By Rita Hibbard
Compassionate Action Network International

What makes a business compassionate?

Is it office birthday parties? Free coffee and tea? Free parking for the “employee of the month?”

Howard Behar thinks it’s all about hiring people “who want to serve other human beings.” Do that, he says, and you will succeed in business and live a happier life in the bargain.

The former president of Starbucks International who has written a book, “It’s Not About the Coffee,” and become a speaker on organizational and personal leadership, advises conducting business in a manner that puts people first. For Starbucks, that has stayed the same, he tells interviewers, from when he joined the company with 28 stores, to the international force the company now is with more than 17,000 stores across the continents.

So back to the question, “What makes a company compassionate?”

Examples Behar gives include empowering employees and providing health insurance for employees .

“Health insurance for part -time workers is approaching the amount of money we spend on coffee,” said Behar, who retired in 2003 but served as a director of the company until 2008, in a 2010 speech at Hollins University.“The same with stock options (for all employees). We’ve had tremendous pressure from investors to get rid of these things because they cost a lot of money, but we won’t budge, because we think it’s the right thing to do.”

He writes in the book that, “It’s impossible to lead in business – or in life – unless you genuinely care about people. That’s what matters. Period.”

Behar calls it “leading with compassion,” whether it’s as business leaders, within small groups, or simply leading our own lives.

It’s not always easy, he warns. It often means having to step up and take responsibility.

“That’s the example we need to send, of who we need to be as human beings, rather than hiding behind things. At the end of the day, leading with compassion never stops. And being a leader is a 24/7 job, not just when it’s convenient.”

He gave the example of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz personally visiting the homes of each of three young Starbucks employees shot dead inside a Washington, D.C. Starbucks in 1997. One 18-year-old had been on the job a week. It was his first job. The other victims were 21 and 25 years old. Schultz made the visits on the day of the shooting, without consulting legal counsel or public relations advisers.

Schultz sat down the families of the victims and apologized and took responsibilities for the deaths, Behar said.

“It wasn’t Howard’s fault,” Behar said, “but he didn’t care, what mattered was he cared about those families and those children… He went from home to home to home and said, ‘we will do whatever it takes that your children will not be forgotten.’”

After the incident, the company established the Starbucks Memorial Fund and began dedicating funds to organizations working towards nonviolence in the D.C. area in memory of the victims. So far, more than $700,000 has gone into the effort.

By Rita Hibbard

Compassion is a humble goal, yet it’s world-changing.

“You can say I can’t aspire to make peace happen today,” says Tom Williams of Louisville. “It’s beyond me. But compassion, yes, I can do that.”

Williams and his city will be recognized in Seattle next month for their efforts to make a more compassionate planet. Williams will be honored with the “2012 International Heart of Compassion Award” and Louisville will be named the “2012 International Model Compassionate City” in conjunction with the First Annual Compassion in Action Luncheon.

Williams, an attorney and father of three, speaks of profound experiences that led him to the path of pursuing and developing compassion. These experiences, including deaths of people close to him, reminded him to “re-prioritize what is important in life.”

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Dr. James Doty

A neuroscience team at Stanford University is exploring whether compassion can be learned. This has potentially great use for all sorts of places where violence and aggression cause problems — schools, prisons, streets and war zones.

The research by Dr. James Doty and his team is simply fascinating. They are asking whether altruism and compassion actually reside concretely in the human brain. Can humans be taught to be more compassionate? The answers to these questions could have major impacts for our violence-prone society.

Doty will be presenting a public lecture in Seattle April 4 at 3 p.m. at the University of Washington, sponsored by the Compassionate Action Network International. His lecture is part of a week of activities that also bring Charter of Compassion author and renowned religious studies scholar Karen Armstrong to Seattle.

One study now underway by the interdisciplinary team is exploring whether meditation increases compassion. One interesting finding so far — it does, but so does training in improv theater. Further research will look at types of meditation training to see if compassion increases or stays the same, compared to improv training or none at all. Another study is looking at those who have been involved in gang violence but now work to support at-risk youth to determine commonalities among those who are able to step away from a life of violence into a life of compassion. A separately funded study is seeking the same answers in Israel with Jewish and Arab former combatants who have engaged in violence in the past and are now collaborating in various peace-making activities.

The research team, called CCARE, was established within the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Research at the School of Medicine to “support and conduct rigorous scientific studies of compassion and altruistic behavior,” according to its mission statement. It draws from several disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, economics and contemplative traditions.

– Rita Hibbard

Compassionate Action Network International is bringing Tori Murden McClure to Seattle next week because she’s leading the planet’s first compassionate university, Spalding University in Louisville, KY.

She’s fully committed to the task. But it’s the result of a lifetime journey, not an “aha moment.” This is the woman known for having been the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first to ski overland to the South Pole. Long before that, readers of her book, “A Pearl in the Storm,” know, she learned to defend her younger, handicapped brother from a constant storm of bullying, and knew firsthand what it felt like to be the outcast in groups of better-off, seemingly happier, more well-adjusted folks.

The Harvard Business review’s April 2012 edition recognizes her for a lifetime of leadership.

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By Rita Hibbard

He describes his journey to Seeds of Compassion as a happy accident. He had the gift of time, the interest and a friend who knew the right people. It just jelled.

“It was an extraordinarily wonderful series of accidents that got me involved,” he says, adding, “Seeds of Compassion is one of the most amazing things that has happened to me in my life.”

But perhaps John Sabol underestimates himself a bit.

And certainly, thousands of Seattle area school children, their parents, teachers and larger community, have benefited from one very committed volunteer’s energy and resources.

After retiring as an executive from Microsoft, a company he joined in 1984, Sabol became actively involved in granddaughter Sophia’s life and interested in childhood development. Friend Yaffa Maritz, co-founder of Listening Mothers and then on the steering committee of Seeds of Compassion, introduced Sabol to two people who made him excited about learning more: Dr. Dan Siegal, a psychiatrist whose work examines how interpersonal relations impact the development of the brain, and Dan Kranzler, co-founder of Seeds of Compassion who at the time was deep into plans for bringing the Dalai Lama andDesmond Tutu to Seattle for a five-day gathering on empathy and understanding.

When they first met at a party, Kranzler explained how empathy could become contagious, and how the Canadians “had it all figured out.” The next day, Sabol says, all he could remember was Canada, empathy and schools. He googled the terms, and found “Roots of Empathy,” an organization based in Canada and led by Mary Gordon. The program brings a mother and baby into a classroom every month over the course of a school year for three 40-minute visits per month . An instructor preps the class before the event, guides the students to discuss the baby’s evolving needs and emotional development, and comes back the next day to allow the students to talk about what they observed.

“The curriculum builds a vocabulary for kids to about the baby’s emotional needs,” Sabol said. “Then they talk about their needs. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

On its web site, the program puts it this way:

“Over the school year, a trained Roots of Empathy Instructor guides the children as they observe the relationship between baby and parent, understanding the baby’s intentions and emotions. Through this model of experiential learning, the baby is the ‘Teacher”’and a catalyst, helping children identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others.”

Research shows teachers report a significant decrease in aggressive behavior among participants compared to a control group, and that children who have completed the program were much more likely to recognize acts of kindness such as sharing, helping and understanding. The program has grown from a few kindergarten classes in Toronto to a program that has reached 450,000 children worldwide.

“Empathy can’t be taught, but it can be caught,” founder Mary Gordon often says.

Sabol joined the steering committee of Seeds of Compassion and made it his mission to bring the Roots of Empathy program to Seattle area schools before the five-day Seeds of Compassion event in April of 2008. It began that year with 10 classrooms, and now is in its fifth year with 96 classrooms and 2,500 students.

For that to happen, Sabol had to overcome initial doubts that the program could be launched that quickly. But the right people came together and made it happen, he said.

While at Microsoft, Sabol had spent some of his time focused on the classroom, but in a very different way. “My experience prior to this had been infusing technology into the classroom,” he said. “Teaching empathy is about as far from that as possible… From hard computers to soft warm babies…”

Today, thanks to Sabol’s and others’ early and onging work, a major foundation has decided to support the program’s rapid expansion in the U.S., using Seattle as a showcase. Programs will launch soon in five or six San Francisco schools and in a similar number of New York schools. Research studies assessing the Seattle area programs have been funded at the University of Washington.

“But I don’t need those studies,”Sabol adds. “I’m a grandfather. I know babies make wonderful things happen.”

There are many other, less quantifiable impacts. He tells the story of a 16-year-old boy, from a dysfunctional family, a loner, held back in grade advancement because of learning problems. One day, the boy asked if he could hold the baby. While that is not generally encouraged, the mother recognized the boy’s need and allowed him to sit in a quiet corner with the baby. The boy then went to the program instructor and asked, in front of the class, “If someone has never been loved, can he be a good father?” That moment of sharing allowed the other students to have empathy for the boy’s struggles in a way that almost certainly would not have otherwise occurred, and allowed the boy and his classmates to consider a complex emotional question.

Five faculty members from granddaughter Sophia’s school in Los Angelos a came to the Seeds of Compassion event. They were so inspired that they decided to eliminate one day of homework and replace it with a day of heartwork. That is a loosely defined exercise in which students are asked to sit down with family members and work on a project of their own choosing that involves empathy – it could be a get well card to a classmate or a note to the teacher about what the student likes about the class. Periodically, Sophia rings up her grandparents on Skype to work on the project with them, which Sabol notes, “is like totally cool.”

One story in particular shows how the Roots of Empathy program can shift a child’s outlook. When helping Sophia learn the multiplication tables, he made a spreadsheet of numbers and asked her to do the math. When he returned to check her work, he found Sophia had completely changed the rules of the game. Instead of numbers, Sophia had written the words “love, community, care, helping, empathy, and fun” on the grid. She had drawn a picture of two people holding a beating heart.

“Needless to say, this just blew me away,” he said. “She was saying, ‘Grandpa, you think math is important, but what really is important is this stuff.’”