Great Leaders Have No Rules

by Kevin Kruse

  SALES PROFESSIONAL: As a sales professional do you need your clients to like you? Many go into sales because they like people, they’re relators, and they thrive on social interactions. And it’s true, all else being equal, people would rather buy from people they like. But what about the tough conversations? Are you too quick to drop your price just to keep the client happy? Are you slow to ask for a change order even though the client clearly changed the specs? Realize you are a sales professional, not an order taker. Your first loyalty is to your company. Think about your best clients. Do you need to rein them in in any way? Do you need to reestablish what defines a win-win relationship?

  SPORTS COACH: In my experience most coaches err on the side of the screaming intimidator, but I’ve had a few who seemed to want to be everyone’s friend. Are you reluctant to address the bad behavior of your star players? Are you sure you’re choosing the starting lineup based on skill and not on favoritism? Use the beginning of each season to have the players come up with behavior standards for the year. With your team captains, enforce those standards regardless of how you feel personally about your players.

  MILITARY OFFICER: I’ve long been curious about friendship and leadership in the military. I know that soldiers, sailors, and marines who serve together often form bonds that are more like family than even friendship. Yet what happens when one “brother” gets promoted and the other doesn’t? I reached out to my friend, retired US Marine Corps colonel John Boggs, to give me insights. He said, “The key is the mutual respect. The new junior, if you will, is very conscious of the new relationship and maintains respect for the rank as well as respect for the friendship. The new senior does the same. The ‘first name’ relationship is put in its place for the proper time and place. I once had to severely chastise a friend who was my junior. Once the day was done, it was just the two of us; I popped my head into his office and asked, ‘What time are we going for that beer?’ ”

  PARENT: Your child can also be your friend, but remind them, and yourself, that you need to be a parent first. Do you let them eat whatever they want, whenever they want, so that they’ll like you? Do you let them watch YouTube all night instead of doing their homework because you don’t want them to get mad at you? Realize that making your kids happy now doesn’t necessarily prepare them to deal with the real world as adults. Do they need another friend, or a strong parent? Perhaps it’s time to chat about family standards and explain that everyone needs to recommit to honoring them.

  INDIVIDUAL: Even as an individual, you can practice self-leadership. And individuals are also leaders—influencers—of those around them. It’s been said that we teach others how to treat us. Do you need people to like you so badly that you let them treat you poorly? Does your fear of confrontation prevent you from standing up for your beliefs? Are you always the one compromising? Realize that true friends will like you—even love you—despite the disagreements, fights, or decision as to where to go for dinner tonight. The next time you think someone is treating you badly, remember your pride and your values, and address the situation.

  5

  LEAD WITH LOVE

  Tom Coughlin led the New York Giants for twelve years. When he joined the team in 2004, he was known as a strict disciplinarian and was called (certainly only behind his back) “Tom Tyrant” and “Colonel Coughlin.” Among his more unusual rules was “Coughlin Time,” which stated that unless you arrived five minutes early to a meeting, you were late. So players who showed up three minutes early were actually fined from $500 to $1,000 for being “late.” Star players like defensive lineman Michael Strahan and running back Tiki Barber did little to hide their hatred of their new coach.

  As Coughlin himself explained, in his book Earn the Right to Win, “I had learned the art of communication from my parents, and from the nuns in elementary school, who basically communicated with a pointer to your knuckles.” After a dismal losing season in 2006, Coughlin was told by team management that he had to change or go. To everyone’s surprise, he changed. While he still maintained unusually strict standards, he worked hard to be more positive, to control his temper, and to show his players that he actually cared about them (Coughlin 2014).

  And it worked. Year after year Coughlin continued his personal transformation and improved his relationship with the Giants’ players. It culminated in 2012 before the Super Bowl with his pregame speech. He said, “You guys have taught us what love really is. When you put it on the line the way you do every Sunday, when your ass is up against the wall, you have taught us what love really is. And I am man enough to tell you guys that I love you, and these guys [the coaches] all love you” (Coughlin 2014).

  The Giants beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI and Coughlin’s transformation was complete. His love wasn’t unrequited. His onetime rival Strahan would eventually pen the foreword to Coughlin’s book. Strahan wrote, “From a cold and distant figure, he became the man none of us wanted to disappoint…I tell people proudly that I love the man” (Coughlin 2014).

  THE L WORD

  Should a leader love her followers?

  You might think the answer is no; after all, we did just agree in an earlier chapter that we should not be friends with our direct reports. So what exactly am I talking about when I say we need to lead with love?

  It has been said that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, and it turns out the ancient Greeks had at least six different words for love. Their language captured the distinction between the sexual chemistry between young adults, the deep understanding between long-married couples, close friendships, emotions between parents and children, and more.

  The love I’m referring to the Greeks called “agape” (agápē) or a selfless love of everyone. The concept of universal love is an anchor of many world religions. Christians speak of the unconditional love of God and Jesus for all mankind. Often quoted is the book of Peter, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” And from the book of Matthew, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In Buddhism, mettā is a term that means “loving-kindness” toward other people and it is one of the four key Buddhist virtues.

  With agape love you don’t love someone for who they are, or for what they do, or for how they make you feel. You love them unconditionally as a human. You have a genuine heartfelt concern and care for their well-being. You love each team member as an individual (an individual who has a life outside of work), not as a soulless cog in your production machine.

  Dr. Sigal Barsade, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, studies something called “companionate love.” She defines companionate love as an “other focused” affection and sensitivity to other people (Barsade & O’Neill 2014). It’s a type of love that expresses itself as affection, caring, compassion, and tenderness. Stuff that won’t get you into trouble with HR.

  I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, but Kevin, Jesus, and Buddha never had to deal with Pat who shows up late every day and I know is stealing people’s lunches out of the fridge! You might find this idea tough to swallow. Love the people who whine, and moan, and don’t do their job? Love the people who don’t make a new pot of coffee when they pour the last cup? Love the people who drive you crazy half the time?

  I gained a fuller understanding of the capacity to love from none other than legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Wooden was notorious as a hard-driving leader who had rules about how players were to put on their socks, tie their shoes, trim their fingernails, and cut their hair (unlike Coughlin version 1.0, Wooden always explained the logic behind these rules). Wooden was not a warm and fuzzy guy. But in his book Wooden on Leadership, he devotes an entire chapter to love and it opens with, “I will not like you all the same, but I will love you all the same” (Wooden 2005). This is something that doesn’t come easy to me. But I remind myself of it all the time. Whether I like you, and whether you like me, is irrelev
ant. In our daily interactions I will lead with love. Who said leadership is easy?

  WHY LEADERS DON’T LOVE

  “It is better to be feared than loved” has been the prevailing leadership wisdom for five hundred years, ever since an Italian diplomat penned The Prince in 1513. Traditional wisdom—and many modern managers—argues that you can’t get close or personal with your team members because doing so:

  undermines respect in the boss-worker relationship,

  prevents maintaining objectivity, and

  makes it more difficult to reprimand or fire others.

  Although I never had any formal management training, advice and messages I received from elders include:

  “Leadership is acting.”

  “You can try to be kind to your employees, but they’ll just be ungrateful.”

  “Productivity is higher if they think they might be fired.”

  You were probably raised on similar advice. When I posed the question on LinkedIn, dozens of people shared the advice they received to put up walls between themselves and those they lead. Paul Maskill shared that he was told, “If you give them too much praise, they’ll get complacent and take what they learned on your dime to help someone else grow their business.”

  And Jamie Alford said:

  Early on in my career, I had a manager tell me if I was too friendly with my team they would try to “pull things over on me.” That to be effective, I needed to be distant and “for the love of God, Jamie, stop being so nice. You make yourself seem like the girl who gets the coffee.” That “advice” haunted me for years. I tried that manager’s advice out and, honestly, that was the worst period of my career. I felt horrible, not to mention not very effective. What is wrong with pouring coffee anyway? I find true leadership is leading with your heart.

  Taking this advice to heart, or should I say, making sure they stay closed-hearted, many managers put up metaphorical walls. They might avoid topics of conversation related to family or personal interests; they never speak of their own lives outside the office. They stay out of office pools, fantasy leagues, or other games. They decline invitations to eat lunch with team members.

  Well, I’ll see your five-hundred-year-old Machiavellian advice and raise you with twenty-five-hundred-year-old advice from Lao Tzu. He preached that the best leader is the one who helps people so that eventually they don’t need him. And historically, the weight of Machiavelli’s recommendation lightens considerably when you realize that his full sentence was, “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” (emphasis mine).

  Indeed, it’s far easier to be a manager of tasks than a leader of people. It’s easier to control than to love. It’s easier to direct than to coach. But what is expeditious isn’t what will get you results over the long term.

  BENEFITS OF LEADING WITH LOVE

  Research and our own experiences indicate that while leadership based on fear may be the norm, and can be motivating, it doesn’t actually lead to good long-term results. Fear crushes creativity, innovation, and new ideas. Fear shuts down communication. When we fear, we are more likely to sweep problems under the rug. Fear contributes to stress, blocks engagement, and causes us to look for a new job. Love is the opposite of fear.

  Dr. Barsade’s research into “companionate love” includes a sixteen-month-long study of outcomes in a long-term health care facility, conducted with colleague Olivia O’Neill, an assistant professor of management at George Mason University. They used outside raters, family members, the employees, and patients themselves to report on emotional culture and signs of caring and compassion. A key finding was that departments that had higher cultures of love also had lower levels of employee absenteeism and burnout. Conversely these same departments showed higher levels of employee satisfaction and teamwork. There was also a strong positive correlation between love and patient quality of life. When it came to actual health outcomes, the data was mixed. A culture of love correlated to a reduction in emergency room visits, but showed no correlation to bedsores or weight gain. Building on this initial research, Barsade and O’Neill launched a more ambitious study, this time with over three thousand employees working in seven different industries. The results were the same, love correlated to satisfaction, engagement, and accountability (Barsade and O’Neill 2014).

  The Gallup Organization has conducted numerous research studies showing the links between employee engagement and business results. Based on survey results from more than twenty-five million employees, the Gallup Organization has identified twelve key elements that drive employee engagement. Notable is question number five in their “Q12 Survey,” which states, “My supervisor or someone at work cares about me.” This caring question and the other eleven items are shown to affect employee turnover, safety, shrinkage, productivity, customer satisfaction, and even profitability (Harter et al. n.d.).

  When we work in a place with an abundance of love—love from our peers and love from our leader—we feel safe. And safety and trust are the foundations for feeling emotionally connected to our work, for the release of discretionary effort, and for loyalty. It is notable that two giants in the field of leadership development, James Kouzes and Barry Posner, conclude the sixth edition of The Leadership Challenge with these words, “The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work…Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart” (Kouzes and Posner 2017).

  So how do we lead with love? How can we nurture the emotion and love as a verb? When Professor Barsade went to measure companionate love in the workplace, she looked for signs of affection, caring, compassion, and tenderness.

  LET YOURSELF LOVE

  I believe that caring for other people is our natural state. Whether it’s innate or part of learned response to thriving in a tribe, feeling a communal love for others is the natural state. So why is it so hard to do? Why don’t we more readily feel love for our colleagues at work? Either through lessons or experience we learn that it’s easier and less painful if we withhold our feelings. Men especially can become inhibited emotionally when they’re raised with parental and societal messages of “big boys don’t cry” and that tough guys are stoic.

  You may have also learned to distance yourself from your followers because of the pain you felt in the past when you had to fire them, or reprimand them. Perhaps it hurt when you caught someone you were close to at work gossiping about you, or maneuvering to beat you out on that promotion. Maybe colleagues have lied to you or even stolen from you. I still feel hurt when I think about Mike betraying my trust, Rudy lying about me after I left the firm, close employees who left me for another company.

  To begin loving your colleagues, you don’t do anything, you stop doing things. Stop avoiding the pain associated with betrayal, disappointment, or loss. I know that in the future, people I lead—people I care about—will steal, lie, cheat, and leave. But I remember that nobody is perfect; past employees acted in a way that they thought was best for them (they weren’t trying to hurt me). These days I choose to focus on all the things they did for me and the company, how their gifts outweigh their mistakes. I forgive them.

  It might help to reassociate in your mind what it means to be tough. Who are your models for toughness and strength? Personally, the toughest people I know—Marine Corp officers, Navy SEALs, NFL football players—all lead with love.

  At the time I’m writing this the hottest name in college football coaching is Tom Herman. He had an amazing run as head coach at the University of Houston and is about to begin his first season leading the Texas Longhorns team at the University of Texas at Austin. Herman has repeatedly made headlines by, of all things, kissing his male players before each football game. His ritual includes a full embrace, a peck on the cheek or neck, and a few wo
rds of encouragement for every player. Even the New York Times covered Herman with the headline, “Houston’s Coach Pecks Away at Football’s Macho Culture, a Kiss at a Time” (Tracy 2016). As he explained in the article, “How do you motivate a human being…love and fear. And to me, love wins every time.”

  I’m not advocating physical contact at work, but if tough male gladiators can show their love for each other surely you can find ways to show that you care too. So let’s begin…

  YOU HAD ME AT HELLO

  Paul Marciano is an executive coach who has worked with hundreds of executives. A standard practice of coaches is to implement some form of a 360 survey, in which one’s boss, peers, and direct reports all critique you anonymously. Over lunch one day I was shocked when Paul told me that one of the most common complaints he sees is some form of, “He walks past my cube every single day and has never once said, ‘Good morning.’ ” Are there that many bosses who don’t say good morning? And do people really notice?

  As I’ve conducted my own employee research, indeed this comes up as one of the most common complaints. In fact, even more common than the complaint about morning greetings is the complaint, “Whenever we pass in the hall he doesn’t even make eye contact!” When I explore the problem with this, many people attach meaning to this behavior. I’ve heard, “He thinks he’s better than everyone else.” And, “He acts like I don’t even exist.”

  I think it’s this latter comment that gets to the root of the issue. While most of us don’t think much about our simple hellos, in the past greetings have meant much more. The common Hindu greeting “Namaste” has a literal meaning of “I bow to you” but an implied meaning of “I bow to the divine in you” (Wikipedia n.d.). Management thought leader Peter de Jager has written about the need—in many societies—for identity. He writes: