Compassion and business haven’t historically been uttered in the same sentence very often.

However, that has been changing in recent years.

More and more businesses are realizing that in addition to helping us be happier and more fulfilled, compassion can actually be great for business.

One of the most touching and striking examples of this comes from an industry that is often referred to as a “commodity industry,” commercial aviation. But even in a commodity industry – perhaps especially in such industries – compassion can be a powerful differentiator.

Unfortunately, this powerful example begins with some very sad circumstances.

In January of 2011, near Denver, Colorado, a two-year-old boy named Caden was beaten by his mother’s live-in boyfriend. His injuries were so severe that he almost immediately went into a coma.

Medical professionals determined the next day that Caden would not survive, and that he would be taken off of life support that night so that his organs could be donated and potentially help over 20 people.

Mark Dickinson, Caden’s grandfather, was in Los Angeles on business when he received the tragic news. Mr. Dickinson’s wife immediately arranged for him to fly to Denver, with a connection in Tuscon, Arizona.

She informed the carrier, Southwest Airlines, of the circumstances and let them know that her husband would be rushing to catch his flight in Los Angeles because, if he missed his connection, he wouldn’t be able to see his grandson for the last time before the child was taken off of life support.

Mr. Dickinson arrived at LAX in what appeared to be plenty of time, almost two hours before the scheduled departure. But there were long lines at check in. By the time he got his boarding pass, he was already anxious that he might miss his flight. When he arrived at security, he noticed immediately that the lines were lengthy and moving very slowly.

Mr. Dickinson’s anxiety escalated significantly as the reality began to sink in that he might miss his flight, along with the chance to see his grandson for the last time. He told security about his situation and asked if he could get to the front. They told him he would have to wait just like everyone else.

After going through security, Mr. Dickinson realized that he was already late. On the verge of tears, he grabbed his shoes and sprinted to his gate in his socks. He arrived at his gate 12 minutes late. His heart must have broken.

To his surprise, though, he was met at the gate by both the ticketing agent and the pilot. The ticketing agent asked, “Are you Mark?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“We held the plane for you and we’re so sorry about the loss of your grandson.”

Although this may seem like a small gesture, as James F. Parker points out in his book Do The Right Thing, Southwest has mastered the art of turning airplanes around quickly. On average, they turn their planes around 15 to 20 minutes faster than their competitors—something that saves Southwest approximately $3 billion dollars per year.

So for Southwest, 12 minutes is essentially an eternity. Making a habit out of holding airplanes for 12 extra minutes would cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

According to an article on Dailymail.com, as the pilot escorted Mr. Dickinson down the jetway, Mr. Dickinson said, “I can’t thank you enough for this.”

The pilot replied, “They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And, again, I’m so sorry.”

Little Caden was taken off of life support that night at 9:20 p.m. Thanks to the kindness and compassion of the pilot, and the leaders at Southwest who empowered him to make the call, Mark Dickinson was there to say goodbye.

When asked how the leaders at Southwest Airlines felt about the pilot’s decision in an interview with AOL Travel News, Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis stated that, “We fully support what our captain did. Customer service is important and we’re not at all surprised an action like this would take place.”

The leaders at Southwest weren’t upset with the pilot for holding the plane. They were proud of him—as they should be. Southwest is known as “the airline that love built.”

And, because the company’s leaders have effectively passed on their values and empowered employees to make important decisions on the spot, they helped ensure that the pilot valued being compassionate above short-term gain.

In the long term, his decision will also likely result in numerous positive business outcomes. It was an incredible example of customer service that inspired everyone who saw it, was reported extensively in the media, and will be talked about for years to come, providing Southwest with a tremendous amount of free, highly impactful advertising.

In our efforts to inspire leaders to see what’s possible, many people, including me, often discuss leadership practices from the perspective of what great leadership ideally looks like.

However, as anyone who has ever led a team knows, whenever there is more than one person involved in any endeavor, things are often quite a bit messier than the ideal scenario we may have in our minds.

One area where this is especially true is during a team decision-making process. Getting a group of people to come together and agree on a decision can be one the most difficult aspects of leading or working on a team.

Sometimes, even when the process seems as though it goes very smoothly, subtle forces are conspiring to prevent the best decision from being made.

I recently had a chance to chat with Don Maruska, the founder of three Silicon Valley companies, and the author a very helpful book on the topic of team decision making, called How Great Decisions Get Made.

In our discussion, Don pointed some of those forces, and offered some great ideas – below are three – for keeping those forces in check so our teams can consistently make the best decisions.

Getting Important Perspectives by Enlisting As Many People as Possible

For any major decision, it is well worth a little extra time up front to identify all of the stakeholders affected by a decision, and all of the people who could have a valuable perspective to share on the issue at hand, and do the best we can to involve them in some way in the decision making process.

This can be especially true when making a decision that affects our customers. Sometimes involving a front line person who interacts with customers every day could yield an incredibly value insight into the problem and its solution.

Solving the Most Important Issue

Another worthwhile use of time for any major decision is to ensure that there is clarity on the issue really is. It would be a shame to spend a good deal of time resolving an issue that is actually much less important than another issue that hasn’t been well identified.

In our discussion, Don suggested that we take some time for each stakeholder present to express their thoughts and concerns about the topic. Before the next person speaks about their own thoughts and concerns, they summarize what the previous person said to ensure that the previous person was heard clearly.

Removing Defensiveness from the Equation

Have you ever noticed than when you get into a discussion on a topic that you care about, you get a little charged up? That charged up feeling is likely a variation of the stress response in the body.

When people talk about something we care about, it’s as though they are talking about us. It’s easy to feel as though we’re being attacked when in fact it’s only an idea that’s being attacked. This results in the self-defense system – the fight-or-flight response – being activated in the body.

The fight-or-flight response is very helpful when we’re actually in physical danger, but when we’re simply trying to reach a good decision being in self-defense mode can have disastrous effects.

As Don mentioned in our discussion, we start to use less of our pre-frontal cortex – the executive center of the brain, largely responsible for rational, higher level thought.

Maruska offered a number of tactics that can be applied to systematically reduce the levels of self-defensiveness from the equation and thereby consistently reach better decisions.

1. Take time very early to discover shared hopes around the topic at hand. This is already getting people see their commonalities instead of focusing on differences.
2. Brainstorm as a group possible solutions and record them all without taking time to discuss them or agree or disagree with them. This gets as many ideas out as possible without allowing early dissent to prevent a similar idea from being mentioned, an idea that could end up being the solution.
3. Without getting into a debate, have everyone state one negative thing about each option, and a few positive things about it. This tends to result in significantly less defensiveness because every idea is being treated equally.
4. Identify which options satisfy shared hopes for the outcome.
5. Map out the most promising solutions and take time to discuss how to improve them in ways that could result in everyone agreeing to implement the decision.

This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

A team member knocks on your door and asks if you have a minute. Before you’ve even finished your answer, the team member starts listing off several “very urgent” issues that need to be dealt with, and asks for your advice on what to do.

How do you respond? Do you immediately start offering suggestions for the best courses of action?

That is certainly how I’m wired to respond. I naturally prefer to give people advice. This is partly because I really enjoy helping people, and also partly because I’m wired to think I have all the answers (I certainly do not).

However, it has become increasingly clear over the years that if I truly want to be helpful to people, it is almost always better to ask good questions than it is to have good answers.

When we make the effort to ask good questions, three important shifts occur:

1. We don’t waste time solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved

When we jump right in and start offering advice, there’s always a significant risk that we don’t fully understand the problem. This means that, at best, we might be solving a superficial problem instead the most important issue. Or, even worse, we might be offering advice that completely misses the mark.

By resisting the urge to start offering advice and begin with a question instead, we can get clarification on the issue, and perhaps even discover the root cause of the issue, or a deeper issue, that is much more important to resolve.

2. We help people develop their capacity to solve issues on their own

By asking people questions to clarify an issue and getting them to offer some ideas for resolving the issue, we encourage their brains to develop new connections, which empowers them to be better able to problem solve in the future.

3. We gradually free up time to focus on what really moves the needle

By training people to realize that we trust them to solve issues that don’t absolutely require our input, we gradually free up more and more time that we no longer have to spend on day-to-day issues.

Instead, we can focus on high-level strategy, developing our team culture, and spending more time serving our team members.

Developing the Coaching Habit

If you’d like some help overcoming the habit of giving advice and developing a new habit of asking questions first, I highly recommend the book The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier. Bungay Stanier (who added his wife’s last name to his surname of Stanier) offers a very practical approach to developing the habit of coaching: asking good questions that help people resolve their own issues.

He also offers seven, very powerful questions – each supported by behavioral and/or neuroscience research – that are designed to make coaching much more effective while also reducing the time we spend in any coaching meeting to around 10 minutes.

For example, one of the questions Bungay Stanier offers is “What’s the real challenge for you here?”

This question is especially useful when a team member lists more than one issue that needs to be solved, either in person or via an e-mail. Instead of trying to resolve each of the issues at hand, we challenge the person to clarify what is the most important issue at hand by responding with, “What’s the real challenge for you here?”

This question is very helpful for three reasons:

As with all of the questions Bungay Stanier offers, one of the most important elements of the effectiveness of the question above is making sure that we wait for a response in silence. Silence can be uncomfortable. When we ask a question and it’s not answered immediately, we may feel a strong urge to ask it again in a different way, or start leading the person toward the answer we want to hear.

Instead, Bungay Stanier urges, we need to learn to patiently endure the silence and wait for an answer before saying anything further. This simple move is one of the keys to saving time while also serving team members by helping them grow both personally and professionally.