A Fine Balance

Leadership plays an essential role in systems, organizations, and classrooms. Good leadership strikes a delicate balance between employee well-being and team members’ productivity, further improving trust and loyalty. There has been a paradigm shift in what constitutes “good leadership,” from one based on exerting control and power to one rooted in self-compassion, empathy, and emotional management. Within management systems, compassion helps foster stronger connections between people, reduces burnout rates, and improves staff retention and collaboration. In a mindful leadership approach, self-compassion, empathy, and emotional awareness are first cultivated within the leader and then utilized within situations at the workplace. This evolved definition of leadership is a more expansive and inclusive term that takes a comprehensive and personal view of leadership. Alongside this view of leadership, there are small, daily actions one might take to develop as a leader, which adds value to ourselves and, by extension, to others. Serious games have effectively cultivated qualities critical to leadership,such as self-compassion, empathy, and emotional management. This work investigates attempts, approaches, and design principles in serious games that aim to build the above-mentioned competencies essential for leadership. We present game elements, themes, and mechanics that could be further empirically studied and used by serious game designers to produce digital games that cultivate the competencies (self-compassion, empathy, and emotional management) for leadership training.