Love in leadership
Love and be loved in organisational leadership
When I tell people that I’ve recently co-facilitated with Jeremy Keeley a workshop for Sadler Heath entitled ‘Love and Be Loved in Organisational Leadership’, the response tends to be either puzzlement (‘Love? At work?’ What do you mean?) or a smile and curiosity. The contrast between these two responses is telling in itself: for most people the concept of leadership being associated with love appears strange and difficult to accommodate in their understanding of a typical working environment, which may be very far from offering anything resembling love.
And yet, as people like Amy Elizabeth Fox point out, when organisations focus on interconnection and interdependence – characteristics of an organisational culture in which love is more likely to show up at work (even when it’s not named as such) – those organisations are implicitly responding to their people’s emotional needs. Consequently, they tend to get creativity, innovation, connection, psychological safety, inclusion – everything that organisations say they want. The alternative is what Fox calls an industrial psychological model, which focuses on autonomy and resilience, which implicitly suggest that people are separated from each other.
Where does my inspiration come from?
From a rational, cognitive perspective, all this offers a compelling reason for considering love as a leadership style. And yet this isn’t the reason I’m so drawn to the idea of leading with love. What draws me is a visceral sense of the essential humanity, care and inevitable connection, and – incidentally – the consequent sustainable business benefits – of such an approach. It’s demonstrated beautifully in Jeremy’s interview with the Møller Institute on Leading with Love, in which he speaks so articulately and with such warmth on how love can show up at work, and what happens when it does. In that interview Jeremy translated into words and explicit concepts what were my own (until then unarticulated) feelings, beliefs and internal drivers about how leadership can deliver at its best.
Unsurprisingly, love is just what Jeremy conveys as his natural style. He imbues the atmosphere around him with love. And I’m fortunate enough – indeed blessed – to count amongst other dear colleagues a number who simply embody love.
How love shows up
Our workshop was designed to be both experimental and experiential – and experiential is what characterises how a leader typically manifests love in the workplace. It’s not a skill, it’s not a process, it’s not an approach: it’s how the leader lives their working life, how they relate to others, the lens through which they perceive, interpret and respond to the world around them.
While leading with love definitely doesn’t mean romantic love, how people express their experience of it varies significantly from person to person. It means the leader loving their people, their mission, their purpose and their organisation, the world beyond their organisation and – as Jennifer Garvey Berger (a specialist in vertical development for complexity and change), points out – the entire biosphere. It’s a way of being. It may encompass care and caring. Heartfelt commitment and engagement. Compassion. Listening and attention. Genuine interest in others. Presence – a deep ‘being with’. Or a blend of any of those and more.
For those who experience receiving love, it’s a somatic experience – showing up in physical sensations and impulses to move in a particular way, which also will vary from person to person. It can mean knowing at a profound level that you matter. Being heard and acknowledged. Feeling connected in relationship, trusting and trusted, respected and safe. A feeling of belonging. And more. In the context of followership it shows up in retention figures, discretionary effort, teamwork and collaboration, creativity and innovation – the kind of thing that Amy Elizabeth Fox (quoted above) is referring to.
The experience of workshop participants
What seemed to be apparent in the workshop was that a number of the participants experienced something profound. There were long hugs. There were tears. There was quiet reflection. Thoughtfulness seemed painted on people’s faces. Privately, people expressed to me the impact of finding their place in a systemic constellations exercise on the context of love – their relationship to love.
How, I wonder, might they live love back out in the real world of organisational leadership?
If this was people’s experience, what does it convey about the current role that love plays (or doesn’t) in their working lives, as leaders or as followers? What does it say about what’s present or missing, what’s needed or wanted, or perhaps even yearned for?
My experience of the workshop
As a facilitator I found myself deeply moved, conscious of the significant privilege of witnessing participants’ experience. Something significant seemed to be going on. Now I’m reflecting on the possibility of bringing love more explicitly to my clients’ understanding of what good – and indeed stellar – leadership is.
Photo by Saskia Johnson on Unsplash
