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New Advocates for the Book Leading with Love in the Workplace

Dr. Shaun A. Sullivan’s new book Head for Leading, Heart for Loving: Leveraging Influence, Compassion, and Relations to Achieve Your Organizational Goals is a groundbreaking work that asks us to think long and hard about how we, as leaders, operate in the workplace, as well as in other organizations and even in our homes. It suggests that at the end of the day, if we lead with compassion and love and remember that relationships are paramount in getting us where we want to go, not only will we be more successful in achieving our goals, but we and all of our followers will experience a more sustainable happiness.

Sullivan advocates servant leadership, which is nothing new, but goes beyond the general concept of servant leadership to delve into the science of how we feel when love fills our hearts, right down to the oxytocin that causes our brains to respond. . Beyond paying lip service to serving leadership, we need to feel it in our hearts. We need to have love and compassion for our co-workers and followers. We need to change our way of thinking, realize that we are all part of a team, and reflect that understanding in the way we treat each other. Sullivan explains, “how a person thinks influences how they will act, and the attributes of these actions impact the kind of leader they will be: moral or immoral, humble or arrogant, honest or dishonest, obedient or undisciplined, pious or profane, peaceful or fickle, eloquent or rude, polite or glib, wise or reckless, and truthful or deceitful”.

Beyond the workplace, Sullivan also asks us to consider how leading from love can change the world. He states that “only the power of unlimited love believed in and lived towards all humanity can defeat the forces of interhuman struggle, and only this unlimited love can prevent the pending extermination of humanity by their own hand in this planet”.

Sullivan also defends the importance of mirroring others. As leaders, we want to create situations where our followers follow our lead. It’s no secret that a poor leader who mistreats followers ends up being hated by them, and not a few of those leaders have lost their minds as a result. But the opposite is also true. Sullivan describes how thoughtful love works. When a leader loves his followers, the followers show love by following the leader. The leader then reflects the love back, praising them, which makes them want to follow the leader more and do more to please him, perhaps fueled by the feel-so-good oxytocin, and consequently, mutual goals are accomplished at will. through this thoughtful love.

Of course, Sullivan is aware that he will have criticism. He states: “Sadly, a brief review of our current corporate world easily reveals that employing a love and leadership modality is not at all common and often not even considered viable. We can only conclude, then, that the reason for this point of view is that people don’t understand love, how to love, and maybe the very idea of ​​love is even terrifying for some”.

I have to agree with Sullivan. British author GK Chesterton once said, “Christianity has been untried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and unproven.” Similarly, how many of us can say that we have really tried to use love in the workplace as a guiding principle or strategy to make the workplace a happier and more productive environment for everyone? We’ve dismissed such ideas as utopian and impractical, but that’s largely because we haven’t taken the time to really understand what love is and how it can be successful. We need to move past superficial representations of love through Facebook memes and rom-com movies and instead come to understand how powerful love is and that it is available for all to exercise.

In Head for Leading, Heart for Loving, Sullivan delves into how we can come to understand what love really is and how to use it most effectively. He has created the H24L2 Model to guide readers through the process of applying love to his leadership. The model can be applied by anyone to improve their personal, family, social and organizational life. It presents macro-relational levels to improve organizational performance to micro-relational and intrapersonal levels to improve work/life balance. Sullivan provides many examples of how this model works.

I greatly admire Sullivan’s vision in writing this book. I agree with him that it is time to try a model of leadership based on love. He believes that to date anyone who has tried to promote such a model has been dismissed as a pop culture writer, but he now presents it academically, having done extensive and serious research on love and leadership. With a Ph.D. in organizational leadership and experience as a public speaker and leadership coach, Sullivan has had extensive time to research and explore the topic of love-based leadership, as well as to apply it in business and organizational settings.

I hope leaders around the world will consider Head for Leading, Heart for Loving. There is nothing to lose other than the few hours it will take to read this book. The benefits, however, will far outweigh any discomfort leaders may feel from changing their leadership philosophy. We have seen how current leadership strategies have often had detrimental effects on the economy and the environment. It’s time to try a new way, one that has so far rarely been tried in earnest.