Leading with love

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the same conversation twice with two women that I deeply respect and admire. 

As a coach and HR consultant, I love to talk to people about profiling and preference tools that they end up doing in their workplaces. The particular tool that’s come up recently just happens to be the VIA Character Strengths survey . It’s a pretty comprehensive and free tool, so lots of organisations like to use it, if you’ve got a spare 20 minutes, give it a go!

On two separate occasions highly skilled, effective and respected leaders have lamented that their top strengths included love and kindness. They had hoped for ‘leadership’ skills like bravery, judgment or just simple perseverance. 

It’s interesting that the traits we try so hard to develop in our children don’t seem good enough to navigate through the adult world of corporate leadership. I’m most curious about why we perceive leading with love and kindness to be a weakness? Aren’t those the leaders we most want to work with? Aren’t those the organisations that are most likely to thrive? 

It’s interesting to reflect that a lot of us equate assertiveness and even dysfunction and aggression with ‘strong’ leadership. There’s definitely a lot of that role modelled in politics, the public service and commercial organisations.

Being counter-cultural to the systems we operate in is usually a burden, but if you (like my friends and colleagues) have the talent and gift to lead with love, I challenge you to embrace and know the unique value of it. After all, all you need is love.