Great Leaders Aren’t Afraid to Love Their Teams

One frustrating thing I see in leaders from time to time is a negative attitude towards people. Many choose a career in leadership who don’t like dealing with people. Unfortunately, they usually find they are less effective as a leader with this mindset. The reason is that leadership is inherently a people business.

“Leadership is a people business.”

The entire role of a leader is to motivate a team of people towards accomplishing an objective. Great leaders know that. They also know people are messy. People have issues, problems, emotions, quirks, hang-ups, baggage, and can be unpredictable. A great leader can see past the flaws, love their people, and motivate them to do great things. In my opinion, you can’t be a great leader if you don’t love people.

“Great leaders actually love their teams more than they love themselves.” Donald Miller

Donald Miller, founder and CEO of Storybrand, sees it the same way. I like his thoughts on this subject as he reflects on the culture he built at his company. One of the core values he put in place was to “make his employees’ dreams come true by serving clients faithfully.”  I thought it was interesting that he purposely intertwined serving customers with the dreams of his employees. In his view, loving your employees means helping reach their full potential.

“Great leaders can see the greatness in others when they can’t see it themselves and lead them to their highest potential they don’t even know.” Roy T. Bennett

Miller credits the growth of his company to the “secret ingredient” of love. Things changed at his company as they started to live out these core values. As he loved and respected his employees, they loved each other, and they worked as a team to better serve customers. He built a culture of respect with a foundation in love.

He explains that love can be quite scary, though:

Love doesn’t give you complete control over people. Love means you can’t disrespect them when you’re frustrated. Love means you really understand that people aren’t just a cog in a wheel. Love means you have to allow people to hurt you and let you down, and they will, just as you will them. But love also means you forgive, you don’t keep score, you show grace and you protect each other at all costs.

 And sometimes, protecting people means you have to let some people go. People that don’t fit into the culture or try and take advantage of the environment need to be dealt with. The sooner you address it, the better it is for that employee and the rest of the team.

He has two fundamental rules which has helped him create a culture of love and respect:

1. Hire people who are better, smarter and faster than you.
2. Never mess with their hearts.

What do you think? Does love belong in the workplace? Can a culture of love and respect boost a company’s performance? How will employees react when they feel their boss truly cares about their hopes and dreams? Why don’t more leaders practice this? Let me know in the comment section below.