How compassionate leaders improve business performance 

Many executives still struggle to see the link between kindness and corporate results. Measuring leaders’ more empathetic qualities against employee motivation is one way to quantify its impact on business performance, say Paolo Cervini and Gabriele Rosani .

In our daily lives, all of us appreciate the power of kindness. Its value lies in how it can create positive feelings both for givers and takers and trigger constructive actions, thoughts and emotions. Yet, in the world of business, kindness is a rare and often unacknowledged commodity. Instead, toughness, assertiveness and self-interest have been considered the corporate benchmarks of behavior.  

But times change, and in the world of modern leadership these traits are now widely seen as negative. Kindness is enjoying a renaissance. The number of Google searches with the keywords kind leadership has multiplied threefold in the last five years; several pivotal articles and books have made the concept familiar to…