Compassion and why being more human is becoming a career advantage (Day 4) | Open to Work

**Helen** (0:00)
Hello, Aneesh. Welcome back to day four of our series on Open to Work.
We are on the sea of compassion. So, just as a reminder for everyone, these are the capabilities to help people get ahead in the age of AI. And it is, I saw something you said recently about the humans are coming.

**Aneesh Rahman** (0:18)
Yeah.

**Helen** (0:19)
And that's a result.

**Aneesh Rahman** (0:20)
That's a chapter title. Yeah.

**Helen** (0:21)
And so, compassion is one of these skills. Can we talk, this is the one I was really interested in. I was like, oh, compassion, should this not just be a baseline? Does this need to be called out? So, tell me a bit more about why you felt it was really important that this was one of the five Cs. Yeah.

**Aneesh Rahman** (0:36)
I mean, again, we started by looking at humans across history and how we did what we've done to build the world around us. And compassion is so core to that. I mean, we talk about anthropological research where we as species were compassionate millennia ago, where people who had disabilities, we know lived long enough that the only way they were able to do that is communities around them, supported them and cared for them. The way that we've bound together at scale. I mean, we've gone from a billion to eight billion people just in the past 300 years in the industrial age, but leading up to that created countries, created communities, like all of that. Compassion for one another is essential to that. The thing I think that was most interesting to me about compassion is, it's arguably the one that people could say is not believable the most, because in the industrial age, where work was asking us to be machine-like, where technical and analytic skills were valued most, where we were managing org charts and organizations entirely around efficiency, entirely around these measurable outcomes of, did we do more better faster?
There really wasn't room for compassion. I think certain leaders understood that to mobilize teams to adapt as a business, compassion was helpful.
But it wasn't something that in the industrial age and in the economy we're leaving behind was the norm. To believe that compassion is going to matter and that it's one of the five Cs, you have to start to imagine where work is going. So where work is going is one where compassion is going to be critical because the human part of work is going to be the core of work. I think that's already immediately true for leaders. You could be leading a team of three or a company of 3,000 or 300,000.
Compassion is so key because empathy is where it all begins right now. I mean, every one of us are growing through a moment of bigger change than we've ever been through before. Every company is going through a moment of business transformation at a level it's never gone through before. The only way that you're going to bring people along with you and the only way you're going to bring yourself along is having compassion for self, compassion for others. And then what I found is at the other end of it, the more compassionate you are about yourself and others, the more energized you are about where work is going for yourself and others. If you get to be pro you by being pro-human with you first, you almost reflexively start to be pro everyone. Because once you recognize with compassion who you are as amazing as you are, we have a line from a neuroscientist in there, everyone is amazing as they are, that I start with these strengths. The old world of work was go address your deficit. You don't have this degree, you don't have that job title yet, you don't work at that big name employer yet, you don't have, you don't have, you don't have, go get, go get, go get. This new world of work is you start with strengths, anyone, everyone. I had a really difficult childhood or I grew up in a really tumultuous environment. Okay, I have resiliency, I have adaptability.
I had to change jobs regularly. I couldn't afford to go to college. Okay, you've got creativity, inventiveness, like you've had to do that. We all start with strengths and once you realize that for yourself, which is compassion for self first of all, you realize everyone has strengths. Anyone who is human has an amazing story of overcoming challenge in some moment, of reaching a new peak in some moment. Anyone who's human has this, but you have to have that compassion. So the new world of work makes compassion relevant in ways that the old world of work didn't. So you're not wrong to say this feels not believable given how work was, but I'm here to tell you this is believable in terms of where work is going.