Dr. Jill Birch
June 16, 1957 — September 24, 2026
Author · Scholar · Leader · Mother
Hi everyone, Clay here, Jill's son.
As many of you have heard through the network, my mom passed away on Thursday, September 24th, after a courageous battle with cancer. She was 69 years old and she lived every one of those years enriching the lives of those around her. My mom spent her life studying, teaching, and living the principles she believed in most deeply, that leadership with compassion is how we take care of each other, and that the way we treat one another in our hardest moments defines everything that comes after.
She always taught me the importance of closing the loop, and this is me trying to do that for her. This passage from The Compassion Advantage is the one I have kept returning to since she passed. I hope it offers you what it has offered me, a quiet place to grieve, reflect, and to remember why it matters to lead and to live with an open heart.
Take the extra time to be kind to each other right now. She would have wanted that more than anything.
To read more about who she was, in her own magnificent words, her obituary is here:
https://www.humphreymiles.com/obituaries/Jill-Birch?obId=49681257
Rest well mom.
Clay xoxo
From The Compassion Advantage
"Nelson Mandela was one of those relational leaders who was a master in each practice, and he left an indelible mark on the world. What sets him apart is that he spent his life integrating leadership behaviours in such a way that he saw possibility everywhere. Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years behind bars at Robben Island's Pollsmoor Prison off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Upon arrival, he found himself surveying a hot, neglected space on the building's roof, which was in sunlight every day. He had an epiphany that day and received permission from the commanding officer to start a garden.
As Mandela tells it: "In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the results. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed."
Each morning, Mandela would put on a straw hat and rough gloves and work in the garden for two hours. Every Sunday, he supplied vegetables to the kitchen so that they could cook a special meal for the common-law prisoners. Soon more prisoners joined to help, and eventually they had over nine hundred plants on the roof, which helped to feed the prisoners and their jailers.
Throughout those tortuous years, Mandela decided to use the gifts of his leadership in a very positive way. Many leaders might give up, become pessimistic, and be depressed. Every day, each of us in our own way makes a choice about whether we will see things in a positive or negative light. It's this fundamental choice — of how we see the world and how we behave in it — that ultimately directs how well we support others and how we continue to grow in our career and as human beings. Mandela used his garden as a way to connect, be an example, create community, and make people feel less isolated.
Relational leaders must find ways to continually draw strength for themselves in order to encourage and inspire others.
It takes extraordinary skills to create a vision, forge connections between people, identify common goals, and rally people around those goals to take purposeful action. As you grow in your career, you will find that you will be asked to make greater sacrifices; more time will be needed to serve and help others. It's no longer about you; it's about supporting a greater goal. It's in making this leap from self-fulness to selflessness that you become an integrated relational leader."
— Dr. Jill Birch, The Compassion Advantage