Your Leadership Love Cup

Everyone has an appetite for love. We all need it, want it, and gotta have it. In fact, we all need a lot of it.

But the kind of love that I am talking about is probably not what you are thinking. I am not talking about the overt mushy Valentine’s Day kind of love. I am talking about the kind of love that brings the feelings of internal comfort, reward, hopefulness, contentment, and security. Love that brings with it the feelings of being appreciated and reassured.

When we get our daily dose of it, we feel grand. When we don’t get enough love, we start to suffer. When we run empty on love, we feel hopeless, forgotten, betrayed, or worse. The consequences of not getting enough reoccurring love range from the bad to the unmentionable.

But did you know that people have different definitions and expressions of love?

People around you at home and at work probably give and receive love differently than you do.

The kind of love that you need is probably not the same as your spouse, your co-workers, your boss, or the clerk at the video store.

Not knowing the kind of love that people around you need can be powerful. This has immense repercussions that most people would ever recognize as a lack of love.

A lack of properly expressing love at home or at work has the same consequence: brokenness.

When a married couple does not express love properly or effectively over time, the consequence can be a bitter relationship that ends in divorce. When parents don’t “properly” love their children, animosity, unruliness, defiance, and unfriendly separations occur. When a boss does not show the “right kind” of love to the people around them, their level of influence, effectiveness, and results will suffer. Their people will also end up bitter, defiant, and divorced from them.

• But how can a boss show love at work?
• What is “the right kind” of love?
• Isn’t this concept crossing the line?

Showing love at home, at work, or anywhere else is much easier than you think. You just have to know the rules.

The rules of showing love are probably best understood in veteran family counselor Dr. Gary Chapman‘s popular book The Five Love Languages. The concepts presented in the book are effective for spouses, families, co-workers, or anyone else with a pulse. In the work environment, practicing these principles can have immense impact on a leader’s level of influence.

Knowing, understanding and committing to serving others’ love languages is probably at the very center of effective servant leadership and at the top of the list for being emotionally intelligent.

Since 2004 I have been passing on this book as one of the most important reads for understanding people and how to influence them.  The premise is simple. Dr. Chapman says that with over 30 years of family and marriage counseling he was able to document five patterns of how people feel, interpret, and express love to others.

The Five Love Languages are:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

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Take this 30 Second Love Language Assessment before you read further. It will help you understand this concept much better.

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Words of Affirmation

Aside from verbal compliments, another way to communicate through “Words of Affirmation” is to offer encouragement.  Here are some examples: reinforcing a difficult decision; calling attention to progress made on a current project; acknowledging a person’s unique perspective on an important topic. If a loved one listens for “Words of Affirmation,” offering encouragement will help him or her to overcome insecurities and develop greater confidence.

Quality Time

Spending quality time (as defined by the other person) with someone. It may be as simple as just being there and saying nothing. Just listening is the best way to express “proper love” to these types.

Receiving Gifts

This could be that box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day or an unexpected bouquet of flowers (for no reason) for a spouse. It could be a new pair golfing gloves to replace some worn out ones. At work, it could be something like a new office chair or something as simple as bringing someone their favorite cup of coffee or tea.

Acts of Service

At work, it could be something like doing demonstrative things for someone like changing the copy toner and paper regularly. Or bringing their favorite coffee or tea could be an “act of service” and not “a gift” to them. Even helping someone figure out a spreadsheet trick could be seen as an appropriate sign of love.

Physical Touch

Ahem….Do try this at home with a spouse. Not so much at work…

But also fully understand that someone who is touchy with their hands (on your arm) could simply be showing appreciation toward you and not meaning anything else. This could indicate that their love language is physical touch. Of course, please follow all HR guidelines on this one…

(Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends by Tim Sanders is another great book on the topic of the power of love at work)

Perceptions

Keep in mind that your perception of how you feel love is probably how you are going to express love. This happens to you at home and at work and everywhere in between. The book has many examples, but I always recall the married couple  who was headed for divorce until they realized that they were loving each other in their own way, not in the preferred way of their spouse. He cut the grass for her for 30 years to express his “Acts of Service” love as she sat inside waiting for “Quality Time” from him thinking him as totally selfish out there on “his” lawn. When they figured out how to express love to each other properly, the husband said “You mean that I could have been sitting on the couch (pretending) to listen instead of cutting all that grass!!!”

When leading others, know that they need love everywhere they go.

They need it from their families, their co-workers, their boss, or any other significant person in their life. Underneath it all, they probably expect it to some degree.

So, the key to providing them what they need is to simply understand how to translate workplace actions into love.

Everyone has a “Love Cup.”

How much and how often do you express love? Unfortunately the answer is “a lot & often.” You see, we are designed to be a receiver of love. As we receive love, it goes in an internal reservoir that I simply call your love cup. Most people have more than one as well. But, by design, our love cup has a leaky bottom and the love keeps draining out.  We need a lifelong supply of love that keeps filling our cups.

Some people have big cups that need much love, some have smaller ones. Some have big holes in the bottom of their cups, some have smaller ones. Time and practicing love will determine both the size of their cup and how quickly it leaks.

To remain an effective leader and to continue growing in your influence, your role is to understand the love language of the people around you and keep filling their love cups with their favorite flavor of appropriate love.

This gets much easier over time and the more you do it, the smaller the hole in the bottom of their cup seems to get.

Take this as a challenge and see if I am not right on this one. I would love to hear your thoughts and examples of filling others’ love cups.

How are you showing appropriate love to those around you? How are you messing this up? Are you projecting your love language on to others to show them appreciation and gratitude? How can this all go wrong if mishandled?

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Tom Schulte is Executive Director of Linked 2 Leadership
He provides leadership training fit for the Blackberry-Attention-Span
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