Leadership and Love: 3 Tips for Leading with Heart

Love and leadership are not words you see together very often.

But leadership – like love – thrives with effort and intentionality. You’re guiding people, navigating relationships and priorities and dealing with a whole range of emotions every day – spoken and unspoken.

How do you bring more heart into your leadership without sounding like a Hallmark card?

Here are three practical tips to help you lead with love (without the fluffy stuff).

1. Listen Like You Care

When we’re busy and distracted, we’re terrible listeners.  We’ve all been there – nodding while checking emails or half-listening while thinking about your next meeting. But we all know that the best leaders are the ones who make the time to listen.

This doesn’t mean you must be available 24/7 and stop what you’re doing while people waffle and go off on tangents.

This doesn’t mean ‘my door is always open’ (Your door should never be ‘always open’).

It does mean helping people to communicate well so that listening is easy. Help them to be succinct, unambiguous and purposeful and see how much time you save. What a beautiful gift that would be.

Talking of gifts…..

2. Give Feedback Like It’s a beautiful Gift

The best feedback is personal and well thought out.  It’s the difference between a beautifully presented bouquet of your favourite blooms and a last-minute dash to the garage for some wilted carnations. And if the feedback might be tough to hear, it’s even more important that it’s presented beautifully.  Clear, concise, honest and compassionate. And with a ‘let’s see how we can move towards something better’ sense of hopefulness.

3. Make Tough Decisions with Empathy

Your leadership life is not all hearts and flowers. You have to make tough calls, and the team might not be happy about it.  Tough decisions don’t have to be delivered without empathy.  Be transparent about why it’s necessary and how the decision will affect people. Allow space for people to vent and ask questions if appropriate but put a time limit on it.

This week’s activity: A hand-written thank you card to a colleague whose support you appreciate would be a huge gift to give (and receive).

Happy Valentine’s Day!

P.S. In your leadership role you need to demonstrate authority, credibility, connection and the superpower I call ‘observation’ – reading the room and knowing what to do with what you’ve read.  You’ll get all this and more in my Lead with Confidence programme (starting in April).  Click here for the details.