Donato Tramuto, a global health activist and co-founder of the TramutoPorter Foundation, spends much of his year engaging with school leaders, nonprofit boards, and health organizations. From these conversations, he has observed a recurring pattern: leaders are under pressure to achieve more with fewer resources, and traditional command-and-control leadership is proving inadequate. "The people they manage do not want to be managed. They want to be seen," Tramuto says, summarizing a sentiment he hears from a superintendent in Maine and a hospital administrator elsewhere. He points to three shifts that have been building over several years through his work with the TramutoPorter Foundation, previously the Tramuto Foundation.
The first trend is that burnout is increasingly visible among leaders, not just frontline staff. Tramuto notes that while burnout discussions have historically focused on lower-level employees, the more significant shift is among those supervising them. "Leaders are exhausted too, and a lot of them are ashamed to say it," he says. "That silence trickles down. If a principal or a manager cannot admit they are tired, nobody underneath them feels safe admitting it either." As an action, Tramuto recommends that leaders incorporate a short, honest check-in into their week, even just ten minutes, where they name how they are actually doing before asking the same of their team.
The second trend is that mentorship is becoming more structured rather than incidental. Tramuto has run the Foundation's scholarship program since 2001 and has seen how deliberate mentorship has had to become. What used to happen by accident, through a hallway conversation or a chance introduction, now requires a plan. "More than 200 young people have come through our scholarship program," Tramuto says. "The ones who get the most out of it are the ones who know they can reach out to a board member whenever they need to, not just at the start or end of the year." He advises organizations to name specific points of contact rather than offer a general open door, because a vague invitation to "reach out anytime" rarely gets used, while a named person does.
The third trend is that compassion is getting measured, not just talked about. Tramuto observes that the language around compassionate leadership has caught on faster than the practice itself. Many organizations use the phrase in mission statements, but fewer have built anything to back it up. "Saying you value compassion costs nothing," he says. "Building a week around it, a scholarship around it, a mentorship structure around it, that costs time and money. That is the difference." He points to the Foundation's Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, launched in 2023, and National Compassionate Leadership Week, observed the second week of September following approval from The National Day Calendar, as attempts to make the idea concrete. He suggests organizations pick one measurable commitment tied to compassion this year, such as a scholarship, a recognition program, or a mentoring structure, and put a date on it, because a commitment without a date tends to disappear.
Tramuto does not view these trends as a crisis but as an opening. "Every one of these shifts is a chance to build something better than what we had," he says. "Burnout at the top is a signal to be honest. Mentorship going structured is a chance to be more useful to young people, not less. Compassion getting measured is a chance to stop talking and start building." The Foundation will continue using its scholarship program, its Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, and Compassionate Leadership Week as concrete pieces behind that argument, rather than leaving the idea to sit as a slogan. Since 2001, the Foundation has supported nearly 140 organizations and helped tens of thousands of people through student scholarships and financial grants worldwide. Tramuto is based in Ogunquit, Maine.
