Love Matters. Especially in Leadership.

It matters, even if you don’t call it Love.

I don’t use the word love much with my clients. Not because it isn’t present — it is, in almost every session — but because most of the people I work with would quietly flinch at it. High-achievers. Leaders. People who have built careers on being capable, rigorous, and not particularly sentimental.

But what I activate when I sit with a client — the quality of attention, the patience, the willingness to stay with someone in their most defended or most broken moments — that is love. Quiet love. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that shows up as presence, as care, as the courage to say the true thing when the comfortable thing would be easier.

I know what it’s like to be cut off from it. There were years in my life when I lived almost entirely in protection — anxious, defended, disconnected from my own heart in ways I couldn’t have named at the time. I wasn’t unloving. I was unreachable. Fear had done what fear does: it closed the circuit.

Coming back to it — slowly, imperfectly, through a lot of inner work — changed everything. Not just personally. Professionally. Relationally. It changed what I was capable of offering another human being in a room.

That’s what this piece is about. Not love as sentiment. Not love as a soft skill to be added to a leadership competency framework. Love as a physiological state. A human need. A force — and what becomes possible when it’s present in an organization, and what is quietly lost when it isn’t.

What Love Actually Is

Love, as I use the term, is not romantic. It is not sentimental. It is not a feeling reserved for the people we’ve chosen or the moments that are easy.

Love is the force and impulse to appreciate and nurture life — within ourselves and beyond — as if there is no fundamental separation between oneself and everything else. It is accompanied by sensations and emotions that orient us toward connection: joy, appreciation, compassion, the desire to contribute, to be open, to care.

Fear operates in the opposite direction. Where love opens, fear contracts. Where love connects, fear protects. Where love asks what I can offer, fear asks what I might lose.

Fear is not pathological — it is necessary. But when it becomes chronic, when it is the dominant organizing force in a person’s inner life or an organization’s culture, it crowds out the very states that make genuine performance, connection, and creativity possible.

“Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects it.” 
— Valerie Kaur

This framing matters because it removes the sentimentality from the conversation. Anger in the service of love — of what we care about, of what we’re protecting — is not weakness. Grief in the service of love is not instability. These are not emotions to be managed away. They are evidence of a heart that is still open and still engaged.

A leader who cannot feel any of these things is not strong. They are defended. And defended leaders, however competent, create defended organizations.

Love Is a Human Need — Not a Nice-to-Have

We are social animals. We are wired for connection as surely as we are wired for air, water, and warmth. In our earliest years, love — attunement, care, physical touch, the felt sense of being held and seen — is not optional. Without it, the brain does not develop properly. Its absence leaves marks that shape a life.

We are remarkably adaptive creatures. We can survive on very little of what we actually need — poor air, poor food, poor sleep, poor connection. We get by. But getting by is not the same as thriving, and the gap between the two has a cost that accumulates quietly in the body, the nervous system, and the quality of our relationships and work.

When any fundamental need is chronically unmet — including the need for genuine connection, care, and belonging — the nervous system responds with stress. Not dramatic stress, necessarily. Often a low-grade, persistent hum of activation that we’ve gotten so used to we mistake for normal. But it impairs us. It narrows our thinking, compromises our creativity, reduces our capacity for genuine connection with the people around us.

David Rock of the NeuroLeadership Institute identified five social needs — Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness — and demonstrated that when these are threatened, the brain responds the same way it responds to physical danger. Executive function decreases. The capacity for nuanced judgment and insight diminishes. People become more defensive, more reactive, less able to take risks or think creatively.

Rock didn’t use the word love. But Relatedness — the need to feel genuinely connected, to matter to others, to be seen as a human being and not just a function — is love by another name. And when it’s absent from a workplace, the cost shows up everywhere, even if it gets filed under engagement, retention, or productivity.

Safe = Self = Love. When we feel genuinely safe, we are most fully ourselves. And when we are most fully ourselves, we are most capable of love.

The Neuroscience of It

Polyvagal Theory — Stephen Porges’s life’s work on the autonomic nervous system — gives us a precise physiological map of what’s happening when love is present or absent in a human system.

When we feel genuinely safe — when the nervous system’s threat detection system registers the environment as non-dangerous — we enter what Porges calls the Social Engagement System. This is the state in which we are most fully ourselves: open, curious, connected, capable of genuine warmth and genuine presence. In the language of Self Leadership, this is the state of Self — calm, clear, creative, courageous, compassionate.

This is also, physiologically, the state of love. Not as emotion — as capacity. The nervous system at rest is a nervous system open to connection. Safety makes love available. Fear makes it inaccessible, however much we might want it.

In the Social Engagement System, we have access to everything that makes extraordinary leadership and extraordinary organizations possible:

When we are chronically stressed — even at a low level, even in the background — we lose access to most of this. Not because we aren’t trying. Because the nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: prioritizing survival over everything else. And survival, for all its genius, is a diminished way to spend a life or run an organization.

(Read more on Polyvagal Theory and the nervous system: The Heart of Resilience)

Love in the Workplace — The Evidence

For those who need the data before they’ll consider the argument: the research is unambiguous.

Harvard Business Review research by Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill found that employees who felt they worked in a culture of genuine warmth and caring reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction, teamwork, and accountability for their performance. The more companionate love — warmth, affection, genuine connection — people felt at work, the more engaged they were.

Steve Farber, in Love is Just Damn Good Business, makes the case plainly: when love is part of an organization’s framework, employees are more loyal, more innovative, more inspired. Customers feel genuinely valued. The human conditions that produce extraordinary work are also, it turns out, the conditions that produce extraordinary business outcomes.

None of this should be surprising. We’ve always known, at some level, that people do their best work when they feel safe, seen, and cared about. What’s remarkable is how consistently organizations are built as if the opposite were true.

I Asked. The Answers Were Revealing.

A while back I posted a simple poll on LinkedIn: Do you believe there is a need for love in leadership and business? No definitions offered. Just the question.

Nineteen people answered. Fifteen said yes. Four said no.

What surprised me more than the numbers were the responses. One colleague called it a provocative question — as if the word love itself had triggered a mild threat response. Another said yes to compassion but thought love might be too strong a word. A few noted that their workplaces were so toxic they couldn’t imagine bringing their hearts to work at all.

That last response stayed with me. Because what those people were describing wasn’t an absence of love in themselves — it was an absence of safety. And without safety, love can’t get in or out. The heart closes not because it stopped caring, but because it learned it wasn’t safe to show it.

That’s not a soft skills problem. That’s a trauma response. And it’s operating in organizations at scale, every day, quietly costing everyone involved.

The Word Doesn’t Matter. The State Does.

I’m not asking anyone to use the word love in a board meeting. I’m not suggesting company-wide displays of affection or performative warmth that everyone can feel is hollow. Virtue signaling is not love — it’s its own kind of defense.

What I’m pointing to is a state of being — one that becomes possible when a person feels genuinely safe, and that makes them capable of things that no amount of pressure, incentive, or management technique can produce.

Call it psychological safety. Call it genuine engagement. Call it care, or compassion, or presence. Call it the Social Engagement System if you’d rather stay in the neuroscience. The state is the same. And leaders who can access it — and create conditions in which others can access it too — are doing something that matters more than most of what gets measured.

There’s an art piece on my office wall that reads: But first, Love. Most of my clients see it and say nothing. Some ask about it. A few, usually later in our work together, tell me it stayed with them.

That’s the quiet version of this argument. Not a proclamation. A reminder. To myself as much as anyone.

What Love Actually Asks of a Leader

In my experience — coaching hundreds of leaders over fifteen years — the ones who lead most powerfully are not the ones who have the most knowledge, the most authority, or the most polished executive presence. They are the ones who are most genuinely present with the people they lead. Who can stay in the room with someone’s difficulty without rushing to fix it. Who have enough inner security to hear hard feedback without collapsing or attacking. Who can hold a high standard and still extend real compassion to the person trying to meet it.

That takes courage. Real courage — not the performed kind. The kind that comes from having done enough inner work to know who you are and what you stand for, and caring enough about the people in front of you to show up fully rather than strategically.

Love, in a leadership context, asks for:

A Final Thought

Fear is the biggest block to love. And fear — chronic, ambient, low-grade fear — is the operating system of most organizations, whether anyone names it that way or not. It shows up as the inability to acknowledge mistakes, the reluctance to ask for help, the meetings where everyone agrees and nothing true gets said.

When one person in a room is genuinely safe — genuinely present, genuinely open — something shifts. Not always immediately. Not always visibly. But the nervous system of every other person in that room registers it. Safety is contagious in exactly the way that fear is. And a leader who has done the inner work to access their own steady center is not just a better leader. They are a regulating presence — one whose very way of being in the room creates conditions in which others can be more fully themselves.

That is what HeartRich means to me. Not heart as sentimentality. Heart as physiology, as presence, as the courage to show up fully and ask the same of the people around you.

You don’t have to call it love. But whatever you call it — don’t leave it at home.

Further Reading

Barsade & O’Neill — Employees Who Feel Love Perform Better (Harvard Business Review)

Steve Farber — Love is Just Damn Good Business

Marshall Rosenberg — Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Valerie Kaur — TED Talk: 3 Lessons of Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage (See below)

US Surgeon General — Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being

Continue Reading

The Heart of Resilience
Beyond Stress Management
It’s Time We Talk About Trauma
Burnout Is Not a Badge of Honor
You Need to Value Your Needs and Values
Coresilience: Building Resilience Through Connection

Guy Reichard is a Self Leadership, Resilience, and Executive Coach and the founder of HeartRich Coaching. He is the author of How to Talk Amongst Your Selves and The Heart of Values. If this resonated, you might start with the free Inner Crews Guide or the Who’s On Your Crew? Assessment.