Love orients our intentions to a place of goodwill for others and being fully present for what they might need or want from the experience.  Love’s orientation opens the space, safely allowing them to discover and deepen their capacity to change and learn, even during the most difficult of conversations.

I am faced with a difficult decision – what would love do? I am in conflict with another person – what would love do? I’ll be having a difficult conversation with an employee today – what would love do? I want to coach my team to take more initiative – what would love do?

Leading by love gives us opportunity to grow, as well. It helps enhance and deepen our leadership presence. When our orientation is focused keenly on the other person – shifting our perspective from ourselves and our egos – we learn from another’s perspective and by how they come to conclusions. Love’s leading deepens the quality of the questions we ask and the guidance we provide. It changes us just as much as it changes them.

Today is Valentine’s Day, a day dedicated to love. What opportunities do we have to let love lead the conversations we will be having? What choices will you make?

This came from one of my client leaders during an intake session.

As I dug a bit deeper I learned that the team was formed as a result of a merger — in 2002! — and, since then, the environment has been all Hatfields and McCoys:  sabotaging successes, gunny-sacking emotions and information, attacking each others’ ideas, stone-faced body language in meetings, non-existent trust. The group’s reputation was severely damaged; many of their internal customers avoided having conversations with them unless absolutely necessary.

So, what to do?

Questions that started to emerge for me were:  What was their past or current leader’s responsibility in all this? How was this allowed to go on for so long? I could only imagine how living and working in this environment was somatically impacting the team members.  What were they feeling emotionally? I imagined each team member’s drive into work each morning. What was that like?

The senior leader of the function is at the point of letting people go — removing the blight and starting over.  I can’t say that I disagree. There’s a saying that goes, “You can quit, or you can stay. But you can’t quit AND stay.” It felt to me like the team had quit a long time ago and had set up camp in an environment of emotional turmoil, distrust and negative thought.

But, wait. Other questions, other possibilities to explore…

Might they be willing to pull up stakes and move out of that environment given the chance? What if they focused on something else other than their “normal”? They were obviously quite comfortable living in dysfunction. At this point, that was normal for them. Perhaps they couldn’t see beyond their cloud of dysfunction to see another way of being. Was there nothing good in what they did? Ever??  Where was strength in the team? Strength must show up somewhere. I mean, they delivered – even as painful as it was, their customers did get their products.

Orem, Binkert, and Clancy tell us in their book, “Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change”,  (a coaching principle based on the theory of appreciative inquiry), that emotions, both positive and negative, are contagious.  When humans are able to shift their focus from the negative to the positive, appreciating the strengths in themselves and those around them, the emotion of joy begins to grow and break through that which was previously dark and impassable. By focusing on appreciation for what is strong and good, the body becomes warmed and open to others rather than gripped in the adrenaline rush of “fight or flight”.

The authors purport that, when humans bear witness to appreciation and positive emotions, they mimic that emotion. Clearly the opposite is also true. Could this team be in a continuous loop of self-reinforcing emotional habits?

Perhaps a “Both-And” strategy would work here, where the leader, with full support from the larger organization, stands before the group and declares an end to what was. Then, an invitation to forgive each other and, for those who can’t or won’t sign up for that, guidance and encouragement to explore other opportunities. For those who are willing to forgive themselves and each other and embrace a new way of seeing their team members, we would develop a plan focusing on the remaining team members’ strengths and appreciations.

One of the appreciative inquiry principles is:  What people focus on becomes their reality.  Taking the first step in helping this team adjust their focus in a new way may be a way to help them begin to create a new reality for themselves.

I’ll keep you posted.

I recently crossed off one of my “bucket list” items and spent time at the Heifer Ranch in Arkansas learning about beekeeping. Everything I knew about bees and beekeeping up to now came strictly from books or documentaries. No hands-on experience. So I heeded the nagging nudge and gave it a try.

Suffice it to say, I’m hooked.

Sue Hubell tells us in her book, “A Book of Bees, And How to Keep Them”, “The end of one honey season is the start of the next, and autumn is a good time to start with bees…Summer’s end is also the new beginning of a new cycle for bees. It is then that they prepare for the winter ahead, and their preparations, along the help a beekeeper can give them, determine how good the next season will be.”

I learned a lot that week – how to calm the bees, extract honey, build and repair supers – all good, practical activities. The most impactful for me, though, was what I learned by observing the master beekeeper, Chuck Crimmins, as he lovingly cared for his bees.

It’s said that bees learn to recognize their beekeeper’s voice and the rhythm of his or her movements. Bees will react, either aggressively or calmly, depending on what is happening around them. Vibrations unnerve them. They can sense apprehension and smell fear.

Watching Chuck’s quiet and gentle movements was like watching a movie clip in slow motion. Bending to rest his ear on the side of the hive, he listens for the buzzing hum. Are the bees active? Quiet? He slowly removes the hive cover, gently pulling out each frame, holding them up to the sunlight to check the bees’ health, and tenderly uses his breath to blow them aside to look for the queen. Bees are landing lightly on his arms, flying around him – he works the bees all the while without wearing gloves! It was inspiring to watch Chuck’s quiet and slow approach how, as beekeeper, his role as helper, he held and cared for the space where the bees calmly work their magic.

Reflecting on Hubbell’s words and spending time with Chuck that week made me think about leadership and how we leaders can often get it wrong. We think our teams need us more than they actually do. We lean into our position, our expert-ness, our thinking that our way is best. We over-care and overbear, fill voids with our voices and opinions, stomp heavily on ideas outside our own – whatever it is, we get in the way of possibility and the creative magic that our teams can create.

Beekeeper-like leadership – this is a notion that I’d like to ponder a bit more. What opportunities do we have to lead our teams like a beekeeper tends to his bees? What are the ways we might lightly step in when needed, gently check-in to assess health, and then confidently assume that our teams are competent to learn from mistakes, perform and deliver? As Susan Scott talks about in “Fierce Leadership” – instead of holding them accountable, hold them able!” How big a shift would that be?

Honeybees don’t really need our help; they’ve been collecting pollen and making honey for thousands of years. Perhaps the people we lead may know intuitively how to work in ways that we can only imagine.