Confidence to Lead with Love

When I give keynote talks on Leading with Love, Not Fear, I aim for the audience to be clear about three things:

1. I want people to know for certain that love is a better way to lead and work than fear.

After I share the business case for love and my research, every audience member should be clear: Loving, human experiences lead to desirable team and work behaviors.

Create respect, trust, belonging, and appreciation (aka love in action at work), and you will get more idea-sharing, loyalty, and effort. You also get better service delivery and improved customer outcomes.

We really shouldn’t need to say it anymore, but we still do:

• Care for people and they will care for customers and quality.

• Abuse people and the same abuse will be given to customers and products.

After talks, people share their stories of both these situations - some inspire me while others haunt me. People tell me about the loving leaders and teams they work with and the fantastic work they do together. Others tearfully tell me stories of the truly horrible treatment they receive at the hands of manipulative, cruel, selfish leaders who either don’t know what they are doing or know exactly what they are doing.

Either way, the damage they do is incalculable and unacceptable. This is why we work so hard to put love at the center of work.

2. I want people to understand how to identify ways to create love and not fear in any situation.

Often I teach a simple method for pausing, reflecting, and clarifying the actions that will bring fear and the actions that will bring love. This method can be applied from the micro to the macro.

I use it all the time and I want people to know that no matter what situation they face, they have a way to discover what love looks like in practice right then and there.

(If you are interested in a masterclass in this method, message me on LinkedIn and if enough people respond, I’ll host one.)

But here’s why I’m passionate about teaching this method: I can’t give you simple instructions for loving behaviors for any circumstance. You, my friends, must develop the emotional, intellectual, inquisitive, and intuitive muscles to find those loving behaviors yourselves. This is our work as humans: To get better and better at learning to bring love to our work and our lives.

3. I want people to be confident in tapping into their loving human instincts as a good source of insight.

When people try my simple method in a talk or workshop, I sometimes have them share one loving action they came up with that they can put into practice to bring love into any situation.

And they do.

They identify love to put into practice. They don’t flounder around. They hardly ever have blank worksheets and empty sticky notes. Usually, they write a lot. They have plenty of ideas. They know what to do. Or at least, they know how to begin. And beginning to love more has value and impact.

That first loving step can be followed up by seeking the counsel of other loving leaders or team members. Or, they can directly ask those impacted to tell them the actions that will create love rather than fear and then follow their advice.

And, at a talk or workshop, people know what they need to do to begin to love. You can see examples pictured here.

And while the world tempered by industrial era thinking may have told you that such love is a bad idea, or not worth it, or too soft, you know better. And you have one powerful thing going for you that you can trust and tap into for your first steps.

You are human.