Jump to section
Learn compassionate management
How it works
Transform your enterprise with the scalable mindsets, skills, & behavior change that drive performance.
Explore how BetterUp connects to your core business systems.
We pair AI with the latest in human-centered coaching to drive powerful, lasting learning and behavior change.
Products
Build leaders that accelerate team performance and engagement.
Unlock performance potential at scale with AI-powered curated growth journeys.
Build resilience, well-being and agility to drive performance across your entire enterprise.
Solutions
Transform your business, starting with your sales leaders.
Unlock business impact from the top with executive coaching.
Foster a culture of inclusion and belonging.
Accelerate the performance and potential of your agencies and employees.
What is coaching?
Learn how 1:1 coaching works, who its for, and if it's right for you.
Accelerate your personal and professional growth with the expert guidance of a BetterUp Coach.
Types of Coaching
Navigate career transitions, accelerate your professional growth, and achieve your career goals with expert coaching.
Enhance your communication skills for better personal and professional relationships, with tailored coaching that focuses on your needs.
Find balance, resilience, and well-being in all areas of your life with holistic coaching designed to empower you.
Library
Research, expert insights, and resources to develop courageous leaders within your organization.
Best practices, research, and tools to fuel individual and business growth.
View on-demand BetterUp events and learn about upcoming live discussions.
EN - US
For Business
How it works
Transform your enterprise with the scalable mindsets, skills, & behavior change that drive performance.
Explore how BetterUp connects to your core business systems.
We pair AI with the latest in human-centered coaching to drive powerful, lasting learning and behavior change.
Products
Build leaders that accelerate team performance and engagement.
Unlock performance potential at scale with AI-powered curated growth journeys.
Build resilience, well-being and agility to drive performance across your entire enterprise.
Solutions
Transform your business, starting with your sales leaders.
Unlock business impact from the top with executive coaching.
Foster a culture of inclusion and belonging.
Accelerate the performance and potential of your agencies and employees.
Customers
See how innovative organizations use BetterUp to build a thriving workforce.
Discover how BetterUp measurably impacts key business outcomes for organizations like yours.
For Individuals
What is coaching?
Learn how 1:1 coaching works, who its for, and if it's right for you.
Accelerate your personal and professional growth with the expert guidance of a BetterUp Coach.
Types of Coaching
Navigate career transitions, accelerate your professional growth, and achieve your career goals with expert coaching.
Enhance your communication skills for better personal and professional relationships, with tailored coaching that focuses on your needs.
Find balance, resilience, and well-being in all areas of your life with holistic coaching designed to empower you.
Resources
Library
Research, expert insights, and resources to develop courageous leaders within your organization.
Best practices, research, and tools to fuel individual and business growth.
View on-demand BetterUp events and learn about upcoming live discussions.
Blog
The latest insights and ideas for building a high-performing workplace.
BetterUp Briefing
The online magazine that helps you understand tomorrow's workforce trends, today.
Research
Innovative research featured in peer-reviewed journals, press, and more.
Founded in 2022 to deepen the understanding of the intersection of well-being, purpose, and performance
You’ve heard it before: people don’t leave companies. They leave bad managers. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, one in two employees has fled from a bad manager. If that’s not a concerning statistic to you, it should be. Mediocre leaders can make or break your business.
But what’s the difference between a manager, a boss, and a leader? A leader and a great leader? In his groundbreaking book, Conscious Business, Fred Kofman writes, “Asking whether someone is a manager or a leader is like asking whether someone is a soccer player or a ball-kicker.” By this token, leadership is the way that good managers earn the trust of their team.
Research has shown that there are a number of key leadership behaviors that managers can learn and develop. These behaviors are grounded in managing our social-emotional reactions to our surroundings. And by cultivating them, leaders can build a team around them that is accountable, trusting, resilient, proactive, and passionate about their work and company mission.
If you want to be this type of leader (and cultivate this type of leadership in your organization), here are the 5 leadership behaviors our research has shown can have the biggest impact on your team’s productivity and engagement, and ways to practice them on a daily basis.
While many leadership experts will tell you that empathy is critical to great leadership, it’s actually compassion — an “ objective form of empathy” — that’s key to being more in touch with your team. Practicing compassion comes down to training yourself to see situations from another person’s perspective. Compassionate management involves taking the time to consider and understand people’s stresses so you can be better equipped to take action. Unlike empathy and empathetic leadership, compassion creates emotional distance, giving leaders the ability to proactively assist another person. Being a compassionate leader can decrease team members’ stress levels and in turn, increase their productivity and effectiveness.
Compassionate management involves taking the time to consider and understand people’s stresses so you can be better equipped to take action. It also helps your team manage their stress when they know they know you both see and hear them.
Compassionate leadership means showing genuine interest in team members’ success and well-being and a commitment to understanding, but not necessarily agreeing. As you practice this skill, you’ll find that you’ll be able to develop more loyalty and trust with team members. While raises and promotions are valuable, research has shown that it’s the positive relationships we develop at work that have a greater impact on retention.
Practice this:
Great leaders are able to quickly change course themselves and also help their team evolve with the organization’s needs.
Anne Dwane, CEO of Zinch, told First Round Review, “Adaptable people aim to do the right thing at the right time for what they want to accomplish.” Adaptable people also tend to surround themselves with people of a similar mindset, establishing a culture of learning and risk-taking.
These types of leaders (much like elite athletes) tend to operate at their peak performance because they enjoy the process, continually push themselves and their teams forward, and aren’t afraid of occasionally losing. They recognize that leadership is a lifelong learning process and mistakes are optimal opportunities to better ourselves and our decision-making skills.
Practice this:
Studies have shown that employee development results are best achieved when a manager is actively involved in the process.
Managers who are able to take a coaching approach to leadership develop a partnership with their teammates and establish a shared vision for what needs to be done and how these goals will be accomplished. This sort of relationship will give you a more personal and active role in each individual’s development, create a relationship of trust, and foster an environment of continual growth.
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford found that the most successful individuals tend to fall into the “improving” or “growth mindset” category. Consequently, leaders who focus on developing people can influence teammates to adopt a similar mindset of constant self-improvement.
Great leaders are able to tie people’s individual development to organizational objectives (and company core values) ultimately increasing accountability, improving employee retention, and developing stronger leaders within their teams.
Practice this:
Effective communication skills are key to building trust with your teammates and getting them to buy into your vision.
Great leaders know that listening can be more empowering than speaking. Effective communication skills are key to building trust with your teammates and getting them to buy into your vision. Effective listening is a combination of both verbal and nonverbal communication skills that can be learned and practiced over time.
In a study of over 8,000 individuals employed in a variety of industries, most respondents said that they believed that their communication skills were effective and in some cases, even more effective than those of their coworkers. Yet, research has shown that “the average person listens at only about 25% efficiency.” There’s a huge correlation between effective leadership and effective listening; effective listening “fosters cohesive bonds, commitment, and trust.”
Practice this:
One of the joys of being a leader is the opportunity to motivate and inspire people to do their best work and pursue projects and goals that enable them to grow. While being inspiring might sound like a soft pursuit, motivation theory has actually shown that there are proven ways leaders can motivate and inspire their teams.
Effective leaders prioritize the creation of an inspiring work environment that propels their teams to see beyond their perceived limitations and step up to new challenges.
What’s their secret?
Motivational leaders have a keen understanding of how to create a strong sense of community and belonging within their organizations, regularly celebrate and reward achievements, and set standards for performance by modeling drive, initiative-taking, and energy. As a result, their teams tend to see lower turnover, increased productivity, and increased motivation.
What are some common behaviors of leaders that teammates would call “inspiring”? They inspire others to act by creating a strong shared sense of organizational purpose, hold their teams accountable for their own destiny, prioritize growth and problem-solving skills, and tend to be humble, compassionate, and transparent — not to mention, great communicators. Leadership development experts Dr. Jack Zenger and Dr. Joseph Folkman identified 10 “companion behaviors that define an inspiring leader”:
Zenger and Folkman found that leaders don’t have to perfectly exemplify every leadership behavior associated with being inspiring, but if they could strengthen just 2-3 behaviors, they could become more inspiring.
Practice this:
Some leaders are born with innate talents and a set of behaviors that make them particularly suited for greatness. But many leadership behaviors can be learned, developed, practiced over time, and used to nurture a new generation of leaders that are yet to rise to the challenge.
Develop your leadership and strategic management skills with the help of an expert Coach.
Develop your leadership and strategic management skills with the help of an expert Coach.
Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships.
With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.
How it works
Products
Solutions
Customers
What is coaching?
Types of Coaching
Resources