Loving leadership – a frequently untapped resource

February 2024

There are many types of leadership: servant, situational, transformational, and visionary leadership to name a few. In my work I always begin with the first principles of leadership by asking these questions: 

• what drives you as a leader?
• where does your leadership drive come from?
• what can you cultivate to empower you as a leader?

Have you ever considered what your greatest resource might be? It’s not your bank balance, shareholder value, assets, intellectual property, or knowledge. It’s not even your health. In this article I will consider how you can harness the love in your heart and make the most of this abundant resource.

What’s love got to do with it?

Currently, the pace of change in the global business landscape is quick and intense. This isn’t just transforming businesses, it’s making a major impact at a human level. Over the coming months and years many of your people will experience worry, overwhelm, and exhaustion and they’ll need you to help them see a way forward. This is a challenge worthy of business leaders of all capabilities, and it is the love in your heart that will help you meet this challenge.

Only love has the depth to meet today’s challenges

While training people around the world, everyone I meet tells me that family is more important than anything else. Why? Because family is where love grows and makes its home. Conversely, many also tell me they see an unwelcome trend outside the family. They see relationships that are shallow, transactional, and conditional. They witness declining moral and ethical standards, ghosting, poor leadership, and a general breakdown in community relationships. These are symptoms of a world calling
all of us to be brave and to extend our love beyond our families and into the wider world.

Love in action – meeting the challenges

You can apply a loving leadership approach to address two of the biggest challenges facing businesses today.

Recruitment and retention

Why should the best talent decide to work in your business? Money alone isn’t the answer, this is a transactional approach that will not win you the hearts and minds of the top talent. Instead, focus on allowing them to feel affirmation and love.

When a new person joins your business imagine you are thinking three generations ahead. Talk to them like you are planning their success over the next 100 years, you will use different language and create a different energy. You will foster trust and a feeling of curiosity and wonder in your people about the scale of your ambition for them. Loving leadership can help people to feel a depth of vision that means they won’t want to work anywhere else.

Fear of artificial intelligence

Not everyone understands artificial intelligence (AI) and can become defensive or aggressive in their thinking. It is easy in this situation to feel helpless, intellectually irrelevant, and disconnected, so be kind and recognise their fears. We all like to belong and feel welcome so it is important that people in this situation feel safe and that someone cares. Let them know that good things happen here and here is where they belong; do this and your people will thrive in an AI world.

Tapping into this abundance

Love has immense value and unlike other resources there is an infinite supply. If you want to be more patient, kind, and empathetic, focused and at peace, concentrate on cultivating love for yourself and people everywhere. Love is a resilient and endless resource, embrace it and use it in your leadership.

About the author

Michael Quigley
Preston, UK

Michael is a former primary school teacher with extensive experience of teaching, coaching, leading and team membership. He is a published author and regular blogger. His life-long passion for and interest in fitness, wellbeing and growing people has led him to building online professional and personal development courses with his company Kataholos.

Michael is experienced in public speaking, delivering for both the public and private sector regionally, nationally and internationally. A regular speaker for Russell Bedford, Michael will be delivering leadership material at the 40th Russell Bedford Annual Global Conference in October 2023 in Montreal, Canada.

michael@kataholos.co.uk