Lead with your heart in 2024.

“Work for many people has gone from being a source of pride to a relentless and dehumanising assault on their dignity.” James Bloodworth

Perhaps the two most important emotions relevant to leadership practice are fear and love. Coupling the word “love” with leadership can feel uncomfortable but love should be the foundation of great leadership.?As an emotion and as a behaviour.?Even in the most severe and extreme environments, like armed conflict, love has the strongest place. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Ricciardi stood before his battalion of 1,000 soldiers deployed with clearing roads of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan, and gave them one simple message:?You need to love one another.?Ricciardi went on to do a PhD on this topic and found that?a team member who feels loved by their boss is significantly more likely to see his boss as a good leader.?Leading your employees is a natural extension of loving them.?

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference and self-interest. Fear is debilitating. Fear drives us to act in stupid ways because we’re afraid of looking stupid. It makes us shake our head in shame as we remember something we said six years ago.?We experience a panorama of emotions as humans, but they fundamentally come either from love or fear.?Confidence, courage, hope—all love.?Worry, pride, self-recrimination—all fear. Fear drives the ego, but love drives life.?In fact, love drives all that matters in life.??Love helps us feel safe and creates the conditions for health and wellbeing, flourishing and growth.

The concept of love in the workplace can be shown through exhibiting:

• Care – includes honouring whole-person wellbeing and human kindness.?This includes treating each other with respect and dignity and supporting people, not tearing them down.
• Listening - and holding space for someone is the ability and willingness to put aside your own stuff to give someone undivided attention reflecting a genuine interest in others.
• Empathy and Compassion – the ability to see something through someone else’s eyes and experiences and engage with them with humanity and grace. This includes a willingness to help others altruistically.
• Setting and adhering to high standards – holding yourself accountable first and having high expectations of others. This requires the courage to hold people to those standards, and having hard conversations when necessary. This element of love that says “No”, holds boundaries and is clear, direct and respectfully challenging.
• Acceptance and valuing diversity - really seeing and accepting people for who they are and empowering them to deploy their strengths and talents.

“As the drive for efficiency and organisational survival increasingly squeezes out our humanity, most workplaces are increasingly difficult – some might say loveless – places to be.?If we are firmly committed to developing cultures that are deeply human then we need to be intentional and choose love as a core competence for everyone in our organisations.”?Helena Clayton

In the 1970s, Robert Nerem was doing a straightforward experiment involving genetically identical rabbits, giving them all high-fat diets. When examining the health of the rabbits, he noticed there was one group that was doing particularly well. He couldn’t figure it out and thought they had done something wrong with the study. They realised that what was different about that one group was that the researcher wasn’t just giving the rabbits food. She was actually picking them up, patting them, talking to them. She was giving them love and kindness.?Loving actions actually change our physiology and conversely, loneliness is a killer.?The biggest contributor to our health may well be the quality of our relationships.?At work, this is largely determined by the quality of leadership.?

I acknowledge that emotional distance can feel safer and more “professional”.?And that a balance needs to be struck.?All heart without results is weak. But all results without heart is ugly. It turns out that leading with your heart, balanced by logic and reason, is a long-term strategy that produces trust, commitment and engagement. Love is a core human need, and one that we should acknowledge when work has become increasingly focused on rationality, efficiency, productivity and competition. When there is no feeling or emotion in a business, the level of engagement and joy in that business will be limited or nonexistent.

It is not enough to say "We care about our employees". Personal and business value are created from the human spirit. We need to help each other to help each other, to be better and do better. The humanisation of work is the next leadership journey. Welcoming humanness and spirit back in to business is not just a good commercial idea, it’s an imperative for our time as we face wicked problems like climate change, geopolitical unrest, ageing populations and the rise of AI. We invite you to join us in making 2024 the year love was welcomed back in to business.

We intentionally seek to build connections with those who are most different from ourselves. We model joy and curiosity and wonder. We embrace our own vulnerability, openly acknowledge our imperfections, and share how these allow us to learn and grow. Exercising leadership is as much an expression of our potential to make things happen as it is of our humanity. If leadership were less about love, our workplaces would turn into the very same places we fear if machines take over. What then would be left of ourselves?