Review: Love-Based Leadership: The Model for Leading with Strength, Grace, and Authenticity

Love-Based Leadership: The Model for Leading with Strength, Grace, and Authenticity by Dr. Maria Church
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Love brings to mind several varied interpretations, definitions, and constructs for different people. Definitions range from a kindness and fondness of others to sexual connotations. Plato carried love from the physical aspect to an immaterial beauty such as justice, wisdom and knowledge. In the context of this book love is simply defined as knowledge, wisdom and acceptance of one’s authentic self and others.

So what does the author mean by Love- Based Leadership in this book ?

Being human beings, we are meaning-seeking animals. The author compares the two theories - one is Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy and the second is Maslow’s Needs theory. From Logotherapy we can conclude that we want to do meaningful things in life and Maslow’s needs theory concludes that an employee seeks belongingness, respect, meaning and purpose in the work that he does at the workplace. The author says that the common theme of these two theories are meaning and love. It’s not possible to have one without the other. Love is the conduit to meaning, purpose and abundant living. Both theories are rooted in love : love for self and love for others.

Love based leadership is based on three fundamental pillars - Love of Self, Love of Source, and Love of others. These three pillars are the major building blocks for the construction of meaning, philosophy of life and love based leadership. The author lists seven factors for each of these pillars.

Let’s talk about these three pillars one by one.

Love of Self - In order to be an effective leader of others, we must first go inward and love, understand , and respect ourselves. We need to be effective leaders of ourselves, in our own lives, before we can successfully lead others. The author says that when you love yourself you do not ignore your intuition, you believe in Truth-Telling and Truth-Receiving, you have the Power of choice to love self, source, and others, You should have the ability to change your perception and be present fully in your interaction with others.

Love of Others - Love of others requires leaders, colleagues and employees to share knowledge and skills , mentoring to and nurturing with care those in the workplace. Here the author talks about Collaboration, meaning , shared ownership etc.

Love of Source - In this section the author talks about the spiritual part of leadership. It talks about Inspiration, creativity, happiness, faith, perseverance, peace and authenticity.
This book is full of wisdom and it seems that the author has poured her whole life experience into it. It changed my perception about leadership.

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