Lead with love today. Lead with love every day. Not the romantic kind. That’s only one type of love, and the one that has misguided society’s view of whether love has a place in business. It does. Erich Fromm, the author of The Art of Loving, says that “Love is not a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole.” So if leadership is moving people in the direction we’re going, we must lead with love. Leading with love starts with exploring what love means to us, how we reconcile that with who we are, and then bringing that reconciliation to our leadership roles – at work, at home, online, and in our community. Leading with love means finding what our love is and bringing it on a daily basis. No matter how we define our love – our emotions, our language, our sensibility, our energy, our being, our compassion, our soul, our presence, our smile – we can lead with it. Leading with love means spending enough time with people, making eye contact with them, and listening to them with our eyes, ears, and heart to uncover what Barbara Fredrickson calls “micro-moments of connection.” Leading with love is being someone who shows that we want to be with the people we’re already with. Leading with love is walking to the precipice and sharing the vision we have of the relationship with them. Leading with love is building such a strong connection with them that they want to be with us. One of my favorite authors, Krista Tippett, says that “Somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value.” If that’s the case for even some of the people we work with, then we have a duty to lead with love. Lead with love today. Lead with love every day. * * * Recommended Books: Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts Love 2.0 by Barbara Fredrickson Real Love by Sharon Salzberg