Why Love Is The Next Hot Thing In Leadership
By Molly Rudberg, MSC, PCC
Look around. Watch the news. Read the paper. It’s time to love the people we work with.
No, I’m not talking about interoffice flings. What I’m talking about is much more serious, and lasting — more like a lifelong marriage. I’m talking about making an emotional investment in the people you spend most of your day with, most days of the week, for most of your life (we know the average American spends 90,000 hours at work in their lifetime).
Tolstoy proclaimed “ one can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”
Freud shared, “love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.”
They suggest we need both.
I suggest we need to do both… at the same time.
Why? Because especially now, when employee turnover is higher than it’s been in ten years, you need to be doing everything you can to keep your employees happy. Including (and most importantly) loving them.
Modern (work) family
As a leader of human beings and teams, people are going to stick around because you love and invest in them, the same way you do with your family, your partner, your kids. In fact, your work “family” is likely starting to resemble your actual family: different personalities that grow with each other rather than in silos. Gone are the days when one specific employee performs one specific task for eight hours minus a break for lunch. Flexibility is an asset. Adaptation is a must. And commending your workforce chameleons for who they are — not just what they do — is paramount.
For all kinds of reasons — from declining population growth to the youngest work generation delaying the start of their careers — what we’re left with is a modern “family” of talents that have found each other thanks to downsizing, transfers or simple serendipity. And if you’re going to make something great together, you’re going to have to learn to love each other.
Love is a tool
I spend a lot of time in organizations partnering with leaders and teams up to big things. I’ve discovered the most successful ones prioritize deeply connected relationships and their colleagues before work product and ego. This is unique: love and relationship as yet another set of tools in your leadership toolbox that you can use as a competitive advantage.
While a great emotional investment package doesn’t exactly have the same ring as a hefty stock investment package, its power becomes evident as soon as it’s put into practice. And like any practice, you’ve got to keep up with it for the results to pay off.
I’m reminded of speaker and consultant Simon Sinek’s example of asking his host to theoretically “prove” how much he loves his wife (<<< please watch this). It’s an impossible ask. Love isn’t quantifiable in the sense that so many other things are. Empathy is built over time — not on demand.
In Sinek’s example, love, in any sense — including platonic love for coworkers — isn’t about specific events (buying flowers for Valentine’s Day, remembering a birthday). It’s not about intensity (buying the biggest bouquet, or the most delicious birthday cake).
It’s about consistency. It’s little things that ladder up to big things. As he puts it at one point, “It’s the boring things that matter most.”
Sinek translates this to a leadership example we can all relate to: the corporate retreat. You host a two-day offsite with your top executives, invite a bunch of speakers, hand out a bunch of certificates, and boom: everyone’s a leader! Wrong. Let’s get real and consider the slow-burn: building leadership day by day, little by little. No certificates.
Ask with intent to listen
The simplest expression of platonic love? Asking a coworker how their day is going. Asking is nice in and of itself. But asking a coworker how their day is going and stopping to listen, look them in the eye, then taking the time to reply thoughtfully — that’s love. It shows that you’re asking with the open-ended opportunity for the recipient to speak his or her mind, rather than a one-sided, transactional exchange.
Still don’t believe me? Try it. Tomorrow morning, instead of offering a passing “How’s it going?” during a crowded elevator ride, stop by someone’s desk just to say hello and see how they’re doing. It doesn’t have to be a big time investment. It’ll cost you a minute, tops. But trust me: it will make a lasting impression on the recipient. Especially if you ask again next week, with the intent to listen.
Learn from the “work wife” example
Take a cue from your younger staffers who fondly dub their cubicle neighbor a “work wife” or “work husband.” They get their morning coffees from the same Starbucks, they take lunch together a few times a week and, to be sure, their happy hours are spent bonding over how much they loathe their new supervisor. Work spouses have each other’s backs when it’s needed most — just like real-life spouses.
Credit: comics.roderickmann.org, Copyright Scott Adams 2016
While pairing off with a “work spouse” doesn’t make sense at the leadership level, it’s helpful to understand why close relationships amongst coworkers help make an average job tolerable, and a good job great. It’s because forming a bond with someone — regardless of what type of relationship you have with that person — is what keeps us humans from going insane.
As a leader, it’s your job to form bonds with — to love — as many of your employees as possible, and encourage them to do the same.
Try it! Love is organic — just like leadership.
*************************************************************************
Molly Rudberg, MSC, PCC, is a Chicago-based ontological life and career coach focused on working with extraordinary leaders and businesses committed to realizing an impossible future. She facilitates workshops and speaks to organizations and groups about creating intentional, purposeful, passion-filled work, and is the co-author of “From the Yoga Mat to the Corner Office: A Mindful Approach to Business Success” (Highpoint Executive Publishing, 2014).