LOVE — Friends Like but Leaders Love

Stop. Do not write off this concept. Everything a leader does begins with a capacity and commitment to love. This is the theme and central core of this book, and there is little doubt the use of that word will rankle the typical leader. But you got past the title of the book, so now you are about to find out how this book uses that term, and why it is the key word in the book.

You must understand that I am not a product of the "flower child culture." I am an early baby boomer who never even came close to being part of the drug- using, peace movement. I was not a protester against the war in Vietnam, and indeed, I was on active duty as a US Army captain during the Vietnam War. I went back to graduate school when the war was unpopular, and I attended classes with the students who turned the country's attention from Vietnam, but a "peacenik" I was not.

If you look at any recount of my leadership and managerial history (www.geraldmczarnecki.com), you will find that I do not even have a "soft" reputation. Throughout most of my professional leadership career, I have been a change agent. Some will call that a euphemism for "tough guy who fires people." Indeed, in some ways, that was true. As a change agent, I spent much of my time fixing broken organizations. Many times, that meant terminating personnel. In short, I have legitimately been seen as a firefighter who did what it took to save organizations and jobs.

I make these points about myself because people who have worked closely with me over the years know that the principles in this chapter guide my every action. The principle of love drives my every leadership act, and I hope that you will read this chapter to understand why I believe that any leader, whose objective is to achieve peak performance and results consistently over the long run, must begin with love.

This chapter leads off the series of key principles reflected in the word LEADERSHIP, but this key idea about love ends up in the title for only one reason. Organizations, no matter how technical, no matter how mechanical, no matter how structured, are comprised of people working together to accomplish a mission or a goal. Take the people away and there is no organization; there are ideas, theories, even dreams, but without people there is nothing but infrastructure, not organization.

Since people make up the essence of organizations, people working together in some type of structure are the essence of how goals are achieved. Science, technology, processes, real estate, machines, natural resources — all are brought together by the humans who "band together" to accomplish a task, series of tasks, and ultimately a goal. The economists define the factors of production as land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. For our purposes, these factors are all combined into an organization that uses those factors to create results and, for the economist, goods and services that will have value in a market system.

Since people are why these resources are brought together, and since people are the glue and the brain of this organizational entity, we are driven to focus on how those people function, how they work together, and how their pooling of efforts creates value to the society. It is this pooling together, this set of human interactions, that makes it possible for organizations to achieve goals. This is not a philosophical treatise; it is a reality. Without people there would be no goals; without people there would be no achievement of the goals.

With that, the role of the leader becomes much clearer. The leader is the one who assembles the people and the various other "factors of production" to achieve the goals or, in our society, to create goods and services. Most economists who added the concept of entrepreneurship to the classic "factors of production" were forced to admit that there needed to be something that organized the factors of land, labor, and capital. We who have led organizations know that the term leader is much more reflective of the thing that ties the factors together.

Love is not used in this chapter to be inflammatory or sensational, although there are some who will charge that is my intent. Love is not just a word being used to carry a revolutionary message. It is the only word that can define the essence of this book. Once again, love is at the heart of all leadership activity, and it is that core concept that is embedded in every chapter of this book.

Love. In order to delve more deeply into this word, we actually need to look into some history, in particular, Greek and Hawaiian history. Let's start with the Greeks. What does the word love mean, especially for us in this context? The idea of love having a place in the workplace may be disorienting, especially if you're thinking of the kind of love the Greeks called "eros," what we know as sexual or erotic love. Obviously, eros is not the appropriate type of love for leaders to practice in the workplace. Indeed, inappropriate sexual relationships with a coworker — or worse, a subordinate — hold the potential for tragedy for all concerned.

The Greeks also used the word philia, which defined another type of love — the love that we have for family. When William Penn first settled in the New World, he named his first and most important city Philadelphia, "the city of brotherly love." The Greek word philia was at the heart of the name of his new city. He dreamed Philadelphia would be a city where people would treat each other as brothers.

The concept of brotherly love, or love of family, is a warm and sensitive type of love. It avoids the erotic or sexual aspects of eros, but goes well beyond friendship. The Greeks, and much of Western civilization, believe the bond between family members, in general, far exceeds that of any other relationship. Most of us would agree that our relationships with our family members are strong and critical elements of our own personal development.

This type of unconditional love has great emotional and spiritual appeal. Unfortunately, leaders cannot be this emotionally tied to those for whom leadership is their duty. In many ways, the unconditional nature of this type of love can be more damaging than helpful to a leader. Leaders of organizations, such as boards of directors, have a responsibility to be judgmental. Also, they...