What does it mean to lead from the heart?

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’ve been thinking and writing about where ideas come from, inspired by something I wrote in my book Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness. The fifth of the seven questions was this: What wants to happen? The question was intended to be a check on our intentions. If I announce that I want to build a pizza stand on the Moon, does that want to happen? Probably not. Look for another idea, one that actually wants to happen.

And there’s no doubt that ideas and innovations want to happen, and there’s a lot of evidence in neuroscience that we can cause ideas to manifest. So it was no surprise to me that when I woke up in the middle of the night earlier in the week, I had the thought of asking if there were any interesting ideas that wanted to happen and wanted me to work with them. And a little while later, one did. I saw the words like a billboard: “Leadership is a Love Story.”

I thought that was so good that I should get up and write it down somewhere. And then I realized that I didn’t need to. That idea was not going away.

Why do we associate the heart with love?

The idea that the heart is the seat of love goes back to the most ancient times. The Egyptians held the heart to be the seat of emotions and morality, of “our better self.” Aristotle and Plato concurred and the idea is almost universal across cultures. The heart's physical reactions to emotions, such as increased heartbeat during moments of affection, excitement, or attraction, likely contributed to its early association with emotions and love.

The neuroscience tells us that the effects of the heart on our state of being are profound. Recent research shows that the heart’s electromagnetic field reaches as much as three feet outside your body and is five thousand times more powerful than that of your brain. In fact, it appears that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

Your heart’s electromagnetic field can be detected in an electro-cardiogram of a person sitting beside you. When you come close to another person, your heart’s force field causes a change in them. This research is important in helping us to understand the power our heart has and how it affects our state of being.

In its healthy state, the heart radiates positive energy, a state we know as being “open-hearted.” When we are open-hearted, we are able to accept and appreciate what is happening in our world and in the people around us. We radiate a positive field.

But what does love have to do with leadership?

You tell me where to go and what to do and I do it, right? Well, maybe I will and maybe I won’t. What I probably won’t do is like it. And I won’t want to keep working for you for very long. Of course, that’s the way work was for many years, particularly with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the idea that people could be just cogs in the machine.

It doesn’t work that way anymore, although there are still plenty of leaders who keep trying to crack the whip. A few months ago, Gallup announced that their most recent update of U.S. employee engagement showed that it had fallen to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31% of the workforce feeling engaged with what they do. And 17% are actively disengaged.

Why? Primarily because they don’t feel that anyone cares for them. Only 39% of the workforce feels like their leaders give a damn about them, down from 47% just a few years ago. (And note that that high water mark is still less than half the people who go to work.)

So what would it be like to lead from the heart?

To "lead from the heart" means you show up with authenticity, empathy, and alignment between your values, emotions, and actions. It means you see people and they feel what it’s like to be seen and appreciated.

Think about a time when you had a leader who made you feel that way – maybe a teacher or a coach, maybe a first boss who saw her duty was to help you find yourself at work.

We live in uncertain times, but we don’t have to feel that way in our work or in our home. Leading from the heart means you care about more than the numbers, it means you care about the outcomes for the people you lead.

And when you do that, it transforms the outcomes for yourself. For yourself deep in your own heart.