“Everyone has two choices. We’re either full of love…or full of fear.” — Albert Einstein
Is it good to work for a boss who loves you?
For the past 38 years, I’ve helped entrepreneurs develop high-performance cultures and businesses. For the first 26 years, I never heard the word love used in a conversation in creating a high-performance culture.
The first time. That changed 12 years ago when consulting with Nate Biel, PE, D.WRE, CEO, Board Chair at KCI.
Nate is not only a great leader who has led tremendous growth for KCI (which now has almost 60 offices across the U.S.), but he’s also one of the most emotionally intelligent leaders I’ve ever worked with! Yup, Nate broke the mold of male engineers for me (I’ve now worked with many emotionally intelligent CEOs who are male engineers). He was the first leader to tell me how he loves on his people. Here’s my memory of what he said:
“It’s important to love your team members. It’s like when you’re in a canoe and everyone’s paddling hard to go to the same place at the same speed. It’s important to love on them. That’s leadership love. Leadership love isn’t unconditional, though, like the love you have for your children. If someone in the canoe doesn’t want to pull their weight or go where we’re going, you should let them off on shore so they can pursue what they want.
“However, if your team members believe in the vision, give them leadership love. Offering skills training and mentoring, build them up, help them become high performers.”
Now, I hear the word love discussed in many leadership teams I work with. Things have changed. Several of my teams, like BlueBird Windows & Doors, have love in some form as one of their values. Theirs is: “Love our customers and team members.” BlueBird has a 4.9 Google star rating because they truly live this value. When EOS Worldwide trains their implementers, the phrase, “Put the love in it” is used often in teaching how to interact with clients.
Current science shows that a team member’s relationship with the person they report directly to is the most important reason that they’re loyal—or why they look to look for a different job.
Back to the question: Is it good to work for a boss who loves you? If it fits the definition of leadership love in this article, a resounding YES! It’s foundational to building a high-performance culture and business.
The science of leadership love. Research suggests that leadership love positively impacts both individuals and organizations. Many studies have shown that:
- Job satisfaction, well-being, and engagement all increase for employees with empathetic leaders. Organizations with strong employee engagement outperform their less-engaged counterparts.
- Creativity and innovation increase in love-based leadership organizations.
- Trust and cooperation, which lead to better decision-making, are enhanced for employees with compassionate leaders.
What does leadership love look like? The emotions and behaviors are similar to parenting because you’re helping develop healthy, highly productive people.
9 actions of leadership love. Leaders:
- See team members’ potential and challenge, encourage, and support them to reach it. It’s consistent with this definition of love: “Love is a word derived from the Sanskrit word that means looking for the good.”
- Continually train and develop themselves and their team members personally and professionally.
- Create strong accountability and hold team members’ feet to the fire when needed. Most people want to improve. Research shows that setting a target with a time frame improves performance. The loving part of this involves creating positive accountability by collaborating with team members to define the target, quality of the work, and timeframe. Then check in regularly, celebrate timely progress, help struggling people get back on track, celebrate success at the end, and learn from accomplishments and challenges!
- Communicate their expectations precisely and timely. Ambiguity creates mistakes, frustration, fear of failure, and procrastination.
- Listen deeply with empathy to understand team members’ professional and personal challenges to help develop trust and loyalty.
- Give the right balance of positive feedback and improvement feedback.
- Show respect and appreciation. Leaders acknowledge good work in private and in public. This infuses positive energy and confidence and may boost morale and motivation.
- Laugh and keep the environment light and productive. Natural physical light and emotional lightness help balance challenging work.
- Create an emotionally safe environment. They give their full attention and connect during conversations. They live the company values at the highest level and coach and hold others accountable to those values. They allow team members to fail (providing it doesn’t have a devastating impact on the company). When team members know their mistakes will be dealt with as important lessons, they’re more likely take risks, innovate, and learn fast from their experiences.
“Leaders are understandably tempted to focus on the context.
But a leader’s true love should be the people who do the work.”
— Max DePree, Leadership Jazz
By embodying these behaviors, loving leaders create a positive and nurturing work environment where individuals feel valued, supported, engaged, and inspired to do their best work. A sustainable high-performance culture depends on leadership love … leaders loving their people.
The post What’s Leadership Love and How Is It Expressed? first appeared on TCNorth.com.
