Compassion & Inclusive Leadership Resource - NHS Leadership Academy

We all want to feel valued, supported and enabled to do our best work. Sometimes we have cultures and micro cultures in our organisations that don’t fully support that.Compassionate and inclusive leadership is embedded in high quality, high performing systems and drives improvement in their overall performance, meaning better outcomes for patients, better population health and better value for money.

Leaders who model compassion, inclusion and a focus on improvement are key to creating cultures where diversity is valued, people feel they belong and are empowered to deliver great care and patient experience, whatever kind of health and social care organisation they work in. Compassionate and inclusive leadership creates an environment where there is no bullying, and where learning and quality improvement become the norm.

Continuous improvement depends on staff feeling safe and empowered to improve services using tried and tested improvement approaches in partnership with patients, families and communities. Where leaders act with compassion, staff feel valued, engaged and enabled to show compassion themselves. They feel obliged to speak up when something is wrong and empowered to continuously improve.

Compassionate leaders take a genuine interest in their staff, value diversity, take time to listen and be with their staff, respond empathetically and are prepared to do something to alleviate distress. They are also the leaders who will be able to share their vision and inspire others to work together to ensure that care is safe, effective, humane, and good value for money.