Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

In my last post I laid out some thoughts on what leadership must become.  I have spoken at conferences in Virginia and the Midwest in the past year making the case that our antiquated approach to leadership is the underlying challenge of our time.  I do not know that any of my ideas about what leadership must evolve into are new…my beliefs regarding leadership have been heavily influenced by Margaret Wheatley, Peter Block, Parker Palmer, Paulo Freire, Arie De Geus, C. Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, Dee Hock and others.

I received a number of e-mails about this particular post, some positive, some negative but everyone of them was written in response to one tiny bullet point from the post.  Every e-mail was responding to my suggestion that the new leadership “must be informed by love.”  The responses to this particular idea ran the gamut. “Why?”, “How?”, “Absolutely!”, “You are delusional!”, and “Well, isn’t that special?!” all made appearances.

With feedback like that I simply cannot help but say more.

We have, I believe, some truly absurd beliefs about love within the context of leadership…yet another example of our flawed, incomplete and no longer relevant understanding of leadership.  Love gets framed as one of those soft, touchy-feely things that really has nothing to do with real leadership…strong leadership.

This is ridiculous and cowardly. I do not know of anything stronger or more powerful than love.  And I know of few things that require less courage than bossing someone around with the power granted you from an organizational chart.

Organizational hierarchies (which are also antiquated and increasingly problematic in today’s business world) create a lot of false power in an organization that is very dangerous and generally leads to significant waste of valuable intangible assets (trust, communication, diversity, engagement, etc.). 

False power makes it very easy for me as an executive to treat you like an object rather than a human being.  The more that I do that, the less likely it is that you are going to be willing and or able to make your unique contribution to our work.  If I have love for you, I will be compelled to treat you as a human being.  If I do not have love for you, I will likely find justification to treat you as an object.

This is how organizations seal their fate today.  50 years ago you could treat employees like objects.  Command and control worked on an assembly line.  You could ask employees to leave their brains at home, you could treat them like objects and you could keep all information to yourself.  That was then.  Today, the pursuit of competitive advantage is fueled by an organizations ability to tap into the intangible assets that is has access to.

There is a huge difference between the organization or leader that treats employees like real, adult human beings and the organization or leader that treats employees like objects.  It is the difference between love and fear.

This is the difference that makes all the difference today. 

I stand by what I said…the new leadership must be informed by love.  Business today suffers from a hollow and cosmetic understanding of leadership which has had all the love and soul stripped out of it.

Be good to each other.