Blog – Welcome to Level 7 Leadership

Live Inspired … Love Inspired … All Year Long

I was recently struck by the idea of inspiration. Of course I had to look it up and ponder it a bit further. Building on Webster’s definition, I now define inspiration as that which animates and enlivens me … to the point of action. It’s a thought, an encounter … a personal experience … that encourages me and emboldens me to something good … and perhaps to something amazing.

Inspiration brings with it a sense of something better…something greater, for me and perhaps for others. An interesting dynamic of true inspiration, though, is that it always calls for something better FROM me. That something isn’t necessarily mystical … and its not something completely foreign. Rather it emanates from what’s already resident within. It draws from who I am. It calls me to live from a deeper place. It calls me to live beyond the limitations I put on myself. Inspiration calls me to take a risk … to put my true self out there … to live into my design and desires for life.

So what inspires us? Often it arises from the best of a creative work or effort, like a song, a speech, a play, musical, a sunrise or simply the words of a friend. Or it may come from the depth of a difficult experience like a disease, a job loss or a break-up. Whatever its source, inspiration motivates us to pursue something better of ourselves, for ourselves and for others. It stirs and encourages us (fills us with courage) to change … and to act … often differently than we have in the past.

I have to chuckle at some of the places from which we …well, or at least from where I, draw inspiration. I recently watched the movie Scrooged. In it, Bill Murray’s character, Frank Cross, lives through a relatively current day experience of Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carrol, as he’s visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The ghosts are brought to him to shake him from his calloused, self-seeking approach to life, business, relationships, money … well, everything. In essence, the ghosts come to inspire him to live better …to live differently. And … in true Dickens’ (and Hollywood) form, Frank Cross got the message. He was inspired to change. And, once he recognized his need to change, he sought to inspire others with these words …

“It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night when we all act a little nicer. We smile a little easier. We share a little more. For a couple of hours we are the people we always hoped we would be. It’s really a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve. You have to take a chance and get involved. … And if you give, then it can happen, the miracle can happen to you. Everybody’s gotta have this miracle! … You won’t say, ‘Christmas is once a year and it’s a fraud.’ It’s not! It can happen every day! You’ve just got to want that feeling! You’ll want it every day! It can happen to you!” – Excerpts from Scrooged movie featuring Bill Murray, Written by Mitch Glazer & Michael O’Donoghue. Script via Drew’s Script-O-Rama

Christmas season tends to be a time where we do act a little nicer and do a much better job of loving the rest of humanity around us. What is it about Christmas that makes us recognize our bond with each other …with the simplicity of respect, grace … and love? What is it that compels us to get out of our comfort zones to interact with others and to show a bit more kindness? What is it about Christmas that inspires us to be a better version of ourselves? (I have my answers … but what are yours?)

As Frank Cross suggests, what prevents us from living beyond the moments of this day or this season to take respect, grace, kindness and love along with us every day? My hope for you this Christmas and New Year’s season is that you would experience the inspiration to do something bigger … something better … for just one person in your sphere of influence. Take one person, one moment, just one act, and live inspired for that one individual for that one moment in time. Give them the gift of you living fully into yourself … and … in turn, give yourself the gift of living fully into yourself.

Ultimately … my hope and prayer is that regardless of the day of year it is, you find yourself seeking that opportunity to live inspired. May you live inspired … and through your living inspired, may you give others the gift of you…and the gift of respect, kindness, grace and love.

Culture

Bad ‘Love’ …. Corporate ‘Love’

Our own individual experiences with love in a business context, have left each of us a bit jaded about love as a life and leadership principle. We’ve all been disappointed by others’ proclaiming they ‘love’ us while delivering something far less than love to us.

Over time, leaders (and organizations) have become increasingly aware that strong emotional connections with constituents can lead to improved financial opportunities and performance.⁽¹⁾ With this realization comes an increasing pursuit of what I’ll refer to as ‘corporate love’. This version of love is often handed to the marketing and advertising department as a charge or end necessary to drive customer engagement and to deepen customer relationships. And once in the marketers hands, love becomes a tool to derive results in the corporate model of love, something like this:

Features + Emotional Significance = Emotional Attachment (i.e., ‘love’).

This mindset is commonly referred to as ‘positioning’. It incorporates using product design and marketing techniques to create a ‘position’ of significance for a product (or brand) in the minds and hearts of consumers.

Recognizing the lift available to brands that customers love, some companies have gone to great extents to try to position customer love with their products. KFC, Jeep and McDonalds all created ads with an appeal towards the experience of love, tied directly or indirectly to their products. You probably don’t even recall these ads, as the campaigns were relatively short-lived, suggesting their lack of success in creating their desired outcomes … associating their brands with ‘love’.

How about Coke and Subaru, though? Think of how we felt about the idea of grabbing a Coke and a smile, or helping the world by sharing a Coke. And Subaru just puts it right out there in their tag line … ‘Love, it’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru’. While these ads have been relatively effective, I’d argue that the ads aren’t much more than simply nice slogans. While consumers may feel a sense of warmth and love from the brands, do Coke and Suburu truly deliver on the experience of love that they promise to consumers?

I’d like to take you back to Apple’s 2014 Christmas ad, referred to many as ‘The Song’. A young girl took a love song recorded by her grandmother and used her Apple devices to record the original song and dub in her own voice to create a duet. She then put the final recording on an I-pod and left it on the kitchen table with a picture as a gift for her grandmother to start her day. If you’re like me, you can recall that add with considerable clarity, and if not specific mental clarity, at least with a strong degree of emotional clarity. It was an amazingly powerful ad geared at selling Apple’s products through the experience of sharing music and our love with others. https://youtu.be/N2ubgxn8aQ8

While the ad itself was powerful, what Apple did as an organization in support of the ideas in the ad was where the ad’s true value resided. Apple aligned their organization to create a consistent experience for consumers … from product design, to manufacturing, to their stores and sales approach. The evidence is there to suggest that Apple not only wanted to create a product and experience of value for their consumers, but they wanted to value their consumers in how they did what they did. I can’t say whether Apple has really continued to live up to the standard of love, and few companies do, but those that do … give themselves an opportunity to thrive. This type of approach, where an entire organization is aligned on delivering love to constituents, is the only way to truly create loving relationships with consumers. Why? Because love doesn’t come from manipulation, and it isn’t something that can simply be taken from others. Instead, it must first be given (demonstrated).

While typical ‘corporate love’ is built on the premise of taking something from consumers, L2 is built on demonstrating love to constituents first. Our model for L2 is:

TRUST + EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE = LOVE

In this equation, product features and marketing simply become one small piece of the process of creating trust and emotional significance with constituents. Every person and process must demonstrate value to others, and the entire organization must understand that strong relationships don’t happen without trust. Organizations must then deliver love first … before requesting love in return. That is the true beginning of love (L2) … which when delivered to others, sets the stage for exceptional results.

Love Matters! Join the revolution of L2®!

L2 is a registered trademark. Used with the permission of the John Maxwell Company

Fleming, J.H., Harter, J. K. (2009) The Next Discipline – Applying Behavioral Economics to Drive Growth and Profitability, The Gallup Organization, gallup.com

Culture

Trust … The Currency of Highly Effective Leaders

Why is love … in the context of valuing others as L2 … so impactful? Think about if for a minute. Think about the last time you felt someone else really treated you as valuable … or special. How did it make you feel about yourself? How did you feel toward that person? In the answer to this question, I believe, is a key to the effectiveness and impact of love. Beneath the appreciation, undergirding the new found sense of connection toward this person who graced you with ‘love’ … is what lies at the bedrock of all great, strong relationships. The result of love … of valuing others … is the creation of trust.

Trust is the currency of great leadership. In this sense, we can think of trust as a medium of exchange for relationships. Like other assets, trust has value and it’s typically acquired with a cost, whether it’s time, intention, sacrifice or effort. However, unlike other assets, real trust isn’t something that can be bought from others, rather (as EF Hutton used to say), “it’s earned”. It is our words and actions that help us earn, or lose trust with others.

To grasp the importance and pervasiveness of this idea of trust, let me personalize it for a minute. Let me ask, what happens when you have to work on a critical project with a colleague you don’t trust? Or what is your relationship like when you don’t trust a spouse, a politician, a repair person or a salesman? Consider what that relationship feels like. What ideas come to mind? Perhaps you feel guarded, frustrated, fragile or even aggressive … at best.

Consider the dynamics of these potentially ‘strained’ relationships. When we don’t trust, we have considerable apprehension about believing what the other person is telling us, whether it be the veracity or truth of what they are telling, or our belief that they may simply be serving their own interests (at our expense). Invariably when we don’t trust the other person in a situation or relationship, we pull back and we enter into a mode of protection. The end result is that we will find ourselves shutting off the words or tuning-out the person the other person. We may listen, but we cease to ‘hear’ or truly value much of what’s said.

On the other hand, consider the best teams, organizations and relationships that you’ve ever experienced. What does trust look like there? Most likely, people are engaged, they feel valued and they don’t feel the need to protect themselves or hold back. Instead, people are open and share ideas, experiences and thoughts. Why? Because it’s safe to do so … and that sharing promotes a feeling of belonging, a sense of acceptance, freedom … and ultimately trust.

Trust … building trust … is a central tenant of having any effective team, whether in business, sports, a church, a family, a rock band or a community project. Where you have trust, you can have the prospects for a highly effective team. Yet, where there is a lack of trust, you may have a team in name, but you will also find dysfunction running through the very fibers of interactions, relationships and performance.

Because trust is central to great teams, great leaders pursue and manage trust as if it’s a value-creating resource.

Great leaders realize trust allows everything to work better. To a large degree, it’s the level of trust that a leader creates with his or her leadership team, employees, customers, vendors, investors and other constituents that will determine the level of greatness an organization will achieve. Money and contracts may bind transactions, but it’s trust that creates and binds relationships … and true partnerships … which is ultimately what creates sustaining value.

Research from the Kenexa High Performance Institute, Edelman, Gallup and others all point to the influence of trust on customer and employee engagement, as well as the health of relationships with vendors, investors and local communities. The punchline of the data indicates as trust increases, engagement levels increase and firm performance improves. ^{(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)}

Building trust takes great effort and intention, and at times it flies in the face of what’s expedient or what seems to serve us best in the moment. But I encourage and challenge you to treat it (trust) like a highly valued asset. Pursue it … invest in it … don’t squander it.

We all have a ‘trust’ account. How’s the balance in your “trust” account? Are you valuing others appropriately? Are you increasing the value of your ‘trust’ account with those around you?

Join the revolution of L2®!

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2011/2012 Kenexa High Performance Institute Worktrends ^TM Report, Trust Matters New Links to Employee Retention & Well-Being (2011), kphi.com
2012, 2013 & 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer Executive Summary (2012-14), Edelman Berland, edelman.com
Fleming, J.H., Harter, J. K. (2009) The Next Discipline – Applying Behavioral Economics to Drive Growth and Profitability, The Gallup Organization, gallup.com
Sheth, J, Sisodia, R, Wolfe, D. (2007) Firms of Endearment, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing,
Elton, C, Gostick, A (2012) All In, New York, NY: Free Press
2012 Global Workforce Study, Engagement at Risk: Driving Strong Performance in a Volatile Global Environment (2012) Towers Watson, towerswatson.com
Perry, Richard (2016) The Missing Element, Createspace, (pgs 31-34, references in bold)

Excerpt from this post are from The Missing Element, available here.

L2® is a registered trademark (LearnLead – L2) of the John Maxell Company and is used with permission.

Culture

It’s Just Business … No, It’s Something Much More

In a prior blog, I defined love as L2 (valuing others) and presented the idea of love/L2 as a central principle to highly effective leadership. But, I imagine some of you may be trying to reconcile this idea with the common belief that business decisions need to be made outside of any context of love. We’re all taught, “it’s just business” aren’t we? Under this premise decisions are “never personal” and are always “practical”, “based on logic” and “based on the numbers”. The concept sounds totally rational and desirable. The problem, though, is that the mantra is at best a partial truth, and therefore, it’s not THE whole truth. There is a far better way to highly effective decisions and performance …

Far too many leaders hide behind this façade of ‘business’ as if it were a free pass for bad behavior. Like many life and leadership principles, the axiom of ‘it’s just business’ is a convenient oversimplification. Beware of the mindset, as embedded at its foundation is a dehumanization of others, a rationalization to take short-cuts and even a justification of behavior that goes against conscience. The mindset behind “anything goes” in business (or life) is a cunning rationalization that suggests we don’t need to (and can’t) be held accountable for how our decisions impact others. How convenient. And really … how shallow.

There are obviously hard decisions that leaders must make and these decisions typically require information, analysis, logic, counsel and wisdom. (My entire corporate career has been about profitability analysis, negotiations and improving performance, in some form or fashion, and often by following the numbers.) I would never advise someone to make decisions without considering information, facts and analysis, nor would I ever say improvement isn’t a goal that should be aggressively pursued. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no reason why leaders and organizations can’t deal with tough situations in love.

Love should influence not only how we think, but it must influence how we carry out our ‘difficult’ decisions. For a leader to act as anything less than humane is less than human. As leaders, we must remedy our misguided view that business is somehow distinct and separate from the balance of human relationships and existence. As long as organizations are made up of people, they will operate within the context and principles of human relationships. And, as a leader … of people … the actions we take will ALWAYS affect … people.

I realize many still see love as weak. Many still ‘feel’ love is inconsistent with making tough decisions, however I believe it is essential to not only making sound decisions, but to being a highly effective leader.

Consider what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has to say about love? He said, ‘Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.’ I think you’d be hard pressed to characterize Dr. King or his leadership style as weak, in any manner, as he held a proper tension and perspective of power AND love. He understood that leadership requires a degree of power and confidence, yet leading without love is actually ‘reckless and abusive’. ⁽¹⁾

Do you know what I believe is weak? Consider for a moment the multitude of people and leaders acting out of self-interest. The press is full of them … CEOs, college football coaches, baseball players, investment managers, politicians, professors … the list goes on and on. They do things with aggression and sometimes reckless abandon in pursuit of their own self-interest (which often happens to be motivated by financial gain). Is that the strength you’re looking for in a successful leader? Really? A person doesn’t have to be strong to let pride or an inflated ego let him or her take advantage of others. It only takes being shallow enough to pursue one’s own interests above everyone else’s. That’s clearly something we’re all capable of doing …but it’s born from weakness, not strength. And this, self-centered pursuit masquerading as strength, is supposed to be our model and motivation for leadership and greatness … self-interest? Really?

Love, on the other hand as L2 requires an inner strength that goes beyond self-interest. Love requires sacrifice and real strength! We’re all capable of love (as L2), but we may need to remove a few social, cultural and personal barriers to fully live into it. This is what I want to encourage all of us to do! Lean in to love! Lean into L2!

Join the revolution of L2!

Please share this post and join the Level 7 Facebook page.

Manby, Joel K. (2012) Love Works, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan

Excerpts in bold are from The Missing Element, available here.

L2® is a registered trademark (LearnLead – L2) of the John Maxell Company and is used with permission.

Culture

Is It Really Love?

I want to deal with the elephant I brought into the room … this idea of love …. as a leadership principle.

Can love really be a leadership principle? Clearly love isn’t something that’s discussed, practiced or proclaimed in our leadership circles, whether we consider MBA schools, the Wall Street Journal or the halls of the Fortune 500. Go ahead. Tell me the last time love was a point of meaningful conversation in your organization? Or tell me, when was the last time you heard someone proclaim the value of love to your organization’s success? (If you have heard this at your organization, you’re one of the few … embrace it!)?

Few organizations and leaders have yet adopted the tenants of loving leadership (as we’ll define soon). And, if I had to guess, if I were to mention love as a leadership principle to most executives, they’d quickly dismiss the idea as a waste of time. Given the way we define and use the word love these days, I’m not sure I’d blame them. So … let’s take a closer look at this word … love.

Over time, our concept of love has become incredibly broad and nuanced. Love has evolved from a word that tended to depict a bond with another person, to an emotional expression about someone near and dear to us … and the concept seemed to proliferate from there. The most obvious may be how love has been romanticized … and then over time, sexualized. Love from this romantic context clearly has no meaningful connection to love as a leadership principle.

If we weren’t confused enough about the term ‘love’ already, consider its use as its evolved to now include our emotional feeling towards things we strongly like. We love our food, clothes, cars, houses, songs, movies, colors … Really? … as if one could actually ‘love’ an inanimate object. Yet, each of these ideas is now a valid use of the word love based on our cultural contexts.

Clearly, love’s a fractured concept. For most organizations, it’s been relegated to the marketing and advertising departments as simply an emotional force to be exploited. Based on our social and personal definitions of love, it has little meaningful value for most leaders and organizations.

This topic of love as a leadership principle is so problematic that most leadership authors and speakers dare not speak of love. As a community, business leaders and authors have actually gone to great lengths to avoid the use of the word ‘love’, instead referring to concepts such as loyalty, trust, benevolence and even endearment to convey the ideals of love. We’ve even coined a number of business terms and concepts that are relevant, but I’d consider them to be “love-light” ideas, such as customer satisfaction and employee engagement. (I’ll say more on that another day.)

In a great article on behavioral economics , Gallup declared the significance of emotional connections to driving exceptional performance. They touched on many aspects of love, yet fell short of proclaiming the veracity of love itself. And the book Firms of Endearment (another highly recommended read) openly addresses dynamics of love in organizations without identifying love as the true underlying principle and source of powerful ‘endearing’ organizations’ results.

In order to have a meaningful conversation about love as a leadership principle, we need to establish a definition that we can align on and build upon. After extensive research, discussion and contemplation, the type of love that impacts leadership (and results) is a love that “values others”. This type of love places a high value on others by thinking, speaking and acting in a manner that demonstrates the inherent value of others. Going forward, rather than using the word love to convey this idea of valuing others, I want to use a new term for Loving Leadership … which I simply refer to as L2®.

Herein is the incredible power of love, as L2. By creating value for others, we actually create value for our organizations, communities, employees, customers … and even ourselves. This probably deserves its own blog, but for now, just pause and think about it for a moment. When a company creates a product and experience that has great value for you, and they demonstrate to you that you are valuable to them … you in turn will likely value that company (trust, appreciate, be loyal to, frequently purchase, share likes, recommend, etc…). In this sense, L2 – valuing others, is an incredibly unifying principle, bringing alignment to everything we do … marketing, employee remproduct development, customer service, employee relations … and ultimately how we lead.

I’m convinced life is best experienced and best lived when we demonstrate the value of others … by creating value for others.

I invite you to join in. Let’s start something ! (Please share this post)

L2® is a registered trademark (LearnLead – L2) of the John Maxell Company and is used with permission.

Level 7

My Driving Motivation

Welcome!

As I kick off this new blog series, I want to take a moment and share with you why I’ve chosen to dedicate a blog and books (and a life) to the idea of love and loving leadership.

I’m chuckling inside, as I’ve rewritten this next part a zillion times. I realize nobody wants to read something that sounds like a cover letter … boring! So, bear with me as I try to boil it down to this … years ago, I got an MBA and set out in pursuit of success in the corporate world. I cut my teeth as a financial analyst at a large consumer products company, and then went into strategic planning at a major financial institution, and eventual became a Division Finance Officer for a couple of billion dollar organizations.

I’d received a number of awards and promotions along the way, signifying some level of success. Yet one day I found myself in my boss’s office having what felt like an ironic, but very thought-provoking conversation.

I’d just spent eighteen months building and leading a highly successful support organization. Our team successfully completed over 75 initiatives targeted at improving organizational effectiveness for an industry-leading business. Our team had great relationships across the organization and three of my team of 16 received an award given to only the top 1% of the entire company. That’s right! Almost 20% of the team received the top award.

So the conversation with my boss was about to be fantastic, and in fact potentially epic, right? Haha Well … epic it was! Despite all the team had accomplished, the conversation meandered to the point my boss said, “Rich, I need more of a bulldog in this role.” Now note, I highly respected this leader and still do (and what’s really funny, he doesn’t remember telling me that). But the words hit me like a ton of bricks.

It took some time to digest what had happened, but eventually those words fueled an epiphany. I began to realize, this boss, and for that matter almost all of my previous ‘bosses’ and leaders, had no idea how or why I did what I did. They generally loved and benefited from my results, but they didn’t understand what TRULY motivated me. It seemed not only did they not understand, but if they got close enough to see, what I did just didn’t ‘look right’ and didn’t fit the typical corporate leadership model. What was perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that I really didn’t understand why or how I did what I did either.

Clearly, I wasn’t the ‘typical’ corporate leader. There really was something different about my leadership approach and I needed to understand what it was. So, I set out on a quest to identify what was so ‘different’ about my leadership style to determine what I needed to do, or not do, to move up the executive ranks. And … after much reading, study, reflection and soul searching what did I discover? I found that my motivation and leadership approach was centered on … brace for it … love.

Could it be? I questioned it. Could love really be the difference? I’m all about strategy, profitability, financial acumen and getting results. Could I really be motivated by love and could it really work in leadership? Could love really help create strong relationships, high performance teams, outstanding results and great organizations?

I must say, the more I’ve read and studied about culture, leadership, customer engagement and human dynamics … and reflected on my own experience and the examples of many other leaders (both good and bad ) … the more I’ve become convinced that Love …

really IS a central leadership principle
ABSOLUTELY CAN lead to exceptional performance and
is THE missing element for many leaders and organizations.

And now, THIS is what truly compels me. THIS is what motivates me … to:

help others become aware of love’s influence
encourage others in their pursuit of leading in love
impact teams, organizations and performance through love
live love

I hope this blog series can help encourage and inspire you to lead … and live … in love.

Join me … let’s start something … let’s change the world … through love.