Growing a Culture of Love

Last week we were fortunate to work with two international nonprofit NGOs on an aspect of our healthy culture model for nonprofit organizations. We talked a lot about company culture and this is valuable, and important, and true.

But, an "organization" is just a group of people who have agreed to work together for a period of time to solve the riddles presenting their current mission. I hear leaders from organizations say, "[name of organization] values its people." Organizations try to characterize themselves as singular intelligent and ethical beings, but a corporation (which nonprofits are!) is just a legal entity. A company cannot love you.

But people can. And the individuals that comprise the corporation are capable of making choices that benefit the people around them on the deepest level. Leadership, whether as a manager, a supervisor, a board of director, or just from your seat at your desk, must be done from a place of sincere appreciation and gratitude for those who share in the work with you. I do not know how you can lead others without some measure of love for them: who they are, what they do, and what they find interesting and compelling.

Sometimes this means we have to wrestle ourselves to the mat as leaders, to find that still burning candle of hope and belief in another person. For people will find all sorts of ways to disappoint us and there are a myriad of irksome traits that get under our skin. That is when we must find some measure of grace for a complex humanity, and return again to a position of empathy, understanding, and love for one another. Irritability is an opportunity for leaders to return to their core values and be the people that coach and give other people an opportunity to learn, grow, and change.

(The above photo is a cluster of trees taken in south Florida. Though you can see individual trunks, it is one entity, relying on the growth of the whole system and each part of the tree to be successful. A metaphor for modern leadership.)

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