Monthly Archives: June 2015

Jun 12 2015
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Developing yourself

On Love and Leadership

Fall in love with everyone. That’s probably not the type of advice you get every day, especially not when you’re talking about leadership.

I don’t mean fall in love in a romantic way, but rather, in a human way.

What does falling in love mean on a deeply human level? Love is a completely selfless investment in someone else. It binds you to them because giving someone love means that you genuinely accept them, value them, and care for them. It means seeing the greatness and potential in someone and having an eager willingness and excitement to be a companion on their quest to achieving it. It means trusting them. It means being genuinely committed to their happiness and wellbeing. And it means being grateful that they are in your life.

I’ve often been accused of falling in love with everyone I meet. I used to think that it was a flaw, a vulnerability, to be so open to everyone. And, in complete disclosure, sometimes it’s come back to bite me. But overall, I have come to realize that love is the most powerful of the leadership tools. It makes every interaction, small or large, genuine and real.

One of the worst types of human experiences is feeling like you are unseen and unheard. That feeling of invisibility is disenfranchising and ultimately leaves people feeling resentful and even worse, powerless. When you practice everyday leadership that is motivated by love, you allow people to be seen and heard, and even if you can’t necessarily do anything more for them at that moment, holding people in that space and giving them that recognition is one of the most powerful things that you can do.

The love you give doesn’t necessarily need to be an everlasting love, or even reciprocated love. It can range from the love that you give the waiter who is serving your food or the IT person on the phone to your management style with your colleagues to the way you interact with your friends. But recognizing and being mindful of the way that people experience you is one of the most important lessons in emotional intelligence.

Giving love also means giving people the benefit of the doubt, recognizing that we are all just trying to get by, and when someone fails or falters, rather than chastising them, you can use a love approach to try and understand why and help lift them up instead of kick them when they are already down.

I could write about all of the studied and proven financial incentives to incorporate love into leadership – it encourages productivity, makes people more effective and committed to the cause, makes them feel believed in and invested in and therefore motivated to work hard, creates equality even in hierarchy. All of this is true, and if you need an economic argument, there’s a lot to back it up, but right now I am coming at this from a values and human-centered approach.

I want you to close your eyes and imagine how it would feel if you gave love to everyone in your life. And imagine if you felt loved by everyone who you worked with an interacted with in return. How would that change your human experience? How would it change theirs? And ultimately, what affect would instilling this type of universal sentiment have on the world? I know I am saying this at the risk of sounding idealistic at best and cheesy at worst, but everyone is looking for an authentic connection, and in this alienating age of money and technology where we have become increasingly engrossed with our bottom lines and smart phones instead of our present reality, don’t forget the value in saying “I see you, I hear you, I value you, I love you.” And fall in love with everyone!

Practicing leadership motivated by love: Let your guard down. Approach every person with excitement about their potential. See and believe in their greatness, even before they have had a chance to prove it to you. Recognize if you are being skeptical or making assumptions and put them out of your mind. Give them your attention and your heart during the time that you are with them, and focus on being present with them.

If going to a place of love seems abstract or inaccessible to you at the moment, think about approaching everyone with openness, curiosity, inclusiveness, gratitude and an investment in their success.

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Jun 10 2015
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Developing others, Developing yourself

A Human-Centered Approach to Leadership

You may have heard of Human-Centered Design, an idea made popular by the design firm IDEO, among others, and beginning to gain mainstream traction, especially in the innovation space. The idea is that you put the human at the center of whatever it is you are designing, because after all, they are the users and ones you are supposedly designing for. In order to succeed in truly human-centered thinking, you need to take an ethnographic, anthropological approach, spending time getting to understand the needs of the people you are designing for, and developing something that is useful and makes practical sense based on your investigation and observation.

Being a human-centered thinker is at the core of modern leadership. This might seem obvious, or that it should be intuitive, but often times, the humans being served are the last to be thought about.

To help illustrate exactly what human-centered thinking is, let’s start with a design example – how many times have you used a product or tried to navigate a building and thought to yourself, “who did they design this for?” Maybe it’s a package that is insanely difficult to open, or a shelf that was installed too high for any normal-sized person to actually reach. This particular design story is about the mop. Yes, your good ol’ household cleaning mop. Think about the terrible impracticality of a mop – you need to lug around a bucket of water in order for the mop to be useful, which quickly becomes dirty water that you end up spreading all over the floor. If you are putting the user at the center of the mop experience, the mop is an irritating, at best, cleaning appliance – it is cumbersome, messy, frustrating and inefficient.

Continuum, a design firm, had consultants spend time watching mop users in their homes. They stood in corners and observed as people lugged around soppy mops and spilling water buckets. They thought about what they could design that would serve the same purpose but be more efficient and make the users life easier. And after hundreds of hours of observing and iterating, the Swiffer was born.

You might be thinking that this approach makes sense when designing products, but how does that translate into anything outside user experience? IDEO and Marie Stopes International teamed up to take design thinking and apply it to educating young women on sexual and reproductive health. They realized that instead of trying to do outreach on their terms – teaching classes in schools or in health clinics, where they were normally done – they needed to understand what would be most accessible to the youth they were trying to reach. They created pop-up nail salons and teen speak-easies that were fun and unthreatening, training college-aged women on how to be sexual and reproductive health teachers and advocates to the teens who came to these facilities.

So how do you translate this into a human-centered approach to leadership? The above are tangible examples of taking a human-centered approach, but hopefully they illustrate what the concept means as we begin to move into the more abstract – human-centered thinking as a day-to-day skill and quality of the modern leader.

Taking a human-centered approach requires engaging a toolkit of soft leadership skills, including deep listening, empathy, curiosity, and openness. It is about recognizing the potential of every person that you interact with and engaging with them as a thought partner who has intrinsic value.  When you are thinking about developing your leadership philosophy and practice – think about the people who you touch, who are around you – how do you interact with them? Are they at the core of your decision making?

By using a human-centered approach as the core of your leadership philosophy, you are developing yourself as a leader who is accessible, who celebrates diversity in people and thoughts, who welcomes opposing viewpoints and is flexible and open to change, and who respects and values every person who you interact with. It is leaders who engage in this type of thinking who will be able to shape the emerging future.

Practice a human-centered approach: Clear your mind, open your heart, and be intentionally and mindfully present with each person you interact with today. When you catch yourself making judgments, dismissing people, or going through your regular motions, remind yourself that you are practicing your human-centeredness today.