Love – The greatest leadership tool

As many of you know, I created a School of Entrepreneurship for business owners, primarily tailored to home service contractors, but most of the material can be used by any business leader and their teams.  I wrote all the material myself and delivered it in live classes.  We recorded some of the classes and created a total of 1134 videos.  The School is online at thesoe.com now.  I deliver 98% of the classes to you via video.  There are written versions of the material – PDF’s to download.  

Starting today and in the upcoming Think Daily for Businesspeople posts, I want to give you a free exercise in it’s entirety.  It’s the very last exercise of the School, until I wrote another class 8 years later called “Building Wealth, How your money can make more money that you do”.

Anyway, there are so many very powerful lessons in the School of E, but this one is very special to me.  It’s called “Love, the greatest leadership tool.”

As many of you know, I have been in business for 44 years, and I own or have partners in about 35 businesses with about 3000 employees.  People ask “How do you do that?”  “Good people who stay for a long time” is the answer.  I hope you enjoy the following exercise from the Contractor Nation School of Entrepreneurship.  And if you want to join this school, and go through it online from where you are, I’d love for you to do that.  thesoe.com

We will do a piece of this class each day until we are done.  (I wish I could deliver this in the pretty format with all the graphics and pictures in the SOE exercise, but my Think Daily tool does not allow me to do that so it will have to be text only.)  Here we go – 

Love – the greatest leadership tool

Love – “a strong positive emotion or regard.  Have great affection for.”

Human beings are first and foremost emotional beings. 

That means you, and everyone around you. We are all searching for meaning, and a place where we are genuinely appreciated and cared about. We reciprocate these emotions because we feel loyalty – we bind ourselves to a course of action or a team that is looking out for us.

Leadership and management can be systematic, robotic, and mechanical. That’s a start. But understanding what truly drives people and causes them to fully commit, is a precious art that any leader should aspire to understand, and use for the right reasons in the construction of a team.

Love is a soft art.

It’s participation in any organization is a matter of opinion. It’s an alchemy; an inexact science. It is our opinion that love being present between the hearts of team leaders and front-line team members is the highest order of influence one can attain.

It’s not talked about often, at least not in this way. Perhaps because it’s seen as a theme that doesn’t align with traditional business methods. Perhaps because it can’t be measured and quantified on a chart. Perhaps because the idea of love and money are often seen as opposing ideas, or at least ones that have nothing to do with each other.

We’re going to put it out there in this SOE exercise. We will leave it to you to determine its usefulness.