Compassion Culture questionnaire
From a foundation of self-compassion, it is possible to build a more compassionate culture in your team or organisation. A good starting point is to assess your current levels of personal compassion, so you can have a professionally facilitated discussion based on your anonymised answers as a team. For example, you might rate yourself on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always) for the following questions. Complete this quiz and check your answers using the scoring process.
If you are highly compassionate, you would expect high scores across for questions 1-3, 7-9 and 14 and low scores for questions 4-6 and 10-13. If you do this as a team and achieve high scores for these questions, this indicates that you have a compassionate culture. If your culture is not compassionate, then you would expect the reverse.
A discussion about issues like this takes careful framing and facilitation, especially if you think you have a mix of people with very different perspectives on compassion. This is why I would always recommend having such a discussion with a professional facilitator with clear ground rules to minimise any likelihood of further emotional damage if there are individuals in the group who are far from compassionate. Summarising some of the research on the benefits of compassion in the workplace, as I have done in Impact Culture, is a good way of framing the discussion once you have the survey results. There will be some who believe firmly in “tough love” and the power of fear or shame to drive action. While you are unlikely to change the deeply held values that drive these approaches to interpersonal interaction, through discussion and with support (in word and deed) from leaders, it is possible for such a discussion to create a new and powerful group norm. Over time, such norms become self-reinforcing, creating a new team dynamic and atmosphere, attracting others to the team who share your compassionate approach, increasingly outnumbering those who are uncompassionate.
From: Reed MS (2022) Impact Culture, Fast Track Impact.