Compassion is one of the words that is variably defined, depending on who you talk to, and this is true in psychology vs. business/management circles. In this episode, Dr. Kira Schabram talks about compassion as a process of noticing, empathizing, and DOING. She also covers what it means for compassion to be a muscle, and how self-compassion and other compassion actually are working that SAME muscle. Dr. Kira Schabram, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, her Masters of Science from Concordia University, and both a Bachelors of Science and Bachelors of Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her academic expertise centers on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork. Here are links to two different articles about her work, one on burnout and one on meaningful work.
Compassion is one of the words that is variably defined, depending on who you talk to, and this is true in psychology vs. business/management circles. In this episode, Dr. Kira Schabram talks about compassion as a process of noticing, empathizing, and DOING. She also covers what it means for compassion to be a muscle, and how self-compassion and other compassion actually are working that SAME muscle. Dr. Kira Schabram, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, her Masters of Science from Concordia University, and both a Bachelors of Science and Bachelors of Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her academic expertise centers on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork. Here are links to two different articles about her work, one on burnout and one on meaningful work.
[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I have a Part 3 with Dr. Kira Schabram because she's been absolutely wonderful in answering all of my off the cuff questions. I've just been having so much fun talking with her about her research. For those of you who haven't been able to listen to the first two episodes with her, here is a short bio. Dr. Kira Schabram is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, and has a PhD from the University of British Columbia. She also holds a Master of Science from Concordia University and received her undergraduate degrees from the University of California, San Diego. Her research expertise centers on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork.
[00:00:43] You talk about compassion being a muscle, and you brought up compassion a couple times in combating burnout. Can you talk about that?
[00:00:52] Kira Schabram: So again here, it's helpful. Let me give you the definition first. And here there's a bit of a tension if you talk to business school scholars like myself and people in psychology departments. In a lot of psychology departments, compassion is studied primarily as an emotion. So people focus on feelings of empathy. In business schools, when we talk about compassion, we talk about a process and specifically we argue that compassion is a behavioral process that starts with noticing when someone's going through pain, either yourself or others, putting yourself in their shoes in the case of others, or feeling the sense of common humanity. This could happen to anyone. I can't blame myself for that. And then importantly, doing something about it. So when I talk about compassion, I talk it about it. Noticing, feeling, empathy, and then doing something.
[00:01:40] And the reason I emphasize that is when we first started studying compassion, there was a sense that maybe the reason compassion is lacking in workplaces is either because we are recruiting on people who are lower in compassion. Or because the workplace prevents compassion.
[00:01:58] I think as the evidence accumulates, we tend to find evidence for the latter. Sure, there's people who aren't very compassionate, but for the most part, what we're finding is the reason it's hard to find compassion in the workplace is it's really hard to notice. Because you're so burnt out yourself or because workplace professional norms say that you shouldn't really be expressing weakness or pain, or you shouldn't be inquiring about someone else. There might be something going on, but I shouldn't be prying. Even if you do notice, it's really hard to then have the energy to do something about it. I think my coworker's going through something, but I'm too exhausted myself. And so what I mean by muscle is that the more you work out these things, the more you practice noticing, and the more you practice doing something about it, realizing that very small acts go a long way. So from our research, that just giving someone a nice note or going for a 10 minute walk with them makes a difference, the easier it becomes. And that's true with a lot of constructs, right? A lot of things, that as we do these things, they become easier to us.
[00:02:58] And so compassion is a muscle in that sense, in that, you get better at it. Now, I'll immediately give you my quick caveat. We find that there's certain members of the workplace who are much more inclined to notice. Women is one of them. People who grow up in lower socioeconomic status is another because they are used to noticing things because they've gone through a lot of hard times. So what is really important is that we don't just, again, put the onus on the individual because there's certain individuals who have worked out that muscle more and all that work will then fall on them.
[00:03:28] Christine Ko: Yes. I like your concept of working compassion as a muscle because, to me, as a non psychologist, non-business school type person, it goes back to Anders Ericsson's concept of deliberate practice. [Yes.] And so I can practice noticing. I can practice just noticing. Oh, I'm gonna notice today one thing about one person that I think suggests they're going through something. Or I can practice, okay, once I notice something, I'm going to do something. Whatever it is, just say, Hey, or text someone or call someone. Yeah, I I love it.
[00:04:03] Kira Schabram: What's even cooler about that, and now I give credit to one of my former doctoral students, Yu Tse Heng, who studies self-compassion, is we actually find the muscle for compassion and self-compassion are the same. So there used to be this idea, that I personally held as well until I looked at the evidence, that if people are so focused on self-care, that means they're not paying attention to other people, that they're being selfish. Not true at all. They seem to be reinforcing. The more you notice other people needing, the more you can also notice your own needs. The more you respond to others, the more you give yourself grace. So all of this tends to go hand in hand, which I think is really beautiful.
[00:04:39] Christine Ko: Oh yes, so important. That makes sense. Popular culture or thought is that self-care is to some degree selfish. [Selfish.] And it applies in the parent, the motherhood setting for me too because of mom guilt. To show compassion to myself will eventually actually help me show more compassion to my baby.
[00:05:02] Kira Schabram: So that's exactly it. And I used to believe that myself. So to give you a little bit of background on our research on self and other compassion, as I mentioned, Yu Tse, my doctoral student, was the one who's really interested in self-compassion, and I thought it was selfish nonsense. I really did. And so we said, let's put it to a test. Because I come from a nonprofit background, I come from a calling background. You should give and give. And so these studies that we did that showed that actually self and other care both play really important roles in burnout and they go hand in hand, that the more you practice one, the more you practice the other. It' s really one of those aha moments where the evidence completely changed my opinion on a topic, and I am now someone who really embraces self-care up to a point again, right? If you're suffering from cynicism, make sure that you're not just focusing on yourself, cuz you'll make the cynicism worse. But you can't just always give to other people. You wanna make your life sustainable, your work sustainable. You have to take care of yourself.
[00:05:58] Christine Ko: Yeah. You know the reason that resonates with me, it makes sense to me just on a lived experience level because I think in healthcare the doctors who I think are like the meanest to trainees, when you're trying to teach them. They are also that hard on themselves, meaning the same thing almost they would say to themselves actually is coming out.
[00:06:18] Kira Schabram: Yeah. There's a societal shift happening. It's very slowly, but right, we've been talking about parenting a lot. It happens there too, where we now recognize that positive interventions, positive reinforcement, are a better way to get results out of your kids in the short, in the long run, that you want. That's certainly something I struggle with. Coming from an immigrant background, I was raised quite harshly. I want my kids to be successful. So I often think, is there a way to get them to be successful without being harsh to them? And so I think we're all having these conversations about how to make the world or work kinder, as wishy-washy as that term sounds. But I think that's kinda what we're trying to figure out here.
[00:06:52] Christine Ko: I know. Hopefully we can get to a place where it doesn't sound wishy-washy to say that we want work to be kinder.
[00:06:58] Kira Schabram: I think we're heading in that direction, and I think the evidence underscores it. If the evidence wasn't there, then I think it'd be very hard to make that case. But over and over we're showing that positive organizations tend to outperform others. And by positive, I mean the technical term, this comes out of the University of Michigan, but organizations that do take this preventative, kind, proactive approach to humans in the workplace.
[00:07:21] Humans want to do something right? And I'm someone who firmly believes that as well. You don't need to have work as a calling, but if you have found work that is a calling and you feel like you are doing that work, there's a lot of benefits that come from that, right?
[00:07:36] There's a lot of meaningfulness from feeling like you're accomplishing something. Scholars who study intrinsic motivation kind of point to what are the things that make us feel intrinsically motivated, and they tend to be being good at something. So having a sense of competence. Seeing things through from beginning to end rather than just having a very small portion of a process or product that you're working on. Doing something that has a positive impact in the world. And having autonomy, being able to decide how to do things. And that can come from your work. There are a lot of jobs out there that do give you autonomy, self-determination, meaningfulness, and the sense of completing things.
[00:08:14] Being a parent is so important to me. I wouldn't want to give that up completely, but all the day-to-day stuff, that's where a lot of the burnout comes from, is that you're spending all of your time on these tasks that just take up so much of your mental energy.
[00:08:28] Christine Ko: Is there any research, or do you have any ideas or hypotheses on if you can truly have two callings at the same? Or more than one?
[00:08:38] Kira Schabram: Because you often imbue a calling with this moral and deeply personal significance, it does tend to supersede other things. So when in conflict, I think one one's out. To give you one way that plays out we actually find that in nonprofits, a lot of employees who view that work as a calling do not have children, and they will often explicitly say, this is my baby, or I just do not have the time or the energy or the money to have children. So I've decided not to.
[00:09:09] Christine Ko: In an emergency situation, for example, one is still gonna have to rise over the other. I've experienced this myself, where that in itself can also lead to a lot of stress, and maybe burnout, and wanting to leave your calling, because you're just not meeting your own expectations of how you would like to do the job. Whether it's at home or at work.
[00:09:30] Kira Schabram: I do think that placing people in a position where they are having to make a choice between the two, often that comes down to resources. So I do think something has to give. This idea that you can have it all, right, is an illusion. At some point, something takes precedent and that will be either your work or your home.
[00:09:49] We're starting to look into longitudinal ideas of, do callings wax and wane over the course of your life? And we don't have these studies yet, so I'm piecing this together and speculating based on a lot of smaller studies that we have. I suspect that you can actually map how meaningful work is to you onto parenthood. That we see callings are particularly high for people in the early twenties. Then they tend to go down, and then there seems to be a second wave somewhere in middle age, so late thirties, forties, fifties, that people start to care more. And my hypothesis is that when your children are young and that's consuming your life, that is the primary source of meaningfulness. And then as they get older, as they move out, you can put that back into the workplace.
[00:10:35] Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts?
[00:10:37] Kira Schabram: A lot of what we've talked about is early research, early questions and things are changing very rapidly. We're also seeing massive generational differences in what people care about, wanting meaningfulness and kindness in the workplace. It's just exciting to have these conversations, but a lot of what we've talked about are open questions that we're still learning about. I'll leave you on that thought.
[00:10:58] Christine Ko: Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:11:01] Kira Schabram: Yeah, thank you for having me.