Relationship Matters

Ep. 6 Love in Leadership

August 04, 2021 CRR Global Season 3
Relationship Matters
Ep. 6 Love in Leadership
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Katie is talking with Neil Edwards about Leadership and Love. In business ‘love’ is not a word, characteristic, or value, we often see or use. Yet, what might be the value of bringing more ‘love’ into the workplace? And how might leading with love transform our working relationships and company cultures? Across the episode we discuss how love affirms life, the sanitation of words in the workplace, the challenges and missed opportunities in leaving love out of the boardroom; expanding our leadership range in include love and loving response, creating shared understanding around what love means, and the power of living and leading with love.

Neil Edwards is a Front of the Room Leader and Certification Faculty for CRR Global. Neil specializes in expanding range and strengthening resilience for leaders, and creating capacity and capability of teams and organizational systems to be positive, productive, and agile in the face of change. He coaches and teaches individuals, teams, and larger organizational systems to identify values, define purpose, act intentionally, think systemically, be inclusive, and nurture wellbeing. He has extensive experience coaching accountants, engineers, attorneys, MBAs, executives, and finance; brand; and IT professionals in corporations, government, and professional services.


For over 18 years, CRR Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one relationship at a time

 We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the larger whole.

Relationship Matters Season 3 Episode 6 – Love in Leadership

 

Key 

 

KC – Katie Churchman   

NE - Neil Edwards 

 

[Intro 00:00 – 00:06] 

 

KC – Hello and welcome back to the Relationship Matters podcast. We believe relationship matters, from humanity to nature to the larger whole. Hello and welcome, in this episode I’m delighted to be welcoming back Neil Edwards. Neil is a CRR Global faculty member who works at the intersection of leadership, relationships, wellbeing and diversity, equity and inclusion. In this episode Neil and I are discussing leadership and love. In business love is not a word, characteristic or value we often see or use. Yet, what might be the value of bringing more love into the workplace and how might leading with love transform our working relationships and our company cultures? Across the course of this episode Neil and I talk about how love affirms life, the sanitization of words in the workplace, the challenges and mis-opportunities in leaving love out of the boardroom, expanding our leadership range to include love and loving responses, creating shared understanding around what love means and the power of living and leading with love. So, without further ado I bring you the brilliant Neil Edwards. 

 

NE – It’s giving me the option to leave the meeting, should I run away now? 

 

KC – Neil. It’s an absolute delight to have you back on the Relationship Matters podcast, welcome. 

 

NE – Thank you Katie, it’s an absolute delight to be back on the podcast with you, we’ll see where this goes today. 

 

KC – Yeah! We’ve got an interesting one today, so we’re discussing the role that love plays in leadership. Now even when I say that I feel an edge brewing up inside me because love and leadership – you don’t hear those words often in the same sentence.

 

NE – No, we don’t. And yet, I know that a lot of people who do work in this space of leadership development relationship work often talk about love and talk about oneness, yet in business where we often do a lot of our work, it’s not a word or a characteristic or a value that’s often seen or written or used in corporate space. And I believe there’s an opportunity there and given that there’s an opportunity, from my point of view, that means that there’s a real gap, we’re missing something. 

 

KC – Yeah, because when we think about the role that love plays in our life it’s huge, and yet it still feels as if we have to leave that word and everything it encompasses at the office door. We cannot bring love into the professional space.

 

NE – Yeah, you know, I think often times what happens is words and concepts get sanitized in the workplace in order to fit a narrative that we believe to be good and right. And we may see words like work together, collaborate, hear, those types of words are used in corporate America, in corporate spaces around the world about how we come together as people and how people experience work together. And I think that love is embedded in that but we’re just not using the word. When we sanitize it we leave something off the table. We are unconsciously telling our people love is not appropriate at work and I believe that that’s false. I believe love is absolutely necessary at work if relationships matter in the boardroom. 

 

KC – I love that you quoted our title there, Relationship Matters, and I’m wondering what does love mean to you at its core? Because I think love gets lost in all of the cultural stereotypes, the romcoms and all of that kind of love, I think, takes over the story. So, what’s your description of love? 

 

NE – Love affirms life. 

 

KC – Love affirms life. Can you speak more to that? 

 

NE – Well, if in a relationship I lead with love and you come to me with a problem, an issue, even if that is with me or it is with someone else or something else in your experience, I can chose to have a loving response or I can have a different kind of response and my response might be neutral. Or it might produce harm. A loving response always affirms life. If a person isn’t feeling affirmed in a conversation or after a conversation, I suggest that it perhaps was not a loving response. You may walk away with a response from me that you didn’t expect to hear, you didn’t want to hear, it challenged you, you know, there’s some growth you need, I don’t agree with you, yet I can still approach you lovingly and I can still offer a loving response. And, you know, I think of the work in this moment of Brené Brown, and she talks about vulnerability a lot and I think, culturally, we wrap meaning around a lot of words and we say courage, we think of it, this is my framing of it, it’s a strong word. It’s hard, you know you have a steady back and your stable, when we use vulnerability in our language we think soft, we think easy. When we use love we think soft, we think easy. But the reality is being loving or leading with love, being vulnerable, are courageous acts, are very powerful acts. Being kind. And somehow it has become difficult to be those things. I think that they’re difficult, perhaps, because they are, they’ve become fearful places for us. They show up as at work. We’re not being vulnerable, we’re not being kind. We’re not leading with love. And we sanitize and we limit our ability to lean into the more creative and resonant aspects of our humanness. We tend to stay somewhere in the middle, you know, love and intimacy and vulnerability are on extremes, so are fear and violence, violent essence, those are on the extremes. So we try and stay on the middle and I think the more skilled we become at going out to the ends of our ranges, the more powerful we become in leading. And love takes us in the direction of producing and reproducing life. Being life affirming. Hate and fear destroys life. So, you know, we have the capacity for both because we’re human and I think it’s weak and a cop out when we hear platitudes like ‘be human first’. Truth is, humans have the capacity to cause harm. What we really need is ‘be love first’, we want to be life affirming. If we want to be human first, we’re inviting all of the things that are damaging and harmful as well in the workplace. That’s actually not what we want, we’re seeking to create. We’re seeking to affirm life so we need to lean in the direction of love, and I think if we’re clear with our words it makes it easier for us to adopt those leadership characteristics and then to behave in a loving way, because love is an act. And love is an act that shows up in relationships. 

 

KC – Your definition is so expansive. It’s making me think about alignment and how when you align you don’t have to agree. When alignment could be agree to disagree. And actually, an alignment, it’s a loving act and it doesn’t mean that you have to like each other or be the same, it’s sort of a deeper, a deeper value set and I think that’s an exciting place to live from because I think we have this sense that love’s about being on the same page but that doesn’t sound innovative or creative or in any way exciting! 

 

NE – Not at all, not at all, there’s so much opportunity lost and I love that you bring up alignment work. That has a specific meaning for us in our ORSC work, and it doesn’t mean that you have to agree like you said, we can disagree, we can disagree massively and still approach each other and be with each other in a loving, life affirming way. You know, I’ve spoken to you before about allyship and what’s missing from allyship in the broader narrative is the fact that allyship requires relationship, it’s not a notion, it’s a fact. And we sanitize things in modern society so, sometimes to make us comfortable, so allyship has come to mean, and you can even see this in a dictionary because there are many connotations, allyship has come to mean you can just declare allyship and support something from a distance and forget about relationship. And so, I hear language now in the world channel, in the public discourse, from corporate leaders and corporations that goes something like this: we need to hold ourselves accountable. Think about that. If I am in a position of power, privilege and rank and I have come to realize that I’ve been doing something that produces harm to someone or some group that I’m supposed to be in a relationship with but I’m not, right, I’ve pushed them off to the side, and I’ve come to accept that and then in my position of power and privilege I say you know what, I am going to hold myself accountable. My question is accountable to what? Accountable to whom? How is it that you get to say I’m going to hold myself accountable? I mean when has a business ever held itself accountable, really though, held itself accountable and it’s gone well? Right? To me that is a non-loving response, that is a fearful response to come into relationship, to have a conversation, a loving conversation that demonstrates that you do care. You do want to affirm life, and to align on something. But I could hold you accountable too, if you’re making a declaration on behalf of me, the one you want to be in allyship, perhaps you should have a conversation with me. Perhaps that can be a loving conversation. I assert that there is fear on the other side, there’s an avoidance behavior. Or, in more sanitized language, you just don’t care. 

 

KC – Mmm. It’s really interesting because this idea of love really brings the human being into business and I was thinking about another example, I heard it on another podcast, the On Being podcast, and someone was speaking about how diversity is thrown around, ‘oh yeah, we really believe in diversity’, and someone challenged a group of HR leaders and said diversity from what? And I think that, that’s a loving space because then it’s not just throwing these terms around, we’re actually getting to the human being at the heart of this, this conversation, the relationship. The relationship that matters at the core of all of this. 

 

NE – The relationship that matters. You know, diversity from what? Accountable to whom? Accountable for what? Who gets to decide? Do you love me enough to come into a conversation and trust love enough that we can have this dialogue and come to a place where we can move forward in alignment in a way that is life affirming in the conversation, and that produces life affirming results. What we know now is that these types of difficult conversation we want to talk about diversity and inclusion and allyship, is not producing positive results. They’re not. They’re failing. And I believe it’s because of the absence of relationship, so whether we talk about allyship or we talk about love, or we talk about alignment, or we talk about designing an alliance we use the term metaskill in ORSC work, leaders need to adopt the metaskill of love. Be it, lead with it, act through it. 

 

KC – Hmm. It’s so interesting because I’m wondering, for some of our listeners who are hearing this and thinking gosh, I like it but I don’t know how I’m going to start using love in the workplace, what’s a feasible edge for someone who’s never really adopted this style, let alone this language in the workplace? What’s a first tip toe over the edge? 

 

NE – I think it’s to name love, name it as a value and invite the conversation. What might this look like to you at work? You know, we think of something like love languages, how would you like to be loved? And people have different love languages. Words of affirmation, quality time, you know, I think the language of love languages has changed for use in corporate America, this is a perfect example, it’s called motivation be appreciation. We couldn’t even use the word love, right, in love languages, a book that’s written out in the public space, we couldn’t use it in corporate America, we chose to change the language and say motivation by appreciation, we’re trying to get people to do things by just appreciating. Now, I’m not deprecating or minimizing the value of appreciation, but we need to have the conversation what if we just used the word love? And then we would develop our understanding of what it means for individuals so that we can be responsive to individuals in the workplace in a way that they feel is loving. You know, no one of us is going to have the answer to codify what love looks like in the workplace, but I think there’s a collective dialogue, you know, the system needs to define that. The system needs to choose to center love as the conversation and allow the voices to speak. 

 

KC – Yeah, you’re making me think about the damage done when there’s an absence of love. So, I have a really close friend who, early on in his career, had a boss who had a son the same age as him and it was just sort of fascinating the way he treated my friend compared to his son. He’d hear about all these trips and he’d work my friend to the ground. And I think because you separate, often people separate work from home, that’s love, this is that life and this is a different kind of clinical, work, work, work, doing culture, it’s very transactional, it’s not relational and I think that does a lot of damage and it enables people to keep neglecting the relationships there because although that doesn’t happen here, I have love, it’s in my home, it’s at home with my family. So I think probably that allows us and enables us to just keep going with this transactional approach to work. 

 

NE – Yeah, we eliminate a fundamental human need by saying that love doesn’t belong at work. We have all of these organizations that say, again, back to diversity and inclusion, what’s now becoming a ubiquitous part of the conversation is belonging. Old psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one belonginess. Why are we creating a culture of belonging but not a culture or cultures of love and belonging? We simply cannot just turn off love. When we try to do that we create toxicity in our bodies, we create toxicity in the systems that we spend most of our time in, at work. We’re inviting toxic behavior into the workplace by excluding and marginalizing love. How is it possible to create a culture of belonging where there is no love? It makes no sense. 

 

KC – Yeah, and I think it’s a love at a deeper level because when you said belonging you made me think of Brené Brown again and how her research shows the opposite of belonging is fitting in. And actually, when we’re talking about love in this way we’re talking about not the kind of love where everyone looks like you and thinks like you and acts like you, and you know, you get on on everything, it’s a different kind of deeper, raw love, that sits and aligns us at that real human level. And you’re right. What’s belonging without love? 

 

NE – It’s not… I assert, and I’m not a terminal degree PHD researcher but I assert that you simply cannot have belonging without love. Inside of love exists acceptance, self-acceptance, and we do this work and we look at secret selves and hidden selves in all of these aspects of selves and we have to accept ourselves and we’re always working on that. When we go into groups, when we go into community, when we get into relationship, we want people to accept us for who we are. All of who we are. And so that requires us to feel like we are loved in order to feel like we belong. And so whether, you know, historically whether you’re a woman in the workplace and early days, wear pants, don’t wear any fewer than X pieces of jewelry and don’t wear anymore because if you wear more than you’re going to get labeled something else, and your shoes need to be this way, there’s all of these rules, you needed to have a certain look which means I don’t feel like I belong here, this is for men, you don’t love me for me and I want to wear pink, I want to wear red, I don’t want to wear black all the time, that’s not how I express myself. So, when we talk about love and belongingness, people want to be accepted in that community, in that culture. 

 

KC – Yeah, so being able to  belong in a culture, a company, is an act of love. If someone creates the space for that. You can’t really have belonging without love. 

 

NE – You cannot. And somebody creates the space for that, so the responsibility, as far as I’m concerned, starts with the CEO because we’re not living in a world where there is acceptance of love as a leadership characteristic. And leadership behavior in relationships and CEOs need to set the tone, that that’s just the nature of business. 

 

KC – Yeah. 

 

NE – I cannot imagine there would not be a critical mass of people who will say yes to love. 

 

KC – I’m wondering if we can steer the conversation down the route of love in it’s stereotypical sense because what you were saying there makes me think of how it’s been trivialized in many ways – oh I love my house… we throw it around and I don’t think we really then understand what it means and what it means to bring love into the workplace. When it’s at that trivial level it means something very different from what we’re discussing. 

 

NE – Yeah. Language is tricky. You know, words, over time well there’s a denotation and then there’s many connotations. And we now throw love around and it has all sorts of connotations and all sorts of meaning that diminishes the power and the value of love. And I actually think, to some degree, the use of the word vulnerability because of the global dialogue that Brené Brown has brought forward is also beginning to lose some of its oomph. You know, everybody wants to talk about be vulnerable, be authentic, we hear this stuff all the time. And so this is why, when I said earlier, what does it practically look like at work? It requires a meaningful and intentional dialogue to frame what are we talking about when we talk about love in this context? In this way. Some people, you know, there’s sort of the flippant use of the word love, I love my bike, I love my running shoes. You know, I love this wine, I love this ring, I love so many things. And I don’t wanna diminish that because we like a lot of things and we find, you know, we make up meanings around everything, right. But there’s also this other notion of love that gets into physical intimacy between people. I think that is the place where people get a little bit edged around the use of the word love in the workplace. You know, HR’s antenna goes up. What are we talking about here when we are talking about love at work? Because it can get mashed up into a set of convoluted meanings that have inferences around things that are taboo. Or, if not taboo, don’t belong at work. It could get you in trouble, right. But that’s limiting the meaning of love. I think that’s where the edge is. You know, can you say to your colleagues or your peers at work I love you? Is that ok? Where’s the edge for that? Can that happen across gender definitions, can it happen not across gender definitions? It really depends on the relationships that you establish at work and I know that there are people who express love in the workplace in meaningful ways, but they develop the relationships in order to do that and they understand what it means. They understand that this is something different from the love relationship that they have with their partner at home. You know, I have colleagues and peers that I say I love you too. 

 

KC – Yeah, me too. It’s so funny, I remember one time my husband overhearing a colleague call and I signed off with ‘lots of love, take care’. And he just looked at me and was like I’ve never spoken like that to my boss before. It was just so funny because I think, for him, that’s just not language. But I think what we’re getting too here is that love and leadership is not necessarily about the language or the words, it’s about a way of being. And it’s about practice. 

 

NE – It’s a way of being. It is a practice. People are gonna have different ways of expressing it and I think it’s important to be clear about meanings and to be clear about boundaries. Using the word love I think is important for people, for some people. But I think there needs to be clarity around the meaning and that’s established in relationships and we do this work so there can be design work, because for some people it’s important to vocalize it. For some people it’s a way of showing it and it may even be expressing this is how I show love. And that might be the last time they actually used the word love. But when people see that behavior they know where it’s coming from. They know what it means and they can design around that in their relationships on their teams and in an organization. So it’s not necessarily about going around and saying I love you all the time, it’s about being clear about what it is you mean, not dancing around it, not avoiding it and inviting love into the emotional field, into the culture in a meaningful way. So that people have an understanding, shared understanding is perhaps more important. 

 

KC – Yeah. I think we’ve allowed culture to define what love means to us, professionally and personally, for far too long. I remember Faith Fuller, founder of this work, this wonderful work, said to me oh, if you love 70% of your partner you’re doing really, really well. She was like 70% of them, you get on with 20% of them and you can’t stand 10% of them – really good odds. And I remember being a bit shocked by that because I remember just sort of hearing the, I guess the cultural idea that you have to love all of the person that you marry. You spend your life with. And actually, I don’t love all of myself, my gosh there are parts of myself that I don’t love, so it’s just unrealistic to expect that. But, to sort of understand that there’s a stretching of the definition, the meaning of love, for me that was really eye opening because then it was like oh, this part can exist and there can still be love there as well. 

 

NE – Yes. And that’s where acceptance comes in. Acceptance is loving. Marginalizing aspects of ourselves is not and that’s work that we all have to do out entire life. But if you can truly say I love 70% of my partner and mean it, and also mean I don’t love that other 30% and I’m gonna struggle with it till death do us part. And I accept you. That’s loving. I think it’s a bold and they can all exist and when we’re clear about that we introduce a marvelous amount of opportunity for relationships, we introduce a magnificent potential around positivity at work and productivity at work. Belongingness at work, inclusion at work. We create an environment where it’s not absent of conflict but it probably goes town and our ability and skillfulness round addressing conflict goes up. I don’t have to like all of you but I can still be loving. 

 

KC – And then, when you really think about that, when it comes to really challenging people or scenarios in our life, I think that’s one of the, at least for me, from The Bible, ‘love thy neighbor’. That doesn’t mean you have to like thy neighbor! And I’m not particularly religious but that’s something that stuck with me, that they have a completely different political view but what is there here that I can align with at that deeper level. How can I be here with love? Even if I don’t particularly like them? 

 

NE – Yeah, love your enemies, you know. It’s, I’m sure we can all think of some people or some leader that we really absolutely do not, will not, agree with. At the same time, if we’re really honest, we might find a fraction of their characteristics that live inside of us. If we’re really honest. You know, a percent or two. And if you can begin to appreciate, if you love yourself or accept yourself it just creates an opening. You know, we talk about dream doors and things like that, and one percent and two percent, and true, it gives you the opportunity to appreciate the humanness of that person that you don’t like 99% of. Right, and so that, this is why I saw love is life affirming. Because once we get into this place of dehumanizing people we’ve lost our love. And Brené Brown talks about that too, once we start to dehumanize we have to push the brake. I was going to say pause but stop. You know, and that’s not easy but that’s the invitation. Love does not dehumanize. Love affirms life. Period. 

 

KC – Yeah, I think we need that on a bumper sticker, for sure. Now I think what I’ve got too from this conversation, above everything else, is that love is almost like a layer cake and there’s that surface level love that we see all over cinema and Instagram, that real showy love, and there’s sort of these deeper levels of love and I’m sure with a long term partner perhaps you transcend even deeper, I think I’m still learning the different levels, but it seems that you can love and, you say, acceptance of parts you don’t love is a love in itself. 

 

NE – Yes. It’s a love in itself. And we can take this even further, our connection to our world, our connection to our environment and all things that live. I was sharing with a friend of mine yesterday or the day before, and you know, I was growing, this is way of course here but I’ll say it anyway, I’m growing basil in my garden, right, and I’m trying to be a green thumb. I’m trying to be kind, I’m trying to be good to my plants and, you know, they’re growing because they want to feed me. They want to give me something. They want to love me and in order for that to happen I have to do certain things like prune, right, and as I do that I feel like wow, I wonder if I’m wounding this plant if I prune too much. I have to approach it lovingly and with appreciation for its existence in our relationship. It’s my job to love and care for this plant because it wants to feed me and if I don’t do it properly I’m going to destroy it. 

 

KC – Pesto pasta’s gonna suck if you don’t do it properly. 

 

NE – Yes, right. So I think we can extend it to how we treat our world, our relationship to our world. Is it life affirming or is it destructive? 

 

KC – Yeah, there was some really interesting research I remember reading about, I think it was a laboratory somewhere and they spoke nice things to the plants and apparently the plants grew better when they were sort of appreciated which is just bizarre. But I wonder whether this conversation is taking us not just too lead with love but live through a lens of love.

 

NE – Yes. When I say lead with love that’s really what I’m saying. What is the lens that you’re wearing, what is the filter that the world, that you’re receiving? If that is love then I believe that just about everything would be different, you know, we would have a more kind, a more just world where everyone can feel like they belong. You know, we would do less damage to our environment, our responses to our mistakes would be different because we’re going to make mistakes and our response to our mistakes would be different. Our learning would be different. 

 

KC – Yeah. What a world. I think that’s the world that everybody wants to be living in and I think everyone’s tired of living, in part, in fear. Fear of not being good enough, fear of so many things. I think the opposite of fear is love, it’s always love. 

 

NE – Indeed. Some folks might hear this and say it’s pie in the sky but I think it’s an un-estimation of how powerful we are, that’s what I think. I think this is practical wisdom. I didn’t make it up. 

 

KC – Yeah. So, let’s go out and be more loving! I guess that’s the call to action here. 

 

NE – Yes indeed. Go out and be more loving. Love is an act and a leadership characteristic and it lives inside relationships. 

 

KC – Well thank you Neil, I’ve loved this conversation, I’ve loved having you on the show, always a delight. 

 

NE – Thank you for having me. 

 

KC – Take care.

 

[Music outro begins 35:35] 

 

KC – A huge thanks to Neil Edwards for that thought provoking conversation around love and leadership. Here are my key takeaways. Words and concepts often get sanitized in the workplace in order to fit a narrative we believe to be good and right. We may see words like collaborate and work together, and whilst love may be embedded in these values, when we sanitize these words we leave something off the table. We’re unconsciously telling our people that love is not appropriate at work. And if relationships matter in the boardroom then love must be a part of that. If I lead with love in a relationship I can chose to respond in a loving way, even during challenge and conflict, and a loving response always affirms life. Being loving, vulnerable and leading with love are courageous and powerful acts, yet they’ve become fearful places for us to show up as at work and as a result we’ve limited our ability to lean into out more creative aspects and ability to connect. If we learn to access more of our range and lean into love as a leadership characteristic we can chose to affirm life in our every interaction. Creating a shared understanding is important when it come to love. It’s not necessarily about going around and saying I love you all the time, it’s about being clear about what you really need and inviting love into the emotional field, into the culture, in a meaningful way. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast and would like to find out more about Neil’s work, do check out Neil’s podcast The Leadership Range which you can find on any of your favorite podcast platforms. For over 18 years, CRR

Global has accompanied leaders, teams, and practitioners on their journey to build stronger

relationships by focusing on the relationship itself, not only the individuals occupying it. This

leads to a community of changemakers around the world. Supported by a global network of

Faculty and Partners, we connect, inspire, and equip change agents to shift systems, one

relationship at a time. We believe Relationship Matters, from humanity to nature, to the

larger whole.

 

[Outro 38:04 – end]