On Loving Your People

Love is not a concept that comes up a lot here at Vision & Balance, and with good reason. It's a touchy and complex and very personal subject – and one potentially fraught with peril for library leaders and managers. We all understand that there are important ways in which love between employees (especially leaders and subordinates) should not be expressed, and enough said about that.

But it's been on my mind a lot recently, and I think it's actually an important – even vital – subject for us to address. So let's take a deep breath and give it a shot.

I subscribe fully to the idea that you can't be an effective leader if you don't care about the people you lead. I'll go further, actually, and say that you can't be an effective leader if you don't actually love the people you lead.

Now, to be clear: I'm not saying you have to like all of them; a library is (usually) a large and (invariably) diverse organization, and not everyone is going to rub you the right way. Some of them will actually drive you crazy, as you will them. But I still think you can and, ultimately, must love them – both individually and collectively.

What does that actually mean? Here are three thoughts:

Care about whether they're happy in their work. If you love your people, it will matter to you whether they find their work enjoyable and are comfortable in your library. You may not be able to provide everyone in your library their ideal work environment, or tailor their job duties to fit all their preferences – but it matters very much to them whether their happiness in the workplace matters to you. And they'll know whether or not you care, not so much because they either do or don't get what they want, but rather because of the ways you interact with them. It's tough to fake genuine caring, and most people can sniff out fakeness in that regard very quickly.

Be genuinely interested in their general welfare. Similarly, if you love your people you will care how they're doing generally. Obviously, this shouldn't mean asking intrusive questions about their personal lives or trying to become every employee's fishing or shopping buddy – but there's nothing wrong with poking your head into the office of someone who just got back from sick leave and seeing how they're doing, or offering encouragement to someone who is working on a graduate degree, or expressing excitement to someone who's about to have a baby. (If you have an administrative assistant, he or she can be a big help in keeping you abreast of what's happening in people's lives.) Conversely: if there's someone in your organization whose misfortune gives you pleasure, take a step back and examine yourself.

Be invested in their professional success and fulfillment. It's hard – maybe impossible – to be a good leader if you genuinely don't care whether your people are successful in their jobs and are achieving their professional goals. You might be able to be a good factory owner without caring about those things, or a good stockbroker. But if your job is leading people, then their professional fulfillment is going to have to matter to you. Again, you won't be able to provide every person in your organization the career path they want – but you can care whether or not they're moving in the direction they want to, and support and help them as they try to define and carve out that path.

You may have noticed that the verbs I've used above – "care" and "be" – represent things that you can't fake. Or, to be more accurate: it's possible to fake them (of course you can pretend to care about their workplace happiness when you really don't, or to be interested in their general welfare when you aren't), but faking them won't make you a good leader. Mediocre leaders can fake those things, to some degree; good leaders really feel them and act effectively on those feelings.

Now: does any of us love our people perfectly? Of course not. Loving one's people will be an aspirational goal for some, and loving one's people perfectly will be an aspirational goal for all. In this as in many other areas of life, there's something to be said for the "fake it 'til you make it" strategy. In other words, deep down in your heart you may not actually be invested in the professional success and fulfillment of your people, or at least of all of them. But what you can do is ask yourself "If I really were invested in Gary's professional success and fulfillment, what would I do?" – and then try to do that thing. Keep doing that long enough, and you may find something magical happening: you start actually caring about what you had been only pretending to care about. It's a bit like kindness: if you pretend to be a kind person for long enough, eventually you find yourself actually becoming... a kind person.

Now, here's one obvious caveat: as a leader, you can't make the mistake of thinking that genuinely loving your people means always making them happy, still less giving them everything they want. For one thing, you don't have the resources or capacity to give them everything they want; for another, sometimes two people in the library want mutually exclusive things and there's simply no way to avoid disappointing one of them. But when you do have to disappoint someone in your organization, there's a very big difference between saying "The answer is no; deal with it" and saying "The answer is no, and I realize this is a big disappointment. Let's talk about what we might be able to do to mitigate that disappointment." In some cases, there will be little or nothing you actually can do – but the "deal with it" response is an expression of dismissal, while the "let's talk more" response is an expression of love.

I realize this post may have seemed a bit squishy and maybe made you a little uncomfortable. But leadership is a social function as well as an administrative one; you're not just managing budgets and spaces – you're leading people. In that context, there's no two ways around it: love matters.

Takeaways and Action Items

• It matters whether you love your people. If you don't, you'll be a less effective leader.
• As a leader, the love that matters is the love you really feel – but to a significant degree, that love can be learned and acquired.
• Look around your organization and ask yourself: whom do I love already, and whom do I need to love better? What would loving them better look like in both my thinking and my behavior?