Phụ nữ có thể lãnh đạo bằng cả trái tim và khối óc. Đây là lý do tại sao lãnh đạo bằng lòng trắc ẩn lại quan trọng ngay lúc này

When former New Zealand prime minister and activist Jacinda Ardern rejected the idea that empathy makes a leader weak, she named a contradiction many women know well. Women in leadership are often expected to be decisive but not too forceful, caring but not too soft, confident but never difficult. Yet in a world shaped by burnout, polarisation, inequality and institutional distrust, the old model of leadership as toughness without tenderness looks increasingly out of date. Can women lead with both heart and mind? The answer is yes; and that may be exactly the kind of leadership our institutions now need.

Compassionate leadership is not about being “nice”. It is about noticing distress; understanding what people need and taking action in ways that reduce harm while still enabling performance, accountability and direction. It offers a transformative approach centred on empathy, understanding and resilience, with relevance far beyond specialist leadership debates. The Potential Project research that encompasses around 500 organisations in approximately 100 countries demonstrates that 55% of women leaders were rated by followers as both wise and compassionate, compared with 27% of men, while 56% of men were rated poorly on both dimensions (Carter, 2022a, 2022b; Hougaard, 2022) .

The point is not that compassion belongs to women or is absent in men. It is that qualities long dismissed as secondary in leadership may, in fact, be central to leading well in complex times.

Why compassion is a leadership strength

One useful way to understand this is through emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is not simply about being sensitive. It is the capacity to remain self–aware, regulate one’s emotions, read social situations, and respond to others with judgement and care (Goleman, 1995) . In practice, it helps leaders notice what is going on beneath the surface: who is disengaged, who is overloaded, who is being left out, and what kind of response will move a team forward without causing unnecessary damage.

Compassionate leadership begins with four steps which are interlinked: noticing, connecting, understanding and acting (Lee, B. – Compassionate Inclusive Leadership Development Programme at the University of Southampton, UK) . In other words, leaders must first pay attention, then care enough to engage, then understand what is needed, and finally do something meaningful about it. That matters because compassion is not just a feeling. It is a disciplined practice.

This is especially the case for women because they are often navigating leadership under conditions of heightened scrutiny. Many face contradictory expectations and carry invisible emotional workloads: repeatedly smoothing tensions, supporting others, absorbing conflict and proving their skills. Under those conditions, emotional intelligence is not a decorative extra. It becomes both a survival resource and a leadership asset.

Drawing on mindful compassion, Waddington (“Creating conditions for compassion”, in The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education, Springer International Publishing, 2017) describes three emotional regulation systems: threat, drive and soothing/affiliation. Threat produces fear, anxiety and defensiveness. Drive pushes achievement, speed and competition. The affiliation system supports connection, safety and contentment. Modern workplaces often over–reward threat and drive while neglecting affiliation. The result is cultures that may look productive on the surface but feel hard, brittle and emotionally depleted underneath. Compassionate leadership helps rebalance this. It does not avoid difficult decisions. It makes them with fuller awareness of their human consequences. This means considering not only organisational outcomes, but also how decisions affect people’s wellbeing, relationships and ability to thrive. That is why compassion should not be confused with weakness. It is often what makes leadership sustainable.

Kintsugi and the power of imperfection

A second helpful lens comes from kintsugi, the Japanese philosophy and craft of repairing broken pottery with gold. Rather than hiding cracks, kintsugi honours them. It treats brokenness as part of an object’s history, not as evidence that it has lost its worth.

For women leaders, this is a powerful metaphor. Too many are still expected to perform perfection: always composed, always capable, always emotionally controlled, never visibly uncertain. But that kind of perfection is often brittle. It leaves little room for reflection, learning, repair or honesty. Kintsugi offers another way of thinking about strength. It suggests that experience, including painful experience, can deepen rather than diminish leadership.

This connects closely with Brené Brown’s (2022) writing on the “Gifts of Imperfection”. Her work has helped shift public understanding of vulnerability away from weakness and towards courage, connection and authenticity. For women leaders, that is especially significant. It creates space for authority that does not depend on invulnerability, but on integrity, self–knowledge and relational courage. This does not mean celebrating adversity for its own sake. Structural barriers, sexism, exclusion and burnout are not gifts. But many women do lead through fracture: exclusion, bias, care burdens, professional setbacks, isolation, migration, health challenges or the persistent experience of not fitting the mould.

Those experiences, when reflected on rather than buried, can sharpen the ability to notice the unmet needs of others. That is where self–compassion becomes essential. Waddington’s work draws on Neff and Germer (“Self–Compassion and Psychological Welbeing”, The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, 2017) to describe self–compassion as involving self–kindness, common humanity and mindfulness. The key point is that self–compassion is not indulgence. It is what allows people to acknowledge pain without being overwhelmed by it. It also lays the foundation for engaging compassionately with others in a way that is genuine and sustainable.

How would you treat a friend, and how would you speak to yourself? Caring for oneself is “not self–indulgence” but “self–preservation”. That matters because many women leaders have been socialised into over–functioning, over–giving and over–correcting. Kintsugi invites them to stop treating imperfection as disqualification. It suggests that what has been repaired may carry a different, deeper kind of wisdom.

Compassionate leadership must be co-developed

There is, however, a limit to how far individual leaders can carry this alone. Compassionate and inclusive leadership cannot depend only on personal goodness. It has to be co-developed through culture, institutions, systems and shared practice.

Paulo Freire argues that empowerment begins with critical consciousness: people must see that their difficulties are not just personal failings but that they are rooted in the structures around them. That insight is crucial here. Too often women are encouraged to become more resilient, while the systems around them remain biased, extractive or exclusionary. Compassionate leadership should not mean asking women to carry broken cultures more gracefully. It should mean changing the conditions in which leadership happens.

In practical terms, this can be achieved in a few steps:

Organisations need to value self–compassion and recovery, not just endurance. This is linked to resilience, emotional regulation and recovery from harm, particularly in the face of discrimination.

Leaders need to get better at noticing what is usually missed: invisible labour, exclusion in meetings, biased assumptions, and supposedly neutral systems that produce unequal outcomes.

Institutions need courageous, compassionate conversations.

Systems themselves need redesigning. If workplaces continue to reward speed, overwork, image management and competition, above all else, compassionate leadership will remain something leaders are praised for in theory and punished for in practice.

The real question, then, is not whether women can lead with both heart and mind. They already do. The more urgent question is whether our organisations are ready to recognise that this is not a softer form of leadership, but a stronger and more future–facing one.

This article was co-authored with İrem Bali, Psychologist & Neurosystemics Practitioner.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Mine Karatas-Ozkan is affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK and the European Academy of Management.