Loved By Being Understood & Appreciated
A leadership topic I have spent a lot of time thinking about and researching is “love.” Love is one of the most important things leaders can give. We need to love the people we serve. C.S. Lewis described four types of love in his book The Four Loves: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. For a leader, the love that fits best is often charity (agape).
Charity is selfless, unconditional love that seeks the well-being of others. A leader demonstrating this type of love prioritizes the needs of the team, fosters inclusivity, and encourages personal and professional growth without expecting anything in return.
Additionally, elements of affection can also be important, as it builds a sense of belonging and creates a supportive environment. Ultimately, a combination of these loves can create a strong, empathetic leadership style that inspires trust and loyalty among team members.
I have also always liked Ashley Montague‘s definition of love: “Profound involvement in the well-being of others.” Today, however, I might have found an even better way to think about and practice love. In Matt Haig’s great novel The Life Impossible, Grace Winters said that, “There is no point in being loved if you are not understood…And once loved and understood to be appreciated.” This is so profound. With this statement, Haig, in my opinion, was having Grace emphasize that love alone is not enough; it must be accompanied by a deep understanding of one another’s experiences, feelings, and beliefs.
This idea suggested that true connection comes from being truly seen and heard by others. It highlighted the significance of empathy and recognition within relationships—whether they be romantic, familial, or platonic. Being loved feels hollow if there is no comprehension of one’s individuality, strengths, struggles, or joys. Furthermore, appreciation serves as a necessary affirmation of that understanding, reinforcing bonds and fostering a sense of belonging.
I had never thought about a leader’s love for those we serve in this light. Haig’s message invites readers to reflect on their own relationships and the essential components that contribute to meaningful connections and loving those we serve. Think about it; we all want to be loved by being understood and appreciated.
Leading By Symposium
While doing research for a book I’m writing I came across The Symposium by Plato. The research I am doing was related to “love” in the sense that I am a big proponent of leaders loving those they serve. And, since I believe everyone is a leader; we should all love everyone. I’m trying to articulate how to do that as a leader in the work I am doing. Anyway, The Symposium is Plato dialoging the speeches taking place at an ancient Athenian feast. Oh, to go back to 380B.C. and take part in that symposium. It was the whole idea of the symposium that prompted my post this morning. The symposium allowed nuanced and super-exploratory environments for deep intellectual discussion. Really, this is the format I strive to create with each of my leadership development gatherings.
What if all our discussions were like those of Socrates and Plato?
Leaders (all of us) can learn from having symposiums like Plato and Socrates in several ways. Firstly, symposiums provide a platform for open and intellectual discussions, allowing leaders to explore different perspectives and gain new insights. This can lead to more informed decision-making and the development of innovative solutions to complex problems.
Additionally, I love creating a safe place for the exchange of ideas among gathering participants. Leaders can benefit from engaging in dialogue with others who have diverse backgrounds and expertise, as this can challenge our own assumptions and broaden our understanding of various issues.
Furthermore, symposiums in their truest form, foster a collaborative and inclusive environment, where everyone’s opinions are respected and valued. This encourages teamwork and encourages leaders to listen to different viewpoints, promoting effective communication and fostering a sense of unity among participants.
Can’t you just imagine Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aristophanes, and Socrates, who all gave speeches at that Athenian feast, sharing their philosophies on love? Imagine that opportunity for leaders to network and build relationships with other influential individuals in their field. This can lead to valuable connections and collaborations that can enhance their leadership abilities and create opportunities for growth and development. It gives me goosebumps!
What is striking to me is how relevant all the dialogues still are today in one way or another. Are you hosting symposiums like Plato and Socrates that can help leaders expand their knowledge, improve their decision-making skills, foster collaboration, and build meaningful relationships within their communities?
Easy To Please But Harder To Satisfy
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said that God is “easy to please, but harder to satisfy.” In that context, I believe Lewis meant that God is easy to please in the sense that He delights in our sincere efforts and desires to have a relationship with us. However, God is harder to satisfy in the sense that He desires us to seek true fulfillment and satisfaction in Him alone, rather than in temporary things or immediate gratification. In other words, while it may be relatively simple to please God through our genuine pursuit of Him, finding deep and lasting satisfaction in Him requires a greater effort and a commitment to prioritize Him above all else. Also, I believe God is never satisfied because he wants us to continually improve and be the best we can be.
We can take a few big lessons away from the simple statement of “easy to please, but harder to satisfy” for our everyday lives as leaders. It is relatively simple to find temporary satisfaction or pleasure in small things or immediate gratification. We need to celebrate those small things in those we serve as well as ourselves. Being easy to please as a leader means being open-minded flexible, and appreciative of the efforts and achievements of our team. It means recognizing and acknowledging their hard work and providing positive reinforcement regularly. This creates a positive and motivating work environment.
However, finding long-term, deep satisfaction requires a much greater effort and cannot be easily achieved. We must work extremely hard to help those we serve be the very best they can be and not be satisfied. Being hard to satisfy means setting high standards and expectations for yourself and your team. It means constantly seeking improvement, challenging the status quo, and pushing for excellence. It means not settling for mediocrity and always striving for growth and development.
Here is how we might put this into practice:
- Clearly communicate our expectations and standards to our teams.
- Encourage and recognize the efforts and achievements of our team members regularly.
- Provide constructive feedback and guidance to help our teams and team members improve.
- Continuously challenge ourself and our teams to set higher goals and strive for excellence.
- Lead by example and demonstrate a commitment to constant improvement.
- Foster a culture of innovation, creativity, and continuous learning within our organizations.
- Provide opportunities for professional development and growth for ourteam members.
Make no mistake, being easy to please doesn’t mean accepting mediocrity, and being hard to satisfy doesn’t mean being unappreciative. It’s about finding a balance and creating an environment where both personal and professional growth can flourish. This environment is what I believe is loving those we serve.
Love In Leadership
Loving those we serve is an important part of leadership because it creates a positive and supportive environment. If we genuinely care about the well-being of our team members, this love fosters trust, collaboration, and motivation. It’s more than having people feel valued and appreciated; it’s about their leaders truly having their best interests at heart and acting on their behalf. First, this love in leadership is the right thing to do for others. Second, this love leads to higher job satisfaction, increased productivity, and stronger loyalty towards the organization. Finally, love in leadership helps build strong relationships and enables leaders to better understand and meet the needs of their team members.
Yesterday at a reception I was attending in Tucson, Arizona I told a table of full of teachers, “thanks for being so engaged during sessions I had done during the day.” Then after we had chatted for a bit and I was getting ready to move along to chat with others, I told them that I loved them. One in the group was impressed with my use of love. We then got into a discussion of what “love” means in the context I was using it in. I love, pun intended, having that discussion because I believe we must love others. It means we are practicing both the golden rule and the platinum rule. So, how do we really provide love for others?
A friend of mine Dr. Lindan Hill shared Ashley Montague‘s definition of love, “Profound involvement in the well-being of others,” with me. Dr. Hill and I have had many a discussion about this and we are both very committed to loving those we serve. I believe Montague’s definition refers to a deep and genuine concern for the welfare and happiness of other people. It suggests that love goes beyond superficial feelings or attachment and is a genuine desire and commitment to support and care for others. This love is selfless. I want to emphasize here the active engagement that love entails, rather than simply a passive affection or attraction. Ultimately, loving those we serve allows for effective and compassionate leadership that brings out the best in everyone involved.
Passion Bubbles
This morning I am contemplating a few things out of recently read books. One out of the great book I finished a couple of weeks ago, Red Dress In Black and White by Elliot Ackerman where it was said, “Family should be at the center of who you are, not the circumference.” The others were by Mark Twain in Volume 3 of his autobiography. Twain spoke of “The things that take up the spare room in my heart.” He also said, “I refuse to take part in things where my heart is indifferent.” This made me think about all the, what I call my “passion bubbles,” I have. These would really be those things that take up the spare room in my heart. This, in turn, got me to thinking about our hearts capacity. Just how much room is in our hearts?
Twain had decided not to take part in things where his heart was indifferent. I consider this a pretty good rule of thumb. It’s usually easy to tell when I am indifferent; I’m not going to comment or not going to get heavily involved. This idea that Elliot Ackerman put in his book of family at the center and not at the circumference is a really good metaphor of how I want to arrange my passion bubbles. Our family should be at the core of what is given prime space in our hearts along with those other prime time passions we have. Then we can fill in the spare space. Interestingly, we also consider the heart being limitless in its ability to love, but we need to realize our limits on the number of passion bubbles we can support.
Each of us has a unique drive to make a contribution and fulfill a purpose. When we combine our passions with our strengths, we can achieve things never even imagined. But, it would probably do us well to consider Twain’s rule of not wasting too much of our heart’s spare room with those things we are indifferent to. This will also give us the room for keeping our family at the center. It’s about having an uncluttered heart.
Love Is A Practice
I talk a lot about needing to love those we serve. Love is a practice, it is not something you find or don’t find. You can practice love for the rest of your life. We need to take this very seriously. On this Thanksgiving Day 2022 I am reflecting on how we need to love. I know what your thinking. You’re saying to yourself, “Byron, love is something you should write about on Valentine’s Day.” No. That’s about romantic love. I’m talking about real love. The kind of love that emerges from a shared appreciation. This shared appreciation is why I write about this on Thanksgiving morning. If we truly appreciate those we serve, we need to love them.
So, what does that mean, you ask. It means both parties are made better by the relationship. This kind of love takes into consideration the passions, goals, core values, strengths, and weaknesses of one another and use those to set a direction of how to help each other be made better. I seem to interrogate the thought of love a lot. Love is the desire to improve the beloved’s life. When we love our students, we do everything in our power to improve their lives. When we love our teachers, we do everything we can to improve their lives. I love my wife and son, so I do everything I can to improve their lives. I’m sure you get my point by now.
Love is a very profound type of recognition. The best leaders I have know and respected have a keen ability to really see into another person’s normally hidden depths, and to realise how profound and important they are. Those great leaders understand that everyone, yes everyone, has potential. The great leaders will love you enough to pull, mold, develop, and help us hone that potential. Loving others is not something to be taken lightly. It’s about being thankful for those that cross our path and recognizing their greatness and what you can offer to bring about their full potential. Let’s hone our own practice of loving.
Love In Action
Today officially marks the start of the 26th week of the year. We are at the halfway point. It also means I am halfway through the great book Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways To Be A Servant Leader and Build Trust, Making Common Sense Common Practice, Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley. I am reading the book one simple truth at a time and writing a reflective post each week. This week’s post reflects on Simple Truth #26: “Great Leaders SERVE.” In this simple truth the elements of the SERVE model from The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller were introduced. Two things jumped out at me. First, the idea of “reinventing continuously,” and second, the statement at the end of the simple truth: “…servant leadership is love in action” (p. 69). Let’s look at reinventing continuously.
As a person who loves learning and experiencing new things, I believe In the idea that what we know today will probably not make us successful even in the near future. We must be constantly reinventing ourselves. This does not mean we are giving up or changing core values, but means we are iterating. In fact, iteration, might be a better way to look at this than reinventing. By its very nature iteration is about learning and progressing to the next level – what great leaders do. For every new iteration, feedback must occur so that the next iteration is better and moving in the right direction.
Besides the personal reinvention there are two other parts to the Blanchard and Miller model of reinventing continuously: reinventing systems and processes and structural reinvention. Now more than ever, there is rapid and continual change all around us. Just think of the supply-chain for one. There is a great need to develop an iterative mentality and create a culture of learning. Therefore, if we want to practice “love in action,” we must not wait or hope that those we serve will somehow learn all of the needed skills that make them great. We must deliberately lead and model the reinvention/iteration process for all.
Being Treated Well
Today I was reminded of something I heard Steve Jobs say, “Leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” A participant in a leadership development gathering I facilitated actually said it better when she said, “Leadership is not about a title. It is about the actions you take for others and the example you set for others.” That was a drop the mic moment given that we had been discussing the leaders who had the most influence on us. We had also been reflecting how how well we had been doing influencing others.
As we develop our own leadership style we must understand that those we serve want to be given opportunities to lead themselves. I’m a huge fan and student of Richard Branson. In an interview with Inc. he said, “If the person who works at your company is 100% proud of the job they’re doing, if you give them the tools to do a good job, they’re proud of the brand, if they were looked after, if they’re treated well, then they’re gonna be smiling, they’re gonna be happy and therefore the customer will have a nice experience.” The key words there are treated well. To me that means loving those we serve. It also means being set up for success. In that same interview Branson discusses putting staff first so everything else can fall into place. I have often said in education we must put teachers first so students can be first. Let’s treat everyone well!
Thinking About Love
What is love? Now there is a question. When I looked it up there are at least eight different kinds of love depending on what source you are studying. Lately, however, I have been obsessed with this idea of leaders, organizations, businesses, and now even governments, loving their people. We all want a community in which to “belong”. A community in which everyone can bring their best self to and leverage their talents each and every day. If we want people to be engaged, whether at work or civically, we must create communities of belonging. So how do we do that? By loving each other!
My thoughts on this were prompted by a line Rob Hart put in his great new book that I just finished, The Paradox Hotel. I’ve got pages of quotes from the book for further pondering, but here is the prompt for this post: “There are different kinds of love, nevertheless they are all still love.” Very true!
Maturana and Verden-Zöller (2008) asserted that, “We humans are loving animals that become ill when deprived of love” (p. 7). They went on to assert, “…that these many different expressions do not denote different forms, kinds, or levels of love as an emotion, but that they in fact connote only different relational dimensions of our living as loving animals” (Appendix 10). So, nevertheless, all the different kinds of love are still love. It seems we have let success, measured in monetary terms, expectations, or desires for what others do take over for our love. Because love is not blind acceptance we must be sincere in creating mutual respect. Love is about a coexistence where we do not put our own desires expectations or aims ahead of others and begin to manipulate. When we think about love in this way it really is about a feeling of belonging and making sure others have the opportunity to belong.
Clearly, love is a complex thing, but all the different kinds of love are still love. What goes around comes around. So let’s all show a little more love.
Reference The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love, Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zöller Edited by Pille Bunnell, Imprint Academic 2008.
Byron's Babbles 
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