How Your Internal Leadership Creates a Culture of Love

The root cause of your employee behavior problems is a hard pill for the ego to swallow, but rising to meet the challenge feels So. Damn. Good.

If we look at other people as the problem, leadership feels easy, because the heaviest challenges and responsibility is offloaded to your team.

If we can honestly take the time to recognize our team is doing their best, we begin to see it’s we, as leaders, who have the most growing to do, and we get the option to hold ourselves accountable for being the best leader we can be to expand our potential, both ours and our employee’s.

When we really begin to see ourselves truly — with all our accumulated mental and emotional baggage from our childhood, our family stories, our romantic relationships, even the messages written into us from our cultural programming — we’ll find it a lot harder to judge our employees, who have lived through similar battle stories and wounds themselves, and unknowingly carry their own garbage pile with them to work each day.

When we can see life’s challenges as meant to bring us closer to loving people in all their brokenness, in all their struggle, in all their darkness and pain, we can finally make the best use of the most challenging people and situations. Seen rightly, we understand that people who are suffering teach us how to overcome our own suffering.

As leaders, we need to look more closely at our inner world to identify the patterns we carry which continue to affect our thinking, hold us away from living in kindness and service, and stopping us from seeing and honoring the work our people are doing.

When we see ourselves truly, we will become humbled by, the heavy weight our employees have been carrying for us, blaming our team members, our corporate support system, for having problems, frustrations and difficulties which they can’t solve themselves. We will be free to use our power in the right way, which is to take care of their needs without blame, shame, criticism, judgement, or taking their problems personally as a negative reflection of us.

To the self-aware leader, employee frustrations are portals of opportunity, clues to follow to see where our influence, rightly used, can help make people’s lives better.

When we see our unconscious reactions to others’ needs, our judgement, our charged emotion, and our negative thought patterns, and consciously uproot them with a mindset of Love, we serve heart healing and trust to our team, we turn complaints into beautiful innovation, and we give our people the care and support they need to do their jobs better, and increase their capacity to support our cause in better, more efficient ways..

And, if our caring is authentic and personal, that same Love and care we give to them is returned to us again, with interest attached.

Exercise:

“On Monday morning, I’d like you to go to work, talk to 10 different people in your organization — in person or online — and ask them this question: ‘What don’t we talk about around here that we really should be talking about?’“

Further Reading:

3 Ways to Create a Work Culture That Brings Out the Best in People,
By TED Ideas