Jaime lost his best friend to cancer two months ago, and it’s been hard for him to focus ever since. McKayla is nearing her one-year sober anniversary, a day filled with anticipation and complex feelings, and she’s grown increasingly anxious as it approaches. Avery is on the engineering team, which recently went through significant cuts, nearly doubling Avery’s workload overnight. Buckling under the weight of the new demands, Avery is also worried about their own job security. Neither Jaime, McKayla, nor Avery feel comfortable sharing their concerns with their managers, so they push through as their wellbeing worsens.
These three are hardly alone. Whether navigating grief, anxiety, burnout, or something else entirely, employees often face mental health challenges they may not be ready to name at work. In their 2026 Workplace Mental Health Survey, Ipsos and the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that fewer than 4 in 10 employees feel comfortable sharing mental health concerns with HR and leadership. Moreover, nearly half of employees worry they’d be judged for sharing mental health struggles, and only 15% say that they’ve actually told their manager when their mental health is suffering due to work itself.
Organizational and people leaders have a responsibility to help here. An organization’s success depends on its employees’ ability not just to maintain performance but to actually thrive. That requires creating cultures where employees feel seen and safe asking for help, where their concerns are treated with care, and where they know they’ll be supported through challenges, not avoided because of them. This kind of help looks like compassionate leadership.
In this blog, we explore how teaching managers compassionate leadership helps them notice early signs of employee distress, cultivate a space for honest conversations, and offer appropriate help to alleviate employees’ struggles – without stepping into clinical territory.
What is compassionate leadership?
According to leadership researcher Rasmus Hougaard, author of Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, compassionate leadership can be boiled down to “leaders having the intention to be of benefit to the people under their stewardship.” It is the combination of caring deeply for employees and genuinely wanting them to thrive, and doing so in a way that maintains effectiveness as a leader and organization.
In this way, compassionate leadership is not just about showing empathy, though empathy is a part of it. For managers, showing compassion to employees has four components:
- Noticing – Paying attention, listening, and noticing someone’s suffering
- Understanding – Learning and recognizing the cause of their distress
- Empathizing – Putting themselves in their employees’ shoes and sharing in their pain
- Acting – Taking thoughtful action, to the degree that’s appropriate and available, to relieve their distress and provide the resources that will help them cope
The last step is where compassion differs from sympathy or empathy alone. Instead of simply understanding, it’s about actually doing something to help.
Together, all four components provide the foundation for psychological safety in an organization that supports employee wellbeing. None require managers to provide clinical guidance or act as therapists, but rather to show they care and establish two things for employees: (1) resources are available to alleviate their distress, and (2) they, as managers, can direct people to the right ones.
Why does compassion matter for companies?
To some, compassionate leadership may seem like an idea that benefits the individual employees receiving help or the general morale of a team. But its influence runs much broader and deeper, affecting nearly every part of an organization for the better.
Let’s start with the benefits to employees. Research has shown that when leaders show genuine compassion, employees feel a greater sense of legitimacy and confidence in knowing their organizations value them, which increases their trust in the organization and job satisfaction overall. Receiving compassion also encourages people to be more compassionate to others in turn, ultimately fostering a more harmonious environment that improves collaboration and helps employees recover from challenges more quickly. Additional research has even shown that when compassionate leaders help employees feel more supported and positive about their work, those sentiments can go home with them and have a positive impact on employees’ family dynamics and relationships in general.
Leaders and managers experience their own benefits. A 2014 study found that managers practicing compassionate leadership tend to have a better mental state in general and a greater sense of empowerment, because being able to show compassion gives them the confidence that they can actually be of service, instead of just sitting on the sidelines. It also helps them appreciate people’s differences and see good in others. Finally, since leaders’ emotions directly affect their subordinates’, when managers feel more positive at work, their employees do too. This not only improves the workplace environment and resulting work product, but it also fosters stronger and more engaged followership for those managers.
All of these positive effects on employees and leaders impact organizations on many levels. The increased trust between employees and leaders drives psychological safety, which successively reduces absenteeism and improves employee loyalty, retention, productivity, and resilience. The numbers support these claims. Hougaard and fellow researchers found that employees with compassionate managers are:
- 25% more engaged at work
- 20% more committed to their organization
- 11% less likely to burn out
With a more collaborative, positive culture overall, organizations also see bolstered innovation and creativity. Together, all of these benefits can increase profitability and save organizations as much as $5,000 per employee per year in lost productivity and healthcare costs through improved employee mental health.
How to show up as a compassionate leader
In a 2018 survey of over 1,000 leaders by the research and leadership development firm Potential Project, 91% of respondents felt that compassion was very important to their leadership, but 80% said they didn’t know how to improve their compassion. Thankfully, compassion is not a personality trait people are either born with or not; rather, it is a skill you can learn and build over time. Here are some tips to help.
1. Learn to notice and recognize the signs.
To be a compassionate leader, it’s useful to be able to recognize when employees are struggling so you can initiate the safe and sensitive conversations that may help them. The most common mental health challenges managers encounter are anxiety, depression, traumatic stress, grief, and burnout. Here are some behaviors that may indicate that one of these challenges is affecting your employees:
- Marked changes in their mood and/or participation that persist longer than a few days
- Missing deadlines, meetings, and/or days from work more than normal
- Consistently saying they’re tired or having trouble sleeping
- Showing difficulty focusing
- Sudden or increased withdrawal from colleagues and detachment from work
- Increased irritability, cynicism, or angry outbursts
- Inability to enjoy their successes
- Fear of criticism, mistakes, or making the wrong decision
We strongly encourage organizations to provide managers with mental health training. This training does not make people mental health clinicians. It teaches them what to look out for, what various mental health conditions entail, and the skills needed to navigate sensitive conversations so they can point people to the appropriate help beyond their office door.
2. Adopt a stance of non-judgment.
Fear of being judged or treated differently is the top reason people are reluctant to open up about their mental health, especially at work. Before jumping to conclusions or initiating a conversation about potential challenges with members of your team, let go of judgment and maintain openness. It’s easy to interpret a missed deadline as carelessness or laziness, when in reality it could be a sign of burnout and overwhelm. Resist the temptation to make assumptions, and instead, get curious about what’s really going on.
3. Ask if it’s OK to have a conversation, and assure confidentiality.
If you’ve noticed consistent signs of struggle, open up a conversation – but how you do this can shape whether or not an employee feels safe enough to be honest. Rather than confronting them abruptly, which may prompt fear or guardedness, start with a low-pressure question, such as “I’ve noticed things have seemed harder lately. Would you be open to talking about it?” This gives the employee a real say in whether and when this happens. Make sure to underscore that the conversation will be 100% confidential: what’s shared stays private, except where safety requires otherwise, and will not be used against them in any way. Your goal is purely to help.
4. Listen with intention.
Drop any idea or agenda for where the conversation should land and give the employee your undivided attention, actively listening to what they share. That means making eye contact, giving space for silence, and letting them set the pace and depth. This is not a time to interrupt or craft answers or solutions as they speak; just stay present and take it in so you can truly understand what they’re experiencing and what might be causing it.
5. Respond with empathy.
Our ability to empathize with someone – imagining how we’d feel in their shoes and resonating with their emotional experience – is a critical bridge in creating a culture of compassion and care. It’s not about taking on so much of someone else’s distress that it becomes overwhelming, but rather about being able to validate what someone’s going through while staying grounded enough in your own perspective to actually be useful to them.
6. Reaffirm your commitment to support, and provide them with the appropriate mental health resources.
This is where compassion becomes concrete. Start by acknowledging what it took for the employee to share what they did. Then, based on their specific concerns and the potential severity, follow with resources or helpful offerings that may address their needs. Perhaps that’s pointing them to content about depression or stress management within the organization’s EAP. Perhaps that’s providing them with more flexibility around deadlines or delineating which responsibilities of theirs are top priorities and which can wait. Perhaps it’s referring them to HR.
This step matters more than it might seem: employees consistently say mental health support at work matters to them, yet oftentimes, many don’t know what’s already available. Importantly, make sure to also ask them what they would find supportive. They may have their own ideas, especially when their concerns are work-related, and listening to and enacting them, where appropriate, can make a big difference.
7. Check in consistently.
Mental health concerns rarely get resolved in one conversation or by one resource. Yet, too often, leaders and managers close the case, so to speak, after one interaction out of their own discomfort or fear of the employees’ potential discomfort in bringing it up again. But that’s not how building trust works; it requires follow-up.
Check back in with employees, but keep it brief and low-stakes. For instance, saying “I’ve been thinking about our conversation. How are you doing?” tells them you didn’t just note their struggle and move on, but that you remember and genuinely care. It gives them the opportunity to share more or ask for other resources if they need them. It also gives you another chance to observe how things are shifting or not, restarting the same cycle of compassion – noticing, understanding, empathizing, and acting – for as long as it’s needed.
Building Trust, Preventing Crises, Enabling Success
It’s worth repeating: compassionate leadership does not mean asking managers to become mental health professionals. It means giving them the skills and confidence to notice when someone may be struggling, respond with care, and connect them with the right support.
When employees trust that their managers will listen without judgment and take their concerns seriously, they’re more likely to speak up before challenges escalate. And when that kind of trust becomes part of the culture, organizations are better positioned to support employee wellbeing earlier, strengthen engagement, and help their people thrive both in and outside the workplace.
Compassionate leadership won’t eliminate every challenge employees face. But it can help ensure they don’t have to face those challenges alone.
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Ready to give your managers the skills to notice, understand, and respond with real compassion? Explore Journey’s Mental Health Certification and build a trusted network of supportive people leaders across your organization.
