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Leadership is hard. How can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness in getting the job done?

A global pandemic, economic volatility, natural disaster, 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 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 – giving tough feedback, making difficult choices that disappoint people, in some cases laying 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 person or being a tough, effective leader. This, however, is a false dichotomy. Being human and doing what needs to be done are not mutually exclusive. In truth, doing hard things is often the most human thing to do.

As founder and Managing Director 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 100 countries, the authors find that when leaders bring the right balance of compassion and wisdom, they foster much higher levels of employee engagement, performance, loyalty, and well-being for 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.

“The Mind of the Leader”, published by Harvard Business Review Press, is the culmination of a two-year study of how leaders lead themselves, their people and their organizations for extraordinary results. Based on assessments of more than 35,000 leaders and interviews with 250 C-level executives, “The Mind of the Leader” concludes that the most successful managers and executives lead with three core mental qualities: Mindfulness, Selflessness, and Compassion.

With real world inspirational examples from Marriott, Accenture, LinkedIn and many more, “The Mind of the Leader” shows how this new kind of leadership turns conventional leadership thinking upside down. It represents a radical redefinition of what it takes to be an effective leader and provides a practical, hard-nosed solution to every organization’s engagement and execution problems.

Researchers have found that the accelerated pace of modern office life is taking its toll on productivity, employee engagement, creativity and well-being. Faced with a relentless flood of information and distractions, our brains try to process everything at once increasing our stress, decreasing our effectiveness and negatively impacting our performance.

Ironically, we have become too overworked, unfocused, and busy to stop and ask ourselves the most important question: What can we do to break the cycle of being constantly under pressure, always-on, overloaded with information and in environments filled with distractions? Do we need to accept this as the new workplace reality and continue to survive rather than thrive in modern day work environments?

In "One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness", Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, and Gillian Coutts demonstrate that it is possible to train the brain to respond differently to today's constant pressures and distraction. All it takes is one second.