As I may have mentioned in passing, I’m very excited about the upcoming visit of Karen Armstrong to the Vancouver area in March. If you are not familiar with her work, check her out on the TED website at http://www.ted.com/speakers/karen_armstrong.html

Her most recent work (in collaboration with people like HH The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu) , and the work that is bringing her to Vancouver is the Charter for Compassion www.charterforcompasssion.org . The Charter for Compassion is a  provocative and important document that challenges us all to bring compassion into our lives and into the lives of our families, organizations and communities in order to make the world a safer and healthier place for all of us. I for one am fascinated by the question of compassion in our organizations and businesses.

I’ve been wondering about how we might use a lens of compassion in our leadership. For example, imagine that we all have a kind of optometrist’s testing machine, the one with the large mask that hovers in front of your face and the optometrist changes lenses in it asking, “which is better, a or b.” Imagine then that when we’re looking at an issue, say a performance issue for an employee, we look at the situation with a few different lenses, including for example, the lens of productivity or the lens of team work. I wonder what might change for us as a leader and for the employee if we also use a lens of compassion? Might we uncover new insights, new opportunities to support a change in the behavior, or even new opportunities for our own growth by using compassion as one of the lenses we use?

May each of us find an opportunity to use our compassionate lens this week.