Love: The Leadership Secret
Want employees to love you? Love them first, or at least fake it.
A teacher friend of mine told me a story. She was giving a tour of her school to new teachers in the district, and one of the new teachers asked for advice on how to connect with the kids.
“Tell them you love them and that you’re not going anywhere.”
They worked in a tough part of town in a large metropolitan district. Many of the children had been abandoned by one or sometimes both parents, they were almost universally poor, and they had no stability. For some of them, the school provided the only structure in their lives.
The kids needed someone to care about them and they needed stability. Your employees, hopefully, have enough personal stability, but they still need someone to care about them. Maybe your boss in the big faceless corporation can’t get you a raise, but did they try in a meaningful way?
A few years after my conversation with the teacher, I attended a conference for the Air Force. The leader of my career field, a one-star general, crystallized it for me. I expected a typical guest speaker lecture full of bland pablum and buzzwords. Instead, I had an epiphany from his lead-off sentence. He didn’t introduce himself again and he…
