Love & Three Actions To Take Today

Compassionate leadership requires honoring all your relationships, on and off the job. We love our families, alma maters, sports teams, and spiritual communities, but there is often hesitancy to love our stakeholders at work. Compassion and love are intertwined, so being a compassionate leader without love is impossible.

As a leader, you may wonder how to lead with love in a way that positively impacts you, your stakeholders, and your organization. The process will involve a self-examination, learning new approaches, and practicing leadership as a whole and embodied experience.

Here are three actions to help you get started:

1. Start with self-compassion. Developing self-care practices and patience with yourself is the best place to begin. For example, as this workweek ends, focus on your progress rather than your mistakes.

2. Model vulnerability. Building a loving and compassionate organization is impossible if people hide their emotions, mistakes, and need for support. As a leader, show people it is okay to be honest, imperfect, and whole.

3. Practice being compassionate with others on and off the job. For an organizational change context, I define compassion as preventing or alleviating suffering for all stakeholders. To begin, ask yourself, how can I use more compassion and lead with love in this situation? Compassion can be developed at home, in your community, and at work.

Solid leadership requires building relationships with stakeholders, but extraordinary leadership requires more. It involves the love of family and friends as a foundation and a strong understanding that the people you lead need the same.

Great leaders know their team members have lives beyond work and are unafraid to acknowledge and support this. They strive to get to know people deeply and come from a place of compassion and caring.

When creating a remarkable workplace, think about how you can better honor relationships and create an environment where your team can do the same.

Leader Activity:

1. Think about your three most rewarding relationships at work and devise one action each for strengthening/improving those relationships in the next 30 days.

2. Think about your three most challenging relationships at work and devise one action each for improving those relationships in the next 30 days.

Team Activity:

1. Discuss creating a better team through self-compassion, vulnerability and compassion for others. How can you foster each?
2. Discuss each of these three categories of relationships and devise one action for improving those relationships as a team:

• Co-workers
• Customers/Venders/Strategic/Partners
• Friends/Families/Community

Learn more about loving your work and becoming a more effective leader, and meet other inspiring leaders in future installments of this series.