Does leadership require love?

1 June 2020
Errol Amerasekera

As a young athlete in my teens I had a coach who was a humble, generous gentle-man named Geoff Wilkinson. It was before the time when I had a car, so he would often pick me up and drop me home after training. I was a shy, introverted kid with not a lot of confidence, but Geoff had this subtle yet powerful way of propping me up in those moments I needed some self-belief. The way he consistently demonstrated respect and care for me over a period of time helped me to believe him when he said I could do things that I believed were beyond my capability. He would encourage me to reduce my training load around exam time, and never failed to check-in on those exam results as they came in. Of course he wanted me to succeed in my on-field endeavours, but looking back now, he was much more interested in the process of my development as a human being and how I would eventually turn out as an adult.

I know that many of you who read my blog work in and/or have a background in sport. And for those of you who don’t, I am sure that you can make the appropriate extrapolation that is relevant in your own life…

Think of that coach you remember fondly – similar to my fondness for Geoff Wilkinson. I can almost guarantee that coach wasn’t necessarily the one who took you to three premierships. And if they did take you to three premierships that probably is not the reason you have such warm recollections of them.

The reason you remember this coach so fondly is most likely because they impacted your development, shared their wisdom and cared for you through a challenging time. Perhaps they were the person who saw something in you that you did not always see in yourself. They role modelled for you what it’s like to have belief in yourself when there may have been many reasons not to; and in doing so assisted you to develop a certain resilience and determination that has served you well all the way into adulthood. They were a coach who wanted to develop your physical conditioning, enhance your skill acquisition and improve your ability to execute those skills under pressure when it counted. But they were also clear that in addition to these “deliverables”, their role as your coach was also to influence and shape how you were going to turn out as an adult.

If you have read this far and resonate with what I am saying, just take a moment or two and remember that coach, that teacher, that mentor who was your version of Geoff Wilkinson. Whether they are alive or not, take the time to acknowledge their influence and impact on you.

What did they do that was so profound that years, perhaps even decades, later their legacy continues in how you remember them, the person you have become and how you live your life? I think you know the answer… they loved you!

This is the power of leading with and from love.

While it’s been more than 30 years since Geoff was my coach, I still think of him frequently. I know he shaped me in ways that I will never fully understand and appreciate. Was Geoff the most technically brilliant coach? Probably not. But what made him an amazing coach and leader, to the point where 30 years later tears still form in my eyes when I think about him, was his capacity to love those he coached and those he led, including me.

 

The vast majority of us are in need of more love

I have been working with individuals, teams and organisations in some capacity for more than 25 years now. And in that time I have formed some conclusions:

The vast majority of us do not feel deeply understood.

The vast majority of us do not feel really seen and valued for who we are, especially those aspects of our personality that we believe are weird or ‘different’.

The vast majority of us would like more friendship. And by “friendship” I do not mean 100 more friends on Facebook or a larger network of business associates. What I mean is friends who are deeply and intimately ensconced in our lives, who understand and appreciate the nuances and idiosyncratic quirks in our personality, and we feel held in the aura of that friendship.

In short, the vast majority of us are in need of more love.

I am using the term “love” fully cognisant that in most business and sporting cultures this is somewhat of a taboo subject. I know it’s taboo because no one really talks about it. And if it is mentioned, it is often done so by means of a throwaway line or in a manner which manages to deflect and minimise the gravity, the yearning and perhaps even the vulnerability we feel around the subject of love.

The myth that we have been led to believe is that love and peak performance are somehow separate, perhaps even mutually exclusive. And this is what makes love challenging to talk about, particularly within the context of business and sport. After all in the heat of battle (in the boardroom or on the field), where we need to be tough, single-minded and invincible, there cannot be any space for love and care, particularly if we associate love to being weak and ineffectual. Yes, love can be ‘mooshy’, soft and overly accommodating – but it doesn’t have to be! Love can be tough. Love can be brutally honest and direct. Love can delineate a clear boundary. Love can be uncompromising in terms of expectations. Great leaders just have the ability to know which ‘version’ of love is needed within a particular situation in a particular moment in time. Believe me, as gentle as Geoff was, there were numerous times he laid the law down to me. In fact, experiencing the wrath of someone who is normally so softly spoken and gentle created greater incentive for me to sit up, take notice and pull myself into line.

Why do the vast majority of us feel the need for more love?

I think there are many reasons why we need more love and why it’s often elusive. Firstly, life can be hard sometimes. Buddhism captures this when it suggests that the first Noble truth is “Life is suffering”. Secondly, the culture many of us grew up in as well as our current culture doesn’t always send messages that place an importance on love. Society appears to value other things more than love – money, status, popularity; so while from the outside it can appear that those people who have garnered these “have it all”, the reality is that they often feel like something is missing. Thirdly, how we are parented has a massive influence on our relationship to love, mostly because of the way unconscious wounding is so often passed from one generation to the next. And finally there is often an existential angst that runs deep within us, that on occasions rises to the surface in the way we think about meaning, belonging, purpose and where we fit in to the world.

So what does love have to do it leadership?

Everything I say!!

 

The ‘business case’ for love

For a leader to achieve their strategic outcomes, productive relationships are imperative, and therefore so is love. Think about key leadership competencies such as coaching, having influence, conflict management, strategic thinking, facilitating “difficult conversations” etc, they all work better when love is infused into the mix. In fact, when it comes to proficiencies such as coaching and building accountability they only really work when love is present. Love is a feeling attitude us therapist/facilitator types call “unconditional positive regard”, which is really just love packaged with a bunch of fancy words to make it more politically correct and palatable. But this is perhaps more the ‘business case’ for leading with and from love – which given most of us work within the context of business, is vitally important.

However, is there an additional rationale for leading with and from love, one that is more transpersonal, perhaps even “spiritual”?

 

Developing people requires love

I often say, leadership is a really tough job. So given that, why would anyone in their right mind willingly raise their hand to take on a leadership role? In my experience, deep down, at the heart of people’s desire to lead is a yearning to make a difference – in the lives of those they lead, their community, perhaps even the world. Individual leaders will have varying degrees of awareness of this. For some leaders this desire will be barely conscious, often buried in the day-to-day fray that is required to successfully navigate through these challenging times. And for others, this is a very conscious and powerful driver which informs how, and perhaps more importantly why, they lead. It comes back to purpose – which I personally define as the deepest “why” we do things in order to make a contribution beyond our own borders – be those borders personal or organisational. This is less about business outcomes, although they will come as a result, and more about a calling deep within us, a “spiritual quest” if you will.

At the heart of making a difference is developing people. Whether we are leading a team, an organisation, a country, or even a family, to make a deep, sustainable and profound difference in people’s lives requires leaders to develop those they lead. And you cannot separate development from love.  Real, sustainable development transforms the fabric of our being and can only occur in the presence of love!

This is because what most often undermines our potential to be the very best version of ourselves is the hurt, trauma and wounds that we carry with us from our past. For it is these experiences that give rise to the internal narratives and self-talk which in turn determine how we see ourselves, what we think we are capable of, and what we believe we are worthy of. And the only real remedy for these wounds is love, primarily because in that moment of hurt and wounding the thing that was most lacking, the thing that we needed the most, was love. Perhaps gentle love, perhaps tough love, perhaps love which made a boundary and said “No!”, perhaps love which said don’t believe what they say or you are better than this, but either way, what we needed in those moments of hurt and trauma was some version of love.

 

We cannot lead with and from love when we are ‘triggered’

So if we entertain my thesis, even temporarily, that love is required for leadership, why is it that love is talked about so infrequently, and why is it that leading with and from love is so challenging?

I have seen so many times where a leader starts a project, a season, an initiative, or even a development session I am running with an open heart and a genuine intention to bring care, trust and compassion to their team. But then something happens – they get ‘triggered’! And then as a natural and instinctive way of protecting themselves, they close their heart just a little; perhaps even a lot. And in that moment, their capacity to lead with and from love is reduced. With a little less love in the culture, something gets a bit harsher, more abrupt and there is a greater propensity for people to get hurt. And as more people get hurt there is a collective closing of hearts, and with that, the vicious cycle is initiated – closed hearts means less love, less love means more hurt, more hurt closes hearts down even further. As a result, relationships rupture; cultures become less effective at best, toxic at worst; and organisations and teams move incrementally away from peak performance.

For all of us, especially leaders, I believe protecting oneself is of paramount importance. But so is leading with and from love. I think this is one of the fundamental challenges and dilemmas of leadership – how do leaders take care of their emotional well-being and make their leadership sustainable by not “wearing too many punches” and at the same time remain open hearted enough so that love, care and understanding is the ‘cultural tone’ that they are setting?

 

No one ‘triggers’ us – we ‘trigger’ ourselves

This dynamic of getting triggered or hurt and then becoming slightly closed hearted happens so frequently, not just in leadership, but also in life.  And it has such a significant impact on a leader’s capacity to lead with and from love that I believe it is worth “unpacking”.

So what happens when we get ‘triggered’?

The term “triggered” in reference to a psychological disturbance has become common vernacular, almost clichéd. However in actuality, the process of being triggered is less about some external event and more about ourselves. While there is usually someone or something external to ourselves that says or does something to initiate the trigger, the real disturbance comes from stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, if I am walking along the beach and see someone I know, and say “hello”, if they ignore me, I might get triggered. While the event is them not reciprocating my hello, the actual disturbance is born out of the meaning I attach to that event and the stories I tell myself about myself. So upon not receiving a hello back, I might tell myself he doesn’t like me or he thinks I am stupid or I am not good enough for him to say hello etc. These stories then tap into and resonate with a previous experience of (in this case) being rejected, and the pain associated with that experience is what sends me into a spiral.

The challenge is that most of these stories happen at a barely conscious level. In my example, I am conscious of him not saying hello back to me, so I attach my pain, my insecurity, my anger to that event. However in reality, what I am feeling and getting triggered from is derived from the meaning I attach to that event and the stories I tell myself about it – and unfortunately, in most cases, this happens at a level that is less conscious than the event which initiated the trigger itself. This is because the stories themselves and the feelings associated to them reside in aspects of our psyche that are usually less conscious.

But where do the stories come from?

Simple. These narratives are constructed around our experiences, particularly painful and traumatic ones, in our formative years as we are forging our identity, view of the world and our place in it. And it is these stories and aspects of our identity that reverberate through our psyche when something happens to trigger an old wound.

What I have learned is that as a leader (as well as a human being) my ability to be loving and accepting of those around me, is intimately connected and proportional to my ability to be loving and accepting of myself. And while I used terms like “loving” and “accepting” in a way where you may interpret them as being static, in reality these inner experiences are actually extremely fluid. In other words, there are some days that I am much better at being loving and accepting of myself. And then there are other times, not too frequently thank God these days, when even finding a modicum of love for myself feels like an insurmountable task. And on these days finding love and compassion for others feels equally challenging.

This is why better people make better leaders, better people make better athletes. By “better” I mean there has been a process whereby they have healed those wounds sufficiently so that they are able to more consistently have love and compassion for themselves, and in doing so are more consistent in their capacity to lead with and from love.

 

A call to action

I believe it is the ethical obligation of leaders to work on those aspects of our personal history and psychology which prevent us from being the best leader possible. After all, we expect athletes to do everything in their power to get their body and minds in the kind of condition where they can perform at their best; so why should we expect anything less from ourselves in terms performing optimally in our leadership roles?

So if leadership requires love, we need to, we must work on being more loving to ourselves so that we can be more loving to those we lead. We cannot lead with and from love if there is not a certain amount of self-love; we cannot give what we ourselves do not own. However, the process of becoming more self-loving is far from simple; the landscape abounds with pitfalls of self-doubt, childhood wounds, trauma, neglect, self-loathing and inherited stories about our worth – not a journey for the faint of heart! But as leaders, this is what we signed up for, albeit we should have paid more attention to the fine print.

So given the above, this is my call to action – this is what I want to challenge you on.

Are you willing to commit to a process, which in all likelihood may take many years, of developing the ability to be more self-loving and self-accepting so that you can lead with and from love more consistently? If so, the following personal reflection questions maybe one useful step along the journey.

1. Think of a time in your leadership role when you were triggered to the point of being less compassionate, less empathetic, less understanding etc.
2. What was the dynamic in that interaction that triggered you? Be as specific as possible.
3. Can you relate that dynamic or experience to a trauma or wound that occurred in your formative years?
4. If so, briefly recall that experience. Be mindful not to get ‘double triggered’.
5. If love was what you needed at the point of wounding, who or what was the loving person or presence that you needed support from? It could be somebody you know e.g. a parent, a coach, a favourite pet or a fictional character from a movie you’ve seen or book you have read.
6. If that loving presence was there at the time of the wounding, what would they do or say that would prevent you from getting hurt? Play that scenario out in your imagination.
7. What is the “version of love” they used i.e. supportive love, tough love, protective love??
8. Now go back to the time when you were triggered from question one. Imagine that same loving presence supporting you with the same “version of love” (from the previous question) during the event which triggered you. How does this change/improve your reaction and your ability to lead with and from love?
9. Keep playing with this, knowing it may take multiple attempts, until you no longer feel triggered by that event.

 

PS: writing this post and then publishing it has definitely been a step out of my comfort zone. So I would like to sincerely thank the following people for their editorial assistance and suggestions, but most of all for their loving support and encouragement:

Marnie Nichols

Matty Angus

Meni Mantzavrakos

Anup Karia