We talk a lot about resilience in tech. About moving fast, staying agile, and leading through the unknowns. We talk about building high-performing teams and delivering results. About psychological safety, servant leadership, and creating cultures where people can do their best work.
But there’s one capability that underpins all of it, and it rarely comes up in leadership development conversations.
Compassionate leadership and the self-awareness it requires.
I’ve been studying and practising mindful self-compassion for over a year now. It started as something personal during my executive coaching studies, at first it felt like an additional layer to add on top of my skills, my knowledge, my background leading GTM and product marketing in complex tech SaaS companies.
What I didn’t expect was how completely it would reframe the way I think about leadership itself.
Spoiler: it’s not an add-on. It’s the heart and the infrastructure.
This is what I’ve learned.
The misconception that’s costing leaders
When most people hear “compassionate leadership,” they think softness. Lowering the bar. Agreeing to everything. Avoiding conflict. Being the leader who never says the difficult thing.
It’s the opposite.
Rasmus Hougaard, who has studied compassionate leadership extensively, defines it as the ability to do hard things in a human way, combining warmth with directness, care with high standards, and presence with courage. It is not about being nice. It is about being real and speaking your mind at the right moment.
The Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) methodology adds a critical layer that I would like to bring to your attention: compassionate leadership starts from the inside. You cannot consistently lead others with compassion if you are at war with yourself.
Treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer a trusted colleague, while remaining fully accountable, is not a personal practice separate from your leadership. It is the foundation of it.
As a GTM and product marketing leader, I see this tension every day. On one hand, the need for deep tech and business expertise, the ability to zoom out, understand the bigger picture, and build a strategic plan that connects product, market, and revenue.
On the other hand, the hardest part: actually leading and executing that plan across functions, with incomplete information, competing priorities, and a team looking to you for direction even when you don’t have all the answers.
This is where most marketing and GTM leaders find the gap. Not in strategy, but in the space between knowing what needs to happen and being able to lead people through the uncertainty of making it happen.
That gap is being able to first trust ourselves, our inner wisdom, gut feeling, intuition, and then with compassion toward ourselves, finding the way to lead others. Listen actively, not to respond or to shut down a discussion, but to truly understand the emotions behind what has been said.
Having this deep understanding of the ‘why’, the root cause of a situation at work, can help leaders move better and faster tremendously.
But often we get caught in the need to deliver, to bring results, and that causes us to miss important information. It raises our inner critic and actually harms our ability to lead. It seeds doubt.
What the research actually says
Dr. Neff, the pioneering researcher behind the MSC method, consistently shows that people with higher levels of self-compassion demonstrate greater emotional resilience, more accurate self-perception, and stronger motivation to learn and grow after failure, not less.
Self-criticism is more likely to lead to avoidance and fear-based behaviour, while self-compassion creates the psychological safety needed to take honest stock of a situation and respond effectively.
Tara Brach, psychologist and one of the leading teachers of mindfulness and compassion practices in the West, frames it this way: the inner critic, that relentless internal voice that catalogues every mistake, every gap, every moment of falling short, is not a motivator. It’s a threat response. And when we’re in threat response, we are not thinking clearly, connecting genuinely, or leading well.
For tech leaders specifically, this matters at every level. The decisions you make under pressure. The way you show up in difficult conversations. How you respond when a product launch doesn’t land the way you planned. Whether you can hold your team through a missed quarter without transferring your anxiety onto them.
Charley Gale
You are not alone in your struggle
One of the most powerful concepts in compassionate leadership is what Kristin Neff calls “common humanity.”
The premise is simple but profound: struggle, ambiguity, and imperfection are not personal failures. They are part of the shared human experience. Every person leading a team through a difficult quarter, navigating a reorg, managing up while trying to protect their team below, every single one of them is carrying something.
The inner critic thrives on isolation. It tells you that everyone else has it figured out but you. That your self-doubt, your exhaustion, your moments of uncertainty are weaknesses that would disqualify you if people really knew.
Common humanity says something different: this is what it means to be human and to lead. You are not failing. You are not alone.
In tech, this is particularly important because the culture often glorifies certainty. That mythology is not just false, it’s harmful. It creates organizations where struggle goes underground, where leaders can’t ask for help, and where the cost of appearing uncertain feels higher.
When leaders internalize common humanity, really internalize it, not just intellectually understand it, something shifts in how they lead. They become more honest. More approachable. More willing to say “I don’t know, let’s figure this out together.” And paradoxically, that honesty builds more trust than performed certainty ever could.
I see this in my own experience leading PMM, and in the coaching workshops I do alongside it. The leaders who are most trusted by their teams are not the ones who project invulnerability. They’re the ones who are real, who hold the standard high while being honest about the difficulty of doing so.
Nitin Kartik
The inner critic in a tech leadership context
Tara Brach writes extensively about what she calls the “trance of unworthiness”, the pervasive, often unconscious sense that we are not enough. Not smart enough, not strategic enough, not decisive enough, not whatever the current moment seems to require.
In tech, that trance has very specific flavours.
For senior leaders in product marketing and GTM, it often sounds like: I’m still too operational. I should be more strategic by now. I’m not influencing at the level I need to be.
For executives, it might be: Everyone in the room has more technical depth than I do. I need to have the answer before I can speak.
For women leaders in tech, and this is a pattern I encounter constantly, it frequently sounds like: I am working so hard, do I have the right platform? Are my efforts being seen?
The inner critic is not motivating these leaders. It’s exhausting them.
And here’s the cost that rarely gets counted: an exhausted leader is a less effective leader. They over-explain and over-justify because they don’t trust that their authority is secure. They give feedback cautiously, if at all, because their own inner critic has made them hyperaware of how feedback lands.
The antidote isn’t to silence the inner critic through willpower or to ‘power-through.’ It’s to develop self-compassion as a resource and nurture your relationship with yourself first – then with others. It’s about developing stability, and that inner stability is what makes compassionate leadership possible in practice.
What compassionate leadership looks like in practice
Compassionate leadership is a framework you can apply for yourself; it shows up in four principles that Rasmus Hougaard identifies as the core of doing hard things in a human way.
Be here now
Presence is a practice, and it is almost impossible to be genuinely present with another person when you are at war with yourself. When you’re not fighting yourself, you can actually be with the person in front of you. You can hear what they’re not saying, you can practice active listening, and you can notice the tension in the room before it becomes a problem.
For GTM leaders who move between strategy sessions, pipeline reviews, and people conversations in the same afternoon, presence isn’t passive. It’s one of the most active and high-leverage things you can do. Being fully present builds trust.
Courage over comfort
Compassionate leadership is not conflict avoidance dressed up in warm language. It is the willingness to have the difficult conversation because you care about the people and you care about the outcome. You can name the standard that isn’t being met. You can candidly share your observations. Leaders who have done the inner work, who have developed genuine self-compassion, find this easier. Because they are not protecting an image, but rather they are leading from values.
Direct is faster
Indirectness is often fear in disguise. The softened message, the hint, the hope that someone will “get it” without you having to say it clearly, these are avoidance strategies dressed up as consideration.
In PMM and GTM teams, where alignment across product, sales, and marketing is everything, indirectness is expensive. Misaligned priorities, duplicated work, campaigns built on assumptions nobody questioned, these are the downstream costs of leaders who don’t trust themselves enough to speak clearly. Directness, delivered with warmth, is one of the most respectful things you can offer someone.
Clarity is kindness
Ambiguity is not neutral. Unclear expectations, mixed signals, and delayed feedback create anxiety, and anxiety erodes trust, performance, and belonging.
The compassionate leader understands that giving people clarity, even when it’s uncomfortable to deliver, is an act of genuine care. In fast-moving tech environments, it is also an act of operational efficiency. The clearer you are, the faster your team can move, and the more ownership they can take.
The connection between compassionate leadership and trust
Trust is built through consistency, honesty, and the sense that someone genuinely has your interests at heart alongside their own. Compassionate leadership enables all three.
A leader who leads with compassion is more consistent because they’re not reacting from a place of threat, shame, or the need to protect their image. They’re responding from a place of values.
They’re more honest because they’ve stopped pretending that difficulty doesn’t exist, either in themselves or in the work. That honesty is contagious, teams that see their leader acknowledge struggle without shame start to do the same.
In PMM and GTM teams specifically, where cross-functional trust is the difference between a product launch that lands and one that fragments, that culture of honesty is not a soft outcome, actually is the strongest culture an organization can hope for to achieve.
This is what builds the kind of trust that actually changes how a team operates. Not trust as a values statement on a company website, trust as the lived experience of working with someone who is present, honest, and genuinely invested in the company and team growth.
Why you should lead with trust
Tech is in a complicated moment, and the macro-economic crisis and geopolitical shifts only increases complication.
AI is accelerating everything, timelines, expectations, and the pace has changed. For PMM and GTM leaders, this is particularly acute. The tools are changing faster than the teams using them. The buyer journey is being disrupted. The definition of what a PMM as a function does, and who it needs to be, is being rewritten in real time.
In that environment, the leaders who will sustain performance are not the ones who push hardest. They’re the ones who can hold pressure without transferring it. Who can stay human when everything around them is optimizing for speed. Who can create and trust, in the middle of change.
That is not a technical skill, it is not a strategic skill, it is a human skill and it starts from within.
Compassionate leadership is the foundation of sustainable high performance.
Where to begin
Start incorporating weekly reflections, ask yourself:
- How did I show up this week?
- Was there a moment of struggle?
- How did I react when I met difficult moments?
- Did I speak kindly to myself this week?
- What assumptions am I making?
- What’s possible?
- What resources do I have?
- What do I want to happen next?
That shift, small as it sounds, is the start that can change everything.
If there’s one takeaway I would like you to take from this article is:
Give compassion. To yourself first. Then to others.
