Social change leaders around the globe are facing systemic, operational, and strategic challenges related to COVID-19 that are testing the limits of their own and their organizations’ capabilities. In a volatile time like this, compassion is a critical competency for leaders and organizations to build resilience, deal with stress, and prevent burnout.
Compassionate leadership means respecting the dignity of others, acknowledging the pain in the room, and recognizing that people who are valued create value. Leah Weiss, a researcher and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, will explore the ways that compassionate leadership can be implemented at all levels of an organization.
Objectives:
- Source wisdom, strategies, and tools for dealing with complexity and multiple stressors, internal and external, to meet complex demands with presence and creativity
- Identify why it’s important to cultivate self-awareness and self-compassion as prerequisites for effective leadership and teamwork
- Cultivate practices for building internal and ecosystem equilibrium, compassion, and resilience
- Learn how to incorporate consistent practices that support the translation of values to action
Speakers
Leah Weiss, PhD, MSW, is a researcher, lecturer, consultant, and author. She teaches Compassionate Leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she created the perennially waitlisted course “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion.” She is a principal teacher and a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Program, conceived by the Dalai Lama. Leah is also a founding faculty member of Space Center Houston’s Human Potential Lab. In 2019, she co-founded Skylyte, a company that specializes in using the latest neuroscience and behavior change to empower high-performing leaders and managers to prevent burnout for themselves and their teams.Her first book, How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind (HarperWave) focuses on developing compassionate and soft- skill-based leadership while also offering research-backed actionable steps toward finding purpose at work. It was translated into seven languages. Her latest book, The Little Book of Bhavana: The Thai secrets of everyday resilience (Quercus), came out in the UK in 2019.
Leah has taught and spoken in diverse settings in addition to Stanford, including Harvard, Princeton, Smith, and 75 companies across sectors, including Genentech, Goldman Sachs, NASA, Google, Kaiser Permanente, and Intuit. Her work has been covered by news outlets including BBC, the New York Times, TED, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and countless others.
Target Audience
This program is open to everyone.
About this series
These conversations will involve practices with seasoned leadership development professionals and philanthropic peers. We’ll explore why the art of tending to ourselves is a prerequisite for more effective social change. We’ll try out practices to cultivate self-awareness, self-regulation, new perspectives, and generative ways of working and working together. Inspiring leaders and activists will shine light on hard-won lessons of leadership during crisis and share practices and strategies for enhancing our own and others’ well-being; clarifying our vision; and fostering more durable and effective social change at a time when philanthropy is called to moral leadership.