Love and Leadership

A brilliant blog by Helena Clayton?

You’re already focused on the performance of your team.?And you’re probably pretty tuned in to the importance of the climate of your team … getting clear on goals and standards, building trust between people, making sure that you’re appreciating and valuing your people, encouraging difficult conversations… and I bet it’s paying off.

But in my leadership development practice and especially in my coaching work, I see beneath the surface. Coaching especially creates a space where people can speak unedited, and say things that they sometimes don’t say to anyone else.?And even when a team looks good on the surface, underneath, I see a lot of stress and anxiety, burnout and pressures.?I hear about a lot of teams and organisations that are harsh and unkind. A lot of organisational cultures that are punishing and toxic.

What I’ve come to see is that most leaders don’t pay enough attention to some of our core human needs – the need to feel we matter, to feel cared for, to feel really seen, our needs for attention and connection. In workplaces that are increasingly technical-rational and drive relentlessly for greater efficiencies, where people are pushed beyond their carrying capacities?- we are in danger of losing sight of what it means to be human.?

Helena started to research what difference love might make.?What if we started to design-for-love??What if we put love at the heat of how we build manage people, build teams and run organisations? I know, right.?Love!?Really?

There is an increasing acceptance of words like empathy and compassion in business.?But I am suggesting that if we want to end up with more kindness and a more human workplace then we need to aim higher.?We need to be bold and talk about love in the workplace.

Let me share some research I did recently.

I asked: ‘does love matter in the workplace’.?94% of respondents said it did.

I asked why, interested in what difference more love might make in the workplace? Respondents said ‘humans work best in a loving environment – love is a core human need’ and that ‘if love is important in life, why wouldn’t it also be important in the workplace’.?Love helped them to feel safe, and feeling safe meant they could take more risks. Connections with other people would be much stronger and more open.?They also felt that we needed love to help us ‘counterbalance the Victorian work approach of making money, the focus on processes and systems and the scientific underpinning of work that requires us to be emotionless’.?

Love also contributed to creativity and innovation: ‘the challenges we face as a human race require a connection to something deeper and real and in our hearts for new responses to emerge’.

But what do we mean by love??From my respondents: care was the word used most often by respondents, meaning nurturing and protecting.?Listening came a close second with the ability and willingness to put aside your own stuff to give undivided attention and the gift of being heard. This isn’t leadership as a performance art but as genuine interest in others. Then came empathy and compassion and the ability to see something through someone else’s eyes and experiences. Even ‘hyper empathy’, for one respondent. There was also a theme of setting high standards - holding ‘yourself accountable first’ and also holding high expectations of others.?This required having the courage to hold them to that, and having the difficult conversations when necessary. This is the part of love that says no, holds boundaries and is clear, direct and challenging. Finally, there was a cluster of words or phrases that equated to really seeing and accepting people for who they are, warts and all, no matter what.?

See what I mean about our core human needs?

So the case for love is clear.?But it’s really tricky to talk about for many of us.?Around 30% of my respondents ‘doing so would make me appear weak because generally love is perceived as weakness and weakness doesn't belong in the workplace’. One person said ‘it feels flaky and unprofessional’ and ‘it’s too personal and intimate and over the line of what’s acceptable in the workplace’.?And, of course,?it’s also overly-associated with religion and sex, which really doesn’t help.?The actor Steve Coogan has said ‘the edgiest word to use at the moment isn’t f**k, c**t, piss or shit. It’s love. That’s what really makes people’s buttocks clench.’

But leaders have a responsibility to do what’s difficult.?We have a responsibility to talk about what’s uncomfortable in service of doing the right thing for our people and our organisations. If 94 % of your teams thought there should be more love, who are you to get in the way of that??And so here’s what you could experiment with:

Ask your team what they think about how things might be different around here if there was more love??This is a question I often start my workshops with – and people get it. And it’s easier to start a conversation like that when people have something to read and talk about so use my research report as a pre-read.

Run the same survey I did and get a feel for what your teams mean by love.?Get clear on what they’re asking for.?Once we know what something looks like in practice, it’s much easier to find ways to make it happen.

Think about your own relationship to the word love??Does it make you squirm – and what would help you get over that feeling??How can you get more comfortable with using the word? Maybe experiment with using the word more in your everyday life and see what you learn from that.