Andrea Hollingsworth. Photos: ily Studios
Maple Grove resident shares methods for creating a culture of caring.
For Andrea Hollingsworth, showing compassion isn’t a soft skill; it’s a power skill. The Maple Grove woman has created a leadership development program designed to help business leaders foster a culture of caring in the workplace. Last fall, she released the accompanying book, The Compassion Advantage: How Top Leaders Build More Humanizing Workplaces—it’s the culmination of a journey that began in earnest during COVID-19 and was nurtured by a close-knit group of women she met through a yoga class at Life Time Fitness in Maple Grove.
Giving Back to the Community
Hollingsworth has long been interested in the science and psychology of compassion. She began speaking and publishing on the topic in 2008 as she worked toward her Ph.D. at Loyola University Chicago. By 2015, Hollingsworth landed her dream job as a tenure-track professor at Boston University, but just one year later, she would walk away from academia. Hollingsworth was burnt out and in need of some compassion for herself.
She moved back to Minnesota, joined a yoga group and welcomed her son, Bennett Hollingsworth. During the height of the pandemic, Hollingsworth found herself navigating the challenges of lockdown with a toddler. She turned to her yoga group for support. “I felt closest with them,” she says. As they propped her up, she wanted to do something in return. “I thought I could put together a class on compassion for my friends, so I did. It was a hit.”
“They were wonderful,” Fern Braam says of the classes. “She has an amazing talent for expressing herself.”
Andrea Hollingsworth’s workshops utilize The Compassion Advantage framework, alongside data, stories and actionable tips.
“Her Zoom class on ‘How to Be More Compassionate’ was life-changing for me during that time,” Cindy Vollmer says. “Her weekly Zoom classes provided an avenue of connection and deep learning. Andrea demonstrated her knowledge of the topics, technical and organizational skills and her ability to present information with clear and usable daily strategies each week in our class. She led us all to dive deep into compassion, including such topics as self-compassion, mindfulness practices, emotional resilience, dealing with our fears and challenges and how to better communicate with others.”
Afterward, Vollmer told Hollingsworth that she had “grown in awareness of being open to being truly human in real connections.” She says, “I’m learning how to be present in not only the good times, but in the challenging times and experiences.”
The yoga group readily lent itself to the ideas of compassion and mindfulness. “Yoga is all about tending to what you need,” Hollingsworth says. “Pay attention to yourself and modify, modify, modify. Mindfulness is built into the yoga sequence.”
Braam agrees with this sentiment. “Mindfulness and yoga walk hand in hand,” she says. “It’s all about focusing on what’s happening in the present moment, and the outside world fades away. It teaches you to block out distractions.”
“We need these tools,” Braam says. “You can see how powerful that is in any part of your life.”
Not content to keep Hollingsworth’s expertise to themselves, the yoga group encouraged her to think bigger. “There were a couple of business-minded women that said, ‘You could really do something with this; bring it to the business world,’” Hollingsworth says.
The timing couldn’t have been better as the “Great Resignation”—a trend where large numbers of employees voluntarily quit their jobs—was underway, and many were evaluating their own workplace culture. “There was a humanizing of work that needed to happen,” Hollingsworth says. “There was an opening for leaders to be more open, more empathetic.”
With the support of her yoga group—called The Beautiful Optimists—Hollingsworth began to pull together pieces of her leadership development program. “We seeded her interest to bring that to the marketplace,” Braam says. “You could see the whole thing happening from the beginning.”
Working with Compassionate Leaders
Hollingsworth’s neighbor, Robin Downing, was one of the first to call on Hollingsworth to share her expertise at the workplace. Downing, the vice president of human resources at City and County Credit Union, had just created a manager development program for the credit union when something on Hollingsworth’s website caught her eye. “Andrea had a workshop she was working on titled Compassionate Leadership,” Donning says. “Knowing what 2020 and 2021 brought to all of us, there was the realization that as everyone tries to do their best after the last two years, I wanted to continue to incorporate empathy and compassion into my leaders for themselves, as well as how they lead their departments/teams, with accountability still intact and making sure the work is getting done.”
Downing says her managers appreciated and valued Hollingsworth’s workshop, learning how to apply the tools of compassion both at home and work. “My managers enjoyed discussing and hearing other managers regarding these topics, [understanding] they were not alone on struggles as a manager and wanting to be better for themselves, as well as their employees.”
Hollingsworth has heard the testimonials time and time again. “Just the fact that top leaders hired someone like me speaks volumes,” she says. “There’s a business case for compassion. The difference compassion makes in the workplace is tangible. Employees are more engaged, more productive.”
And leaders are grateful. “They say, ‘You’ve given me permission to care. Thank you,’” Hollingsworth says.
Birthing a Book
“It was Fern that said, ‘Andrea, I think you have a book in you,’” Hollingsworth recalls.
The yoga group agreed. At that point, the group was not only doing yoga together, but had also started a book club, also called The Beautiful Optimists. “It’s an intellectual and gifted group,” Hollingsworth says. “They’re just a bunch of nerds, and they wanted the research so I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Hollingsworth got to work pulling together content for the book and enlisted Braam as her accountability partner. “Every month, she would deliver a chapter, and I would read it,” Braam says. “She stuck to it.”
Before long, the book was finished. “She’s an amazing researcher,” Braam says. “Everything in the book is backed up with real research.”
Andrea Hollingworth’s book, The Compassion Advance: How Top Leaders Build More Humanizing Workplaces, is available for purchase online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Compassion Advantage was released September 24, 2024, and Braam would be surprised if it’s Hollingsworth’s last. “I keep telling her there’s more books in her,” she says.
Hollingsworth isn’t ruling it out, but right now she’s relishing all she’s accomplished with the help of her yoga class. “They helped me birth this book out into the world,” she says.
And they’ll do it again if need be. “We’re a force, a support system,” Braam says. “We’re a very tight group of yogis.”
