Competing Priorities & Loving Leadership
Our work as Loving Leaders can be complex. I've been feeling the tugs and pulls from many directions. I've been hearing it from leaders too.
After all, we are responsible for enacting love in various forms in multiple relationships and places simultaneously. Our route is not always clear.
We aim to love our team members, customers, and stakeholders. We aim to love ourselves too. And we intentionally make efforts to be sure love is embedded in our organization’s operations. This creates a loving ecosystem in which people do their work and achieve our shared purpose.
These domains of responsibility hold our opportunities and challenges, and perhaps our learning edge. Oh yes, that learning edge keeps cropping up.
When the interests of each are clearly aligned, then our path of action is straightforward and clear. Those days are sweet. We've got this!
But these interests more often seem opposed to each other. Then we find ourselves wrestling with how to love across the breadth of our responsibilities. This struggle is real whether we are providing social services to an at-risk population, or producing an essential part in a manufacturing value chain, or delivering a quality meal to diners in our restaurant.
What do we do when loving actions for some appear to create threat, fear, or loss for others?
As I often remind Loving Leaders, the higher up the org chart we go, with more responsibility for more relationships and more authority over that ecosystem, the greater our capacity for love must be.
That capacity is our ability to consider the needs of all, not just one or a few, to understand options and impacts, to decide, and to implement that decision with respect and care.
Sometimes, we view those needs competitively so that some win and others lose. At other times, collaborative engagement is the way to go, working together to discover creative solutions so that everyone wins. Sometimes a combination of the two is the right way to go.
Any of these can be a loving approach, and, for that matter, any can be done in a threatening way. How we lead is the differentiator. Our aim should always be to embody deep regard for people.
This means growing our skills to listen, recognize our biases, be comfortable with ambiguity, to stand humbly in our decision, to hear dissenting views, and to speak directly and kindly.
These uncomfortable moments test our ability to stand in discomfort. But that is an expression of our Loving Leadership. And so is building our muscle to stand too.
Are you wrestling with this discomfort or with the competing concerns of multiple parties? Want a coach to help you navigate this challenge in alignment with your values? Drop me a note here: https://www.makeworkmorehuman.com/consultation and I’ll get in touch with you.
