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Leading with love


Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.
 

Leading with love


Hey Monday Lovers, this week I'm interrupting the series of unlearning, learning and relearning emails for a very important acknowledgement of something we can never have enough of in our lives and the world... L-O-V-E, Love.

You might wonder how such a topic could be useful for leadership, but when you consider the current battle to retain talent, the need to lead with empathy, and the loyalty gained when people know and feel that they matter and are appreciated, it all starts to make sense.

How do you show the people in your world that you appreciate them? Write it down.


Consider: what your love languages are. You can find out here.

Practice: showing your team you appreciate them in the way they respond to being appreciated.

Decide to: identify and note down the love language of the people you interact with the most next to their names somewhere you can refer to easily.


The love languages of leadership

 

Gary Chapman asserts that everyone has a primary love language or two, and after reading his book The Five Love Languages a number of years ago, I began to see leadership as a language of love. According to Chapmans Five Languages, people associate behaviours with affection in five ways:

  • Quality time
  • Physical touch
  • Acts of service
  • Giving and receiving gifts
  • Words of affirmation

In business and work, we're often in long-term relationships with our coworkers, employees, clients and customers, and these relationships can often last for years requiring ongoing effort and commitment to maintain these as healthy and thriving relationships. 

Chapman's original message and intent was a consistent urging towards learning other people's love languages and modifying our own behaviour. By observing more, and tuning into the languages those around us respond to, we can profoundly improve our relationships, team dynamics and collective success.







If we took time to discern the love language of people we work with, how might this affect what people are willing to do for and with us?

Have a love-ly week friends ðŸ’–

Love your Mondays.