The Double Bottom Line: How Compassionate Leaders Captivate Hearts and Deliver Results
Donato Tramuto with Tami Booth Corwin
Fast Company Press (April 2022)

“Your people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt

I thought of Roosevelt’s observation as I began to read Donato Tramuto’s book, written with Tami Booth Corwin. No President before or since was more aggressive and competitive, and no other President — with the probable exception of Abraham Lincon — had more highly developed emotional intelligence (i.e. empathy).

In the business world, it is no coincidence that the companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also ranked among those most profitable and having the greatest cap value. However different these companies may be in most respects, all of them have passionate leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.

Tramuto: “I see compassionate leadership as listening to others’ challenges, needs, or problems; having sympathy for them; then [key point] doing something about it. To me, empathy –the ability to think about and feel for another person’s problems, suffering, or experience — is a critical component. Compassion, on the other hand, usually starts with or coexists with empathy, but adds the desire and action to relieve that person’s suffering, help them overcome a challenge, or otherwise better their situation.”

He does on to suggest, “Compassion shows that you are committed to the person. You embraced the dignity of that individual. I’ve always loved the line from Man of La Mancha, ‘Be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause,’ and I think that’s also what compassion is sometimes: being willing to take that road less traveled and set yourself apart from what others may be afraid to do. In any organization, because it is only people who get results, I think it means that you invest your time in individuals, and that is how the organization prospers. In other words, people are your true focus.”

Throughout his lively and eloquent narrative, Tramuto stresses that profitability and compassion are NOT mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are [begin italics] interdependent [end italics].  All of the major studies of employee satisfaction reveal that, when asked to rank what is most important to them, respondentsx ranked [begin italics] feeling appreciated [end italics] at or near the top. That is also true of those who responded to major customer satisfaction surveys.

These are among the other passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of this book’s coverage:

o Compassion as strength (Pages 11-12 and 71-85)
o HIV/AIDS (27-28, 35-37, 48-49, and 72-73)
o Empathy(35-50)
o Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Joe Kennedy III (54-55)
o Purpose-driven leadership (56-57)

o Toughness and compassion (75-76)
o Trust (89-105)
o Misconceptions about culture (108-113)
o Diversity and inclusion (151-165)
o Listening (167-185)

o Listening bias (177-180 and 183-184)
o Cultivating compassion (189-206)
o Self-compassion (195-198)
o Teaching compassion (207-221)
o The future workforce (223-224)

Business leaders — especially at the C-level — would be well advised to keep in mind this observation by Albert Einstein: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily matter; everything that matters cannot necessarily be counted.” More recently, Stephen Covey asserted that most executives tend to spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” In this context, I add my favorite Peter Drucker quotation: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

I cannot recall a prior time when a combination of compassion and profitability was more essential to the success of an organization than it is now. Nor can I recall a prior time when individuals –including but by no means limited to C-level executives — had more and better opportunities to achieve highly developed compassion while adding greater value to their organization and their associates as well as to their customers.

Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990) is generally credited with formulating the concept of what he characterizes in a seminal essay (in 1970) as “servant leadership.” Here is a brief excerpt:

“The servant-leader is servant first… Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first… The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

“A fresh critical look is being taken at the issues of power and authority, and people are beginning to learn, however haltingly, to relate to one another in less coercive and more creatively supporting ways. A new moral principle is emerging, which holds that the only authority deserving of one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader. Those who choose to follow this principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions. Rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants. To the extent that this principle prevails in the future, the only truly viable institutions will be those that are predominantly [begin italics] servant led.” [end italics]

This is precisely what Donato Tramuto has in mind. It is desirable but insufficient for us to care about other people when they are going through tough times. We must also DO ALL WE CAN TO HELP THEM in ways and to an extent appropriate to the given situation. I offer to both Tramuto and Tami Booth Corwin a heartfelt “Thank you!” and “Bravo!”