Principle 2: positive cultures have compassionate leaders
Last updated: 9 Jun 2025
Listen to Fôn talk about compassionate leaders in a positive culture.
An organisation’s leaders and their leadership style have a huge effect on workplace culture.
What is compassionate leadership?
Compassionate leadership is a commitment to giving the right support to our colleagues, partners and people in our teams. It helps them to respond effectively to challenges and thrive in their work.
It’s a key part of Social Care Wales and Health Education and Improvement Wales’s joint workforce strategy, A Healthier Wales.
The model focuses on four behaviours:
- listening
- understanding
- empathising
- helping.
It also has seven principles:
- agreeing direction, alignment and commitment for working together
- creating environments where collective leadership thrives
- establishing conditions for our workforce to reflect, learn, continually improve and innovate
- managing difficulties openly, courageously and ethically
- developing supportive and effective team, and inter-team, working
- improving equality, inclusion and diversity, consciously removing barriers
- enabling safe, trusting and engaging systems and cultures.
We developed these principles with Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW).
This way of working is an essential part of health and social care in Wales.
How does compassionate leadership lead to positive cultures?
When we lead with compassion, we prioritise staff well-being and development.
This means the people we lead are working in a culture that’s inclusive, effective and positive.
Staff need a supportive culture with clear direction and encouragement alongside a commitment to open dialogue.
Leading with compassion gives them that direction and encouragement. It helps teams to feel valued and respected, so they can do their best work.
It takes resilience and courage, but compassionate leaders give confidence to their teams.
That confidence means teams can:
- work together to reach shared goals
- learn from mistakes at work
- feel motivated to do a good job
- feel safe and confident to have open discussions where staff can express their feelings, opinions and ideas without holding back
- feel comfortable raising concerns and making suggestions to make things better
- keep staff longer because they’re happier
- be compassionate to other people.
This allows us to support people to live the best life they can through better care and support.
Where to find out more
Here are links to information and resources to help you understand more about compassionate leadership and how you can lead with compassion.
Some of these links may not be available bilingually or in an accessible format. We’re not responsible for content produced by other organisations.
Compassionate leadership principles and how to use them – Social Care Wales
Explains what the principles are and ways to lead with compassion.
A positive culture toolkit for adult social care – Skills for Care
A toolkit to help you make your workplace culture a positive, compassionate, collaborative, and inclusive environment where people experience high quality care and support.