The Compassionate Instinct

To become a forgiving person, we have to practice forgiving smaller grievances. Then, when a bigger insult comes, we are ready, willing, and able to deal with it. Alternatively, like Delores, once we learn to forgive a major grievance, we can understand the value of limiting the power that pain and anger hold over us the next time we are hurt. No one can make the people in life behave kindly, fairly, or honestly at all times. We cannot end the cruelty on this planet. What we can do is forgive the unkindness that comes our way and put energy toward meeting our positive goals. Then we can help others do the same.

Forgiveness, like other positive emotions such as hope, compassion, and appreciation, is a natural expression of our humanity. These emotions exist within a deep part of each of us. Like many things, they require practice to perfect, but with this practice they become stronger and easier to find. Ultimately, they can be as natural to us as anger and bitterness. It takes a willingness to practice forgiveness day after day to see its profound benefits to physical and emotional well-being and to our relationships. Perhaps the most fundamental benefit of forgiveness is that over time it allows us access to the loving emotions that can lie buried beneath grievances and grudges.

COMPASSION ACROSS CUBICLES

Jill Suttie

FIVE-FOOT TALL PANELS divide the physician’s billing department into a maze of cubicles at Foote Hospital, in Jackson, Michigan. Each cubicle contains one of the 39 employees who make up the billing office staff. Most of the employees are women, many are single mothers, and they spend each day on the phone trying to collect unpaid debts owed to the hospital. The work is repetitive and may seem uninspiring. Yet the hospital staff widely considers this department one of the best places to work at Foote.

“Our department is special,” said Sarah Boik, head of the billing unit. “People care about each other here.”

Deb LeJeune agrees. LeJeune had been on Boik’s staff for only five months when her husband needed a kidney transplant. She said she was worried and distracted in the days leading up to his operation and couldn’t concentrate at work. She needed to take six weeks off without pay to care for her husband, a financial strain she wasn’t sure she could handle. When her coworkers learned of her situation, they pitched in to make her a basket full of puzzles, books, and snacks she could take to the hospital, took up a collection to help her make her house payments, gave her gas cards to use for the drives back and forth from the hospital, and visited her at home just to check in on her.

“It was amazing!” said LeJeune. “I couldn’t have gotten through without their support. They are like family to me.”

These days, it’s rare to find people who consider their workplace “special” and feel close to their coworkers, let alone call them “family.” Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, traces that fact to a steady deterioration in employer-employee relationships that began in the 1980s, when changes in technology, globalization, and a volatile stock market pushed major manufacturers to lay off large numbers of employees. Other organizations followed suit, and soon managers were hiring and firing their workers at will. “The downsizing surge in the ’80s left employees feeling betrayed,” said Rousseau. “Employees no longer felt they could trust their employer to provide for them, so they had less attachment and loyalty toward their places of work.” Rousseau’s statements are borne out by statistics from a recent Gallup poll, which found that 59 percent of American workers are disengaged from work—putting in their time, but with no energy or passion for it—while another 14 percent are actively disengaged, acting out their unhappiness at work and undermining coworkers.

But a growing number of researchers, mainly at business schools across the country, are working to determine what’s behind anomalies like the Foote billing department, where ennui and malaise are displaced by excitement and compassion. This movement, called positive organizational scholarship, or POS, breaks with traditional business research. Instead of analyzing organizational failures, POS looks for examples of “positive deviance”—cases in which organizations successfully cultivate inspiration and productivity among workers—and then tries to figure out what makes these groups tick, so that others might emulate them. “We’re a combination of positive psychology, sociology, and anthropology,” said Jane Dutton, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Michigan and a leader in the POS movement. “POS seeks to cultivate hope and a sense of possibility that people don’t always know is there.”