What does "love one another" mean anymore?
Leadership and love are two concepts that are not often intermixed. However, love fits with transformational leadership, and it engages empathy with a call to do the right thing. Intersecting business and society requires a dose of love to empower better leadership, moral behavior, and integrative empathy.
Love one another seems to ring mostly hollow in today's world of polarization. If this idea of love still exists, it seems to have become love someone precisely like me and all others be damned. The remnants of the last president remain, who brought out the worst in others. Leaders who engage in divisions create a divisive empathy or the idea that we can only care for those who believe what we believe or feel what we feel. This is not loving one another.
Do love and leadership mix?
Love and leadership seem like an odd combination. However, it may be more uncomfortable than peculiar. Love is often thought of as personal, emotional, or religious. Yet love is embedded in transformational leadership concepts.
In the late 1970s, James MacGregor Burns defined transformational leadership as a new focus area. Today, many embrace being transformational; however, they may not grasp what it calls on them to do.
Transformational leaders strive to tap into the higher needs of followers – engaging the whole person – by building a mutual relationship to convert followers into leaders and convert leaders into moral agents. While Burns does not use the word love, it would be impossible to know a whole person without it.
Empathy may be a more comfortable term, but it takes effort to know what loving another person means while bringing out the best in them. Doing so becomes vital when eliciting the most exemplary behaviors from leaders and followers, especially if we want to have followers become leaders and leaders become moral agents.
Connecting love to leadership
Agape is a form of love. It intentionally promotes well-being, especially when an individual or group wishes adverse outcomes upon others. Promoting well-being happens through leading with humility, self-sacrifice, emotional control, and impartiality.
Agape love also promotes moral behavior within leaders because a responsibility exists to promote another's well-being.
Instilling moral behavior requires a sense of situational ethics, which is making ethical choices within the context of the entire situation. Situational ethics engages four working principles:
1. Pragmatism - actions that lead to loving consequences
2. Relativism - responding based on a unique situation
3. Positivism - justification for an ethical decision
4. Personalism - put people before the law
Morality is achieved when an individual does the right thing regardless of how they view those involved. It is practical love, especially since it removes emotion and focuses on the circumstances of the challenge or issue.
A result of these concepts is pursuing the well-being of others, no matter who they are, and doing the right things in a situation and doing so with empathy. When leaders do these things, they have connected their leadership to love (and vice versa).
Making empathy real (and, consequently, love)
While love is not deliberated often in leadership circles, empathy certainly has been. Just as "love one another" seems hollow today, empathy does too. Maybe we have over-discussed it. Still, empathy in action is much better than empathy in words.
Leading with empathy in action requires two shifts.
The first shift is to empathetic diversity. Empathy given to those like us is one-dimensional empathy. Is it reasonable to consider others like us? Yes, but it is like walking through a wading pool. We need to go deeper and truly engage empathetic diversity. We need to understand the impacts on those unlike us and who are deeply affected by defined actions.
The second shift is integrative empathy. We need to position ourselves within intersections of differing policies and then listen intentionally. We need to understand another's feelings and situation and then imagine them as if we were them. It is a challenge to remove our own biases, preconceptions, feelings and experiences. However, when done thoroughly, it is transformational in resolving issues and speaking about a problem or situation.
Re-imagining empathy is too cliché. We need to revitalize empathy by how we act with empathy. We need to place "love one another" into action.
Can we love one another?
The answer is unclear. Achieving the ideal of loving one another requires more profound empathy in action. It also requires leaders willing to engage agape love with confidence in leading change and developing others. We need a better leadership standard than what we see by leaders who put others at risk in terms of their well-being. Accountability to diverse and integrative empathy standards is required. As citizens and team members, we need to rise to the challenge, too.
Are you ready to love one another by how you lead?
References
Carvalho, Fallan Kirby; Mulla, Zubin R. Power of love (AGAPE) in leadership: A theoretical model and research agenda. South Asian Journal of Management; New Delhi Vol. 27, Iss. 4, (Oct-Dec 2020): 96-120.
Miller, M. (2006). Transforming leadership: What does love have to do with it? Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies, 23(2), 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/026537880602300205