**Leadership

**Leadership

is hard. How can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness in

getting the job done?**A global pandemic, economic

volatility, natural disasters, civil and political unrest. From New York to

Barcelona to Hong Kong, it can feel as if the world as we know it is coming

apart. Through it all, our human spirit is being tested. Now more than ever,

it's imperative for leaders to demonstrate compassion.

But in

hard times like these, leaders need to make hard decisions--deliver

negative feedback, make difficult choices that disappoint people, and in some

cases lay people off. How do you do the hard things that come with the

responsibility of leadership while remaining a good human being and bringing

out the best in others? Most people think we have to make a binary choice

between being a good human being and being a tough, effective leader. But this

is a false dichotomy. Being human and doing what needs to be done are not

mutually exclusive. In truth, doing hard things and making difficult decisions

is often the most compassionate thing to do.

As founder and

CEO of Potential Project, Rasmus Hougaard and his longtime coauthor, Jacqueline

Carter, show in this powerful, practical book, you must always balance caring for

your people with leadership wisdom and effectiveness. Using data from thousands

of leaders, employees, and companies in nearly a hundred countries, the authors

find that when leaders bring the right balance of compassion and wisdom to the

job, they foster much higher levels of employee engagement, performance,

loyalty, and well-being in their people.

With rich examples

from Netflix, IKEA, Unilever, and many other global companies, as well as

practical tools and advice for leaders and managers at any level,* Compassionate Leadership * is your indispensable guide to

doing the hard work of leadership in a human way.