My grandma died last year. I am so grateful I was able to be with her, and even more grateful that I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to be.
I run my own business now, so nobody signed off on that. I didn’t check a calendar, or explain myself to a manager, or work out how to phrase a message that would make the reason sound serious enough. I just went. And in the middle of everything that was happening, that mattered.
I’ve thought about that a lot since. Not the freedom of being unsupervised, because that’s not really what this is about. It was the freedom to decide what actually mattered most to me in that moment. Being present with someone I loved, at the end of her life, was never going to be in competition with anything else. But when I think back to being employed, in moments like that, there was always a second voice: What will they think? What’s going to slip? Who’s going to have to cover this?
I think that’s the bit that workplaces tend to get wrong. They sort people into positions. The boss. The employee. The one going through something. And somewhere in that sorting, compassion starts to feel like it belongs differently depending on which one you are. Like it’s owed downward, or upward, or only to whoever’s role says they’re allowed to be struggling right now.
I felt it from the other side, as a manager, a few years ago. My Director told me I needed to start performance management proceedings with someone on my team, because of the amount of time they’d taken off. On paper, it probably looked straightforward. A process exists for a reason, and the numbers said it was time to use it.
I pushed back. Hard, and for longer than was comfortable.
I knew what that person was carrying, even if the process didn’t. I knew that turning up with a heavy handed formal procedure would have confirmed every fear they already had, that they were failing, letting people down, one step from losing something else important. None of that would have brought them back to work sooner. It would have pushed them further out.
I wasn’t as certain as I probably sounded. There was doubt sitting underneath the pushing back, a real question of whether I was protecting my team member or just delaying something that was going to happen anyway. There was fear too, of getting it wrong, of what it would mean for them and for me if that was the case. I also felt anger, about feeling forced into that choice, about a process that had no consideration for the human it was about to be used on. And underneath all of it, a loneliness in holding a position nobody else could see.
I think that’s the part of compassionate leadership that gets left out. We talk about it as something a good leader gives. Understanding, patience, the benefit of the doubt. All true. But in that moment I wasn’t only a manager making a decision. I was a person having a genuinely hard day at work. The workplace, with its processes and procedures, didn’t recognise or hold any of that human-ness.
A grieving person. A person struggling to hold on to their job. The manager standing between that person and a process, trying to protect them both. Underneath all of the context, we are talking about humans: messy, real, living, breathing, feeling humans. Compassion doesn’t check what your job title is before it decides whether you’re allowed to need it.
The shift isn’t doing more, or being kinder as an added extra on top of everything else the job already asks. It’s refusing to let a job title decide who gets to count as a person in a given moment, and who has to wait their turn. That refusal is quiet. Nobody has to see you make it. But it’s the difference between a workplace that runs on process and one that remembers, underneath the process, there was always just a person, trying to get through something, same as you.
