It is difficult to use the word ‘love’ without risking alienating those who will immediately perceive it as a ‘fluffy’ concept, and one that has no place in leadership discourse. Byrne-Jimenez and Yoon (2019) suggest that even writing about ‘love’ will make some people feel uncomfortable, so an important distinction needs to be drawn between ‘love that you see in the movies’ and ‘a courageous love that requires everything.’ Darder (1998, cited in Jimenez and Yoon, 2019) describes love as:
"rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life and to intimately connect that purpose with what [Friere] called our 'true vocation' – to be human."
And Byrne-Jimenez and Yoon (2019) surmise that ‘the search for love, therefore, is a search for our humanity’. Leading with love is not ‘fluffy’, and it is not easy. 500 years ago Niccolo Machiavelli observed that ‘it is much safer to be feared than loved’, and today, insig
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