anywhere (laughter). [Instead], we found it everywhere. It’s not that there weren’t compassion failures and compassion dilemmas. I would say the overriding takeaway for us – from multiple studies in multiple settings – was that compassion was a highly powerful, invisible, human, healing force that was operating all over the place in organizations. But it was not being talked about and not being given credit, just like a lot of other relational practices [that are related to] the well-being, the performance, and the accomplishments of the collective.

How would you define compassion?

Compassio [in Latin] literally means “with the suffering”. You cannot have compassion without suffering. As Jack Kornfield describes it, compassion is the heart’s response to suffering. I think you can have positive interrelating to lots of different things, but compassion is a particularly human response. Suffering is part of the human experience, therefore, suffering is normal, and it is everywhere – just like compassion is everywhere. When you include suffering and compassion, you are giving a fuller depiction of the lived experience of people at work.

You write that pain, suffering, and tragedy are part of human existence

Yeah. It doesn’t have to be something big. It can be something [very small]. I did a study with colleagues [Gelaye Debebe and Amy Wrzesniewski] where we used stories told by hospital cleaners to build a description of the valuing and devaluing acts that help to compose the meaning that people derive from their work. For example, one cleaner in the study discussed an experience he had had of getting on the elevator with their hands totally full of cleaning supplies. He asked a doctor who was sharing the elevator], “Please, push floor 3,” and the request was completely ignored. That’s suffering. It doesn’t have to be the loss of a family member, or a 911, or something that dramatic. There’s suffering in many people’s everyday experiences at work.

I love my friend Peter Frost’s phrase, “There’s always pain in the room” because it is so true. The compassion work shines the light on the positive, on the healing force, but also on the negative. Both are totally part of the lived humanity. With the Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) work, the positive is not just about being nice. It’s about understanding what processes are capability-building. POS and compassion work are about strength-building. This is not about ignoring the negative. You need compassion to be able to deal with the negative.

What is the relationship between caring and compassion?

You know, I don’t have a good answer to that. I feel like I need to have a good answer to that. I think of caring as a broader umbrella term, and compassion as a particular form of caring.

If you’ve closed down the CompassionLab, what project are you working on right now?

We have actually just reopened the CompassionLab this year as CompassionLab2. I’m excited to tell you about the new work! [But before I talk about it], what you have to understand is part of what I have learned is that my best work comes from the universe. I don’t even know how to talk about it; it’s a lot about getting myself out of the way and listening for and discerning openings. I think that there are calls that say, “Come here, and you will be surprised and delighted!” I’m usually coming from a pretty personal place with my work.

I was introduced to my new project through my sister who has done amazing volunteer work for an organization called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep [www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org]. The work is simply beautiful. This is an organization where volunteer professional photographers go into hospitals to take photographs of parents, families, and their babies when they have died or are going to die. You have strangers, photographers, coming into this place of grief to take photographs of families at a moment in time that is valuable and profound. If you think about it, people going through this kind of loss do not usually get any photographs of their baby. It’s heartbreaking.

I knew coming back to the compassion work that I wanted to be able to bring the lives of women more center stage. I knew I wanted to try to bring the beauty of compassion to life. This project gave me the opportunity to do this.

What my colleagues [Kristina Workman and Jessica McClain] and I did with this project was to study how compassion is organized and designed in an organization, in an extreme case where compassion makes a difference. We interviewed the photographers and also studied [Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’s systems, processes, and] training manuals, trying to understand how the organization had constructed roles and procedures and did all the organizing around allowing people to be compassionate and to do compassionate work.

The first paper we’ve written and submitted for publication from this project is called “Readying for Compassion.” It’s about the different ways that people and organizations psychologically, technically, materially, and relationally ready people to be compassionate. It problematizes compassion. What’s so different in this research is that this compassionate work that we are studying is not being done in a helping occupation (like social work or medicine) where the occupation [itself] is supporting the compassionate behavior. Many assume that compassion is such a natural, unskilled practice, and compassionate acts are often invisible. With this organization that we are studying, the preparatory work for compassionate acts is much more visible. The photographers are much more conscious and able to talk about them. It is really a deviant situation, where the suffering is [that of] a stranger and it is extreme.

This project has taught me, and my research colleagues, so much about humanity. It has been a privilege to be allowed into the experiences of loss for the families as well as the space created between the photographer and family to record, and honor, the baby’s life. The privilege of being allowed to tell the story of the organization and to study its compassion processes has just been mind-blowing.

In starting this project, I had been worried about being a stranger and going in and talking to photographers and taking their stories about their experiences, because I had not lost a child. I didn’t want the photographers or the families to think that I was using them. Kristina, who is a graduate student, was one of the signs of the universe that I should be doing this. I remember the day I asked her [to participate in the project]. She said she wanted to work on compassion. I said to her I’m not doing compassion work anymore. Then I thought about this project. I remember thinking, oh gosh, how am I going to ask Kristina if she wants to work on a study that involves photographing dying babies? It doesn’t fit your normal business research project! But the amazing thing is, is that she has the story. Her parents had lost a baby, and there were no pictures. It was a major story in her family’s life. Her parents were so excited that Kristina was involved in this. So Kristina actually did all the interviews. She had a way of connecting to [the photographers] authentically, in a way that felt right. People could talk with her. She is [also] a very gifted interviewer. I was with her and listened. I want to make sure that I give her the credit here.

Do you have an example of how Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep designed for compassion?

[Here is an] example about material readying, or the physicality of preparing. This is having the right things on hand. For example, what clothes you wear. For example, one of the photographers was very articulate about trying to wear clothes that on one hand didn’t express grief and on the other were not glitzy. For the material readying involved in dressing, there seemed to be to issues at play. First, the photographer was trying to find that right blend of attire that would strengthen herself as a photographer –, i.e. to remind herself that they were gifted photographers and taking pictures in a very sacred space [with the grieving families]. Second, this photographer talked about wearing attire that signaled deep respect for the family and their suffering. For example, she talked about trying to not be in funeral clothes but to be in the kind of clothes that were in this in-between space. So that’s an example of material readying.

The material readying has been so interesting to me because it’s made me look at our own as role faculty members. As faculty members, we have students that are suffering that are entering [our schools] all the time, and we don’t usually think about being prepared for this. An example of material readying in this world, our world, would be to have Kleenex boxes in [faculty] offices to normalize the possibility of crying.

I’ve gotten so excited to discover how these preparing moves affect both the person trying to be compassionate and the receiver of compassion. I love the theory that we’ve built! The theory talks about how these four kinds of preparing moves [psychological, technical, material, and relational] are directed both at increasing the positive for the compassion giver and decreasing the negative. [The preparing moves] also increase the positive strengths and decrease what would be negative, or harmful, to the compassion receiver. The theory also discusses the way the preparing moves move, and how they affect the quality of the connection between these two people. So for me, it really shows the complexity and the beauty of compassion episodes in an orderly way and the skilled practice that can be part of compassion preparing.

This photography study has been so incredibly generative and wonderful. I’ve loved it. My colleagues and I are writing several different things from it. This is the kind of work I adore – [studying] one thing in really detailed ways with other researchers.

Let’s talk about how we can apply this to a for-profit organization. What can managers to do promote compassion and positive relationships in their organizations?

Well, just so you know (laugh) […] that’s a complicated question! We define compassion as the noticing of suffering, the feeling of suffering, and the movement toward response to that suffering. It’s a process, not just an emotion. Unlike psychologists, we look at compassion as more than just an emotion. If we think about compassion in this way, then, and we also acknowledge that compassion is evolutionary and biological, we are hardwired to be compassionate.

Part of the answer to your question is literally having organizations being very mindful about getting out of the way of this natural healing force. An example of how to do this would be to decentralize decision-making about how to deal with someone who is suffering and to allow the emergent healing communities to evolve. As we’ve talked about, it’s not enough just to say you have compassion or you don’t have compassion. In organizations, we can think about compassion competence, which involves the scale, the scope, the speed, and the customization of the compassionate response to the particulars of the sufferer. It’s really important that a person who is working with someone who is suffering is able to customize their compassionate response to the unique needs of the sufferer. Some people are going to want to have their suffering known, you know, they want a lot of attention. Some people don’t want that. We’ve studied lots of different kinds of crisis situations where there is suffering involved. We’ve watched leaders try to apply kind of a standard one-size-fits-all response to all people that have suffered. Often times, that kind of response can backfire.

If you are asking about a prescription for compassion, the first step is to notice suffering. Noticing suffering means being present – both the leader’s being present and the coworkers’ being present to each other so that suffering can be known and felt. Sometimes the most compassionate response is to simply be – something big doesn’t need to be done. It means literally just being with a person and creating a holding space for the suffering. That depends a lot on just noticing, knowing, that someone is suffering. This is not a very complete answer, but it’s a start for addressing [a big question].

You’ve written about the meaningfulness and impact of bringing compassion to the individual in the organization through the qualities of active listening and generosity. Do these qualities feed into what you are talking about here?

Yeah, I think that the quality of compassion is related a lot to the quality of the connections between people, the quality of social fabric – to the degree that things like active listening and other aspects of respectful engagement are central for creating a higher-quality social fabric. I think this is an important part of compassion.

Today, because of the Web and globalization, we have many virtually structured organizations in which people from many different backgrounds are working together. How do you build positive relationships into the social fabric of these environments? So much of this usually happens through body language

I teach a course on this. I personally haven’t done lots of empirical work on this myself, but instead, I borrow other people’s work to provide some prescriptions for this.

If you have a virtual collective that is interdependent, it’s important to have the collective’s first meeting be face-to-face. This creates a potentiality in the social fabric that you’ll never have if you don’t do that early on. So, early moves to connect people more holistically, face-to-face, establishing bodily connections, are very important. Researchers have found that some of the video-based technologies, though not perfect, are increasingly helpful for people to build connections. The neuroscience behind connective dynamics shows that if you can see people’s faces in a meaningful way, there’s a lot that’s communicated automatically and unconsciously that is really helpful in building connections. This means tending not only to the frequency and the form of connecting but also to the way that people connect.

Barbara Fredrickson has a new book coming out called Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become [Penguin Publishing, 2013] that talks about high-quality connections. She’s had such a big impact on me. I’ve written with her. She’s a good friend, and she’s one of my real academic heroes. It’s really about love, she says. She calls love the supreme emotion, and she uses an emotional lens to talk about this, which is very much a relational lens. One of the many things she’s good at is talking about the bodily processes that explain why these positive connections are so generative and why they are so absolutely critical for well-being.

When you are trying to build the possibility of compassion and positive relationships across distance, the way you come together virtually – after the face-to-face beginning – is really important. Barbara’s work suggests that you literally get into a different social form by communicating with a ratio of at least three positives to one negative.

What do you mean by a ratio of three positives to one negative?

It’s a tipping point in the ratio of positive to negative emotions that fosters flourishing for individuals, dyads, and groups. It’s in her book. The best paper to look at to understand this is Barbara Fredrickson’s article in American Psychologist called “Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing”. In this paper she worked with Marcial Losada, a mathematician, and they did modeling based on complexity theory to explain the change in the form that accounts for flourishing. They have data at the individual level, the dyadic level, and the business-team level that all pretty much show the same tipping point. It’s really powerful.

I remember when she was working on this. She used to be a faculty member at Michigan and we used to meet regularly. She was really astonished by her empirical results, because all these different levels suggested that the tipping point for the positivity ratio was pretty much the same. She thinks that this is literally talking about a life-giving process dynamic that is associated with flourishing or growth in people, in relationships, and in collectives. For example, her research suggests that when you have individuals experiencing a ratio of at least three positive emotions to one negative emotion during the day, your body is functioning in a different form. When you’re in a business meeting, for example, the group has developed a way of interacting. When you have a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative communications, you have a similar change in the form of the collective such that it is literally more alive.

So many organizations literally make people sick, as you pointed out with your colleague that got cancer. This is really revolutionary work, isn’t it?

Yes, it is revolutionary.

Barbara’s work is very scientific, in legitimate ways. She does really careful psychological experimental work. She tolerates me (laughter) and [the studies] I do! She is very supportive of this work on compassion.

She also has done some of the most important work on loving kindness meditation. Barbara and her colleagues have done controlled field experiments with loving kindness meditation. They have tried to understand if you could systematically affect the positivity ratio through loving kindness meditation as a type of compassion practice. Would it have sustainable effects on resilience and health and that kind of stuff? No surprise, the answer was yes.

Let’s get back to your work. One of the real challenges is to show that compassion and positive emotions are good not only for the individual’s health but also for the organization’s health. How do we change the “domination” cultures in organizations so that they are more positive?

I think our time is better spent going to the positive deviant, caring organizations and trying to understand why and how they are working this particular way, rather than looking at how to get domination cultures to switch over. From my perspective, it can be more effective to try to diffuse the positive than try to transform the negative. Systematic dynamics says that the life-giving dynamic in a life-giving system is heliotropic. If people or systems see positive energy, are exposed to it, they will lean into it because it is literally life-giving. This is what the POS [Positive Organizational Scholarship] – the work of David Cooperrider, Kim Cameron, and others – is trying to do.

Is there a way to smuggle this into organizations, to convince them to create more positive environments?

No, this will never work by smuggling it in. It has to be based on an authentic experience of humanity. You have to have people get in touch with their humanity. And when they get in touch with their humanity, this becomes the natural way.

In my courses, what I’m trying to do is unshackle people from what they think it takes to be successful in business. I try to give them unequivocal evidence that they are going to be stronger and will create more effective systems if they [build and implement] positive relationships.

Do you have examples of positive, life-giving companies?

Yeah! I don’t know how much you are familiar with the companies that are affiliated with Conscious Capitalism? If you go on their web site [consciouscapitalism.com], you’ll see many CEOs talking about their companies. The guy who has been the major academic catalyst there [Raj Sisodia] has written a book called Firms of Endearment [Wharton School Publishing, 2007] about these kind of companies. We’re all talking about the same thing. These are organizations that are creating value above economic value, social value. I think leadership does matter, but I don’t think that’s the whole story at all.

I’ve written about positive deviant companies. I also think that there are flourishing pockets within all organizations. For example, the paper [“Understanding Compassion Capability”] that my colleagues and I have in Human Relations is about the extraordinary compassion and execution excellence in a physician billing department. We were trying to understand what creates the compassion capacity at the collective level. The hospital is located in a midsized town in southeast Michigan. The hospital is close to the top in their state at their ability to collect a dollar, but they’re also the kind of workplace that people go to and learn to love. This particular place employs a lot of single mothers. There is a three-year lineup of people waiting to work in the physician billing department. It’s a great example of a unit within a whole that, I would say, has really high-quality relationships and the clear impact this has on effectiveness and how well they grow their people. And we have another paper about this company [“The Contours and Consequences of Compassion at Work”] that’s published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior that’s more looking at stories of compassion that describe the difference it makes for the people who have experienced compassion at work.

A good example of a positive company is this deli that we love in Ann Arbor [Zingerman’s Delicatessen] that’s been on the front cover of Inc. Magazine. It’s always singled out as one of the top companies to work for. They are a beautiful example of a skilled, relational organization. Their meetings are completely open to the public. These meetings are large. At any one time, they have 30 to 35 people in the room. They are long, like two hours, and they are very energizing. They have an energy meter on the wall. Anyone can go up to the wall at any time. If the energy goes low, anybody can go up and put the energy meter down. Then, they will pause the meeting [and readjust]. They are very skillful at doing quick success stories, quick appreciation [to raise the energy level in the room], because they know that they need to be in a different state to tackle the very tough problems. It’s not an issue of getting rid of the negative. It’s about building the capacity for the positive in order to be able to deal with the negative.

I believe you mentioned in a paper that the billing study occurred around the time of 911, which showed you and your team the need for compassion at a huge level. How do we generate compassion in a positive way on a great scale, not just on a unit or organizational scale?

Well, I don’t exactly know. But I’m watching with wonder the Compassionate Action Network, the social movement that was born from the Charter for Compassion, which was the theme of Karen Armstrong’s TED talk in 2008. I’ve talked to the Compassion Action Network, and I’m watching how they are creating this process for cities to be certified as compassionate cities. There are compassionate cities, there are compassionate universities, and now there’s a spinoff organization which I’m trying to get involved with run by Ari Cohen, who was the original organizer of the Compassion Action Network on compassionate organizations.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know why there’s been this sort of rapid diffusion and desire for accreditation around claiming to be a compassionate entity. I have a student I’m trying to encourage to study this, because I don’t understand why this is happening. I think technology is really helpful. Images of suffering are much more vivid on YouTube than on a flat newspaper. [Technology gives you] the capacity to mobilize, repurpose, and spread different kinds of organizational routines and generate invitations for compassionate responses.

Today, for example, I got an e-mail from the Stanford Center for Altruism and Compassion with a New York Times article about a photograph that someone took of a police officer in New York City who had bought some boots for a homeless man who had blisters on his feet. That image went viral really fast on both Facebook and reddit.

We know from research that witnessing compassionate acts, or altruistic acts, is contagious. It has effects on our brains. From an evolutionary point of view, our reaction to it is one of opening, and cooperation, and furthering generosity. On a larger scale, perhaps part of what we can do is spread more images of authentic compassion and let the natural forces of contagion occur.

I know that that sounds overly idealistic. That’s really what David Cooperrider is doing a lot of with appreciative inquiry. I see him as such an incredible innovator and courageous scholar with how he is trying to do this, too.

What do you see as more deep-rooted in people: are people more fear-based? Or are they care-and compassion-based at their core?

I think there is really strong evidence that we are born to cooperate and that we learn to be fearful. There was a really good recent article [“Human Behaviour: A Cooperative Instinct”] in Nature Magazine written by a behavioral economist [Simon Gächter] who did some standard studies about cooperation versus self-interest. What Gächter found was that acting from intuition can sometimes lead to poor decisions, but it would usually support the common good. What this means is that intuition favors cooperative, rather than selfish, behavior. The instantaneous motivation was cooperation. The more time that people had to reflect on [the situation], the more self-interested it looked.

The more I read about neuroscience and how our brains operate, the more evidence I find that we are as hardwired to be other-serving as we are to be self-serving. Whether or not being more other-serving – acting in cooperation and with care – trumps self-serving, I don’t know. I think that the old story that we’re hardwired to be self-serving is really being debunked. There’s a great book by Stephanie Brown that came out this year, Moving Beyond Self-interest: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and the Social Sciences [Oxford University Press, 2012], where she talks about different kinds of biologically-based care-giving systems that are not only female in nature – and says that people may have this genuine drive to benefit others that affects attachment and care-giving.

We haven’t talked about empathy. How do you see empathy and the relationship between compassion and empathy?

Empathy can be one of the feelings that help people. [It means] “putting yourself in the shoes of the other, feeling the feelings of the other”, which can be a really important part of the feeling dynamic in compassion. You can have empathy without suffering. So empathy – feeling the experience, the feelings of the other – can range the whole gamut of feelings from positive to negative. There’s another term – empathic concern – that means more than empathy. It’s where a person feels the other’s suffering that is coming from an experience of harm or pain, and they also feel concern for the person and are motivated to alleviate the distress. So I think that empathic concern [and compassion are] related.

I just find it so interesting that empathy as a topic is becoming quite legitimate – especially in marketing and some other areas of business. You have to empathize with the customer to be able to connect with your customers. You have to empathize to do design thinking. Empathy is becoming kind of a normal term. I think that what compassion really does is help us remember the suffering and vulnerability of human experience, and therefore, the necessary human response called compassion.

Have you seen any cross-cultural differences in your work or is compassion something that is fundamentally human?

I think that this is such an important question! I don’t feel that I know the answer to it. I would suspect that the impulse – the biology, the evolutionary nature of compassion, the instinct, and the responding – is universal, but I would expect that how it expresses itself is going to be really different in different cultures. My doctoral student, Ashley Hardin, is really focusing on this question.

I think that cross-cultural variability really shows up on the interpersonal level and at the broader organizational and societal levels. If you think about different institutions, for example the institution of marriage, or education, or health care, they get organized in different ways in different cultures. Compassion work gets structurally organized in different ways.

I’m working on an annual review paper right now on compassion. [I’m seeing] that there’s a lot written at the individual level, but there is really not very much on the organizational level, the level of contextualized compassion. There’s so much good work that could be done here! I’m so surprised that there’s not more work.

I’m trying to understand how compassion unfolds in different situations. I look at some of the training on compassion that’s happening, like at Stanford. What worries me about the approach that says, basically, “It’s about doing more meditation,” is that it puts the burden for building the capacity for compassion at the individual level. I think that there’s a lot that happens organizationally – even if people have a high capacity for compassion – that suppresses the compassion capacity in organizations.

How do you think that concepts of care and compassion are influenced by gender?

As I said before, I think that the idea of care and compassion can get gendered really fast, and as a result, oftentimes, get devalued. That certainly was my experience when I was first doing this work. My colleagues here [at Ross] used to call me the “heart lady”, and there was kind of this joke about me studying care and compassion.

You know, that changed after 911, but I always felt that way being a girl faculty member, studying care and compassion and oftentimes studying women. Now I’m an elder lady, I’m just using my privilege to say, “Okay, that’s what I do, that’s what I care about, and I’m going to work really hard to make it legitimate.” Women are often in the discretionary role that facilitates the competence in the compassion process. It’s often women who are stepping into the discretionary compassion roles because oftentimes they have the experience in care-giving roles. They have [had] this experience since the time they were little girls. They’re skilled practitioners.

I think that part of the gendering of care and compassion can be a strength and part of the gendering of them can be a problem (in terms of trying to create effective healing organizations) I don’t have a good answer, but I know I can say, I know that they are gendered and I don’t know quite how to work with that part of it in a way that makes compassion and care a kind of responsibility and a value that we all share.

I don’t tend to take on the gendered stuff too directly. I know in my heart of hearts, I have so much anger about this, and part of the reason that I stay away from it is that I cannot be generative in terms of opening people up to possibilities when I’m coming from that place. This is why I enter from the perspective of inviting people to see the compassion and caring in themselves. I go to a pretty personal place. It seems to work better for me if I’m trying to motivate change.

You are doing wonderful work. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers of Cross Cultural Management?

I guess I would just appeal people to make their own lived experience of suffering more visible to themselves. And to ask themselves, “When have I experienced the healing power that comes from other people?” From that space, [I would like] to invite people to think about what can be done at the organizational level to unlock human healing. Again, I think that [starting personally] is the port of entry for this.

This interview has been condensed and edited.