Love and Leadership

“To remain in a high-commitment, low-standards posture as a leader allows you to feel as if you’re in service to others, since you’re taking care of them, but it’s mostly about you. It’s a decision to trade off other people’s excellence in order to stay within the limits of your own emotional safety zone.”  ~ Frei & Morriss, Unleashed

According to Frei and Morriss, empowerment leadership starts with trust - it is the work you’ve done on yourself that has earned you the right to have impact on others. The picture of their model is concentric rings (like a bulls eye) with trust in the very middle.

Moving outward from the foundation of trust, your employ more skills that are embedded in what they call ‘love’ or deep devotion with high standards. Love then leads outward to belonging and then strategy and culture.

In a Brandman University thematic research study on trust, Daniel Scudero (2019) posited that “superintendents who consistently practice leadership based on love and acceptance while holding board members accountable for high achievement will be trusted and revered”. I was a committee member for Dr. Scudero’s study and he and I dialogued and maybe even debated a little about this conclusion from his study.

Love and acceptance or deep devotion with high standards - as Frei and Morriss suggest - are built and illustrated in your daily walk of leadership. The authors provide the following practical ways for a leader to show deep devotion (love - in their terms).

10 Ways to Reveal Deep Devotion Tomorrow

1. Put down your phone. (Give them your undiluted attention.)

2. Get curious about the lives being lived around you. (Tell me about yourself.)

3. Experience their reality. (What do they do all day - active inquiry or job shadowing.)

4. Ask how you can help. (Find out how to be of service.)

5. Proactively help. (without the asking part).

6. Offer snacks. (To feed someone is to acknowledge their presence and humanity at the most foundational level.)

7. Give them a break. (Protect the space for real recovery and rest for people.)

8. Acknowledge their lives outside of work. (Operate on the assumption they do have a multidimensional life and minimize requests that infringe on nights and weekends.)

9. Offer sincere, specific gratitude. (Be specific on how their contribution made a difference.)

10. Less me, more we. (Language matters - use more we, us, you and yours … and less I’s).

11. It is of note that every one of these ten practical strategies for illustrating love and devotion are also specific strategies that the Flippen Group coaches leaders on in their Leadership Blueprint trainings and support (in their framework,much of this work is about creating connection and relational capacity).

So, which of these ten have you been practicing lately and how can you begin to more intentionally ‘love’ your people?

“People will meet and often exceed the highest expectations and and demands when they know their leader values and cares about them.”  ~ Crowley, Lead from the Heart

According to Scudero, “Love practiced by leaders in an educational environment is characterized by acceptance and a high level of respect for others taking into account their strengths and weaknesses, and choosing to focus on their strengths.”