Bringing Love to Work: One Leader’s Radical Approach to Unlocking Business Growth

In today’s modern world, raising a successful business empire can be tough. If you want to succeed in today’s competitive world, you have to do more than be a smart businessman. A strong worth ethic, making the right choices, and having the right funds is not enough today. If you want your business to succeed and exceed others, you need to put some love into it!

Love is a powerful driving force and takes many shapes and forms in the workplace. If implemented correctly, you can use love to power your business to achieve newer and greater heights! Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a successful company looking to grow, you’ve come to the right place! Here’s everything you need to know about growing your business by unlocking its truest potential. Expand your business in a healthy and organic way, and learn how to bring love to work through this guide!

What does bringing love to work mean?

Before getting into the details, you may be wondering what exactly does this phrase mean? Love and work often don’t go hand in hand in the modern world, so joining them might seem impossible right? Wrong! Bringing love to work is less about marrying your job and more about making it a more enjoyable and fulfilling experience for you. There are many ways to bring more love and light into your workplace as both an employer and an employee. 

You don’t have to be singing and dancing throughout your 9-5, but a little happiness and fulfillment is a good start. If you are content with and fulfilled by what you’re doing at work, you’re more likely to do a better job. If every employee is content at their workplace, the whole business will work like a well-oiled machine. Now that you’re all caught up, here are some of the basic principles of bringing love to work and how it can unlock your business’s potential!

Adopt a service mindset

It’s easy to be disenchanted and unhappy with your work when you’re not invested in what you’re doing. When you’re not invested, your mood sours, and your productivity drops. By looking at your work as a service, as something that helps people, your community, or the world, you can change that. By adopting a service mindset, you can fundamentally shift your attitude towards work and by proxy your productivity. 

Unless you’re selling cigarettes to little children, chances are, the work you do means something to someone or in the grander scheme of things. One way to change your mindset is through one of Kurt Uhlir’s guides to this approach which is to adopt servant leadership. This approach teaches you to learn to value your work as a service to your coworkers and vice versa. It teaches you the value of community and belonging in the workplace and how it can unlock brand growth. Adopting a service mindset towards both your individual jobs and your coworkers is the key.

Rewiring your brain in this way takes a little time, but it has to start somewhere. As a business owner, you need to first tackle your own shortcomings in your work and try to inspire a similar revolution in your employees. Start by bringing things back to ground zero and remembering the purpose of your work and business. Who are you trying to help, what are you trying to achieve, and how is it benefiting the world? Refocus yourself and adopt a service mindset and your business is bound to benefit and grow from it. 

Employ compassion

It’s one thing to care about the work you do, and it’s another to care about your coworkers. Your coworkers are the backbone of your company and if you push them too far or don’t appreciate them, your business will suffer. To run a business you need to be smart, calculated, and educated, but you also need to know how to work with people. Compassion, for your work and your employees above all else, is the most important approach to running any business. If you want your brand to succeed, you need to learn how to employ compassion at your company. 

In a high-pressure working environment, it’s easy to demand the most from your employees. It’s easy to forget that your employees are people too, who are flawed and have their own lives. Setting unrealistic, unachievable goals for your workers not only does them a disservice but does your business one as well. You need to find a balance between having high expectations for your employees and being realistic. Understand that your employees are people too and that, while you may suspect, you may never know what’s going on under the surface.

Make an effort to get to know your employees and workers, to better understand their situation and feelings. If you’re the person in charge, take a walk on the floor and walk a mile in their shoes. Get to know their everyday lives at work, what they like, and what they struggle with, and gain a better perspective of your workforce. Get to know your employees on a more personal level to both better understand them and better provide for them. Compassion starts with openness and understanding, so make an effort to employ it and your business will prosper. 

Be firm but fair

Sometimes, love in the workplace needs to be tough, but not rough, never rough. As an employer, you need to approach your work and employees as if you’re a loving parent. You need to know when to be kind and compassionate and when to be stern and firm. You need to find the balance between being a benevolent ruler and someone who rules. If your employees don’t know who is in charge, they might take advantage of you and your business may suffer. Finding this balance can be hard, especially if you are new to owning and running a business.  

The easiest way to mess up the employer-employee relationship is to terrorize your workers with critiques. Giving feedback and critiques is a fine art, and not just anyone can do it well. You are there to guide your employees and business to success by helping them work their best. You need to find a gentle way to highlight the mistakes of your employees while gently pushing them in the right direction. If your employees are terrified of making a mistake, the repercussions on your business and productivity will be great. Honesty, transparency, and openness as an employer are key. 

If you want your business to run like a well-oiled machine, you need to create an environment where your employees do not fear you. To inspire discipline in your workplace without it turning into a dictatorship, you need to be assertive and consistent. Assertive in your decision-making and consistent in how you treat your employees and coworkers. To be a firm but fair employer, you also need to invest in your employees and take an active interest. If your employees know what to expect from you, both the bad and good, they will respect you more and work harder. 

Focus on trust

Piggybacking off the previous point, if you want your business to succeed, you need to focus on building trust. Trust is another form of love and having it in the workplace is essential. You need to be able to trust your employees to do a good job and to be strong and independent. In turn, your workers need to trust that you will guide them, keep them safe, and provide for them. Without trust, even the strongest organizations and relationships will falter. The workplace, for most people, is historically a difficult environment to inspire trust in.

Many of us have been burned in the past by employers and coworkers alike and it can be hard to open up and trust again. Trust is something that often needs to get earned, and in a high-pressure working environment, there’s often not enough time for that. Instead of adding to the barriers of trust, why not start with trust at work? Start by assuming that everyone you meet has good intentions and that everyone is here to achieve the greater good. Assuming that everyone you meet is a capable and mature professional will do wonders in fostering trust. 

While cultivating this mindset can be hard, especially for the skeptics, it’s essential for success. Sometimes in life, as well as business, you need to be the one who extends the olive branch first. Extending trust to your fellow coworkers and employees will help inspire them to trust you as well. Love and trust are two-way streets but you can’t cross someone down it until you meet them halfway. A working environment devoid of fear and full of trust is the key to growing your company. 

Practice generosity

While learning how to be firm in the workplace is important, learning how to be generous is even more so. In the workplace, most people often adopt the mindset of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. Although this may be the easier route, it does nothing to support love and trust in the workplace. This mindset will also not give you the progress you want for your company, as it will always hinge on the other person “scratching your back” first. The trick to growing your business is to practice generosity and to “scratch first, ask questions later”.

Reprogramming yourself to put others first and practicing generosity can be hard, but you have to stick it out. A kind gesture, a word of encouragement, or a good review could mean the world to someone else. Once you start spreading this positivity, it will make its way back to you in no time! Although it is important to be helpful and generous not in the hopes that it will come back to you, but simply because you want to help. 

Learn to make the pleasure of lending others a helping hand enough motivation for you. Be generous to your higher-ups, coworkers, and employees and you’ll find your business to be a better, kinder, and more productive one for it. Treat others as you would want to be treated and be generous where you can. 

Lead with gratitude

Last but not least, love in the workplace needs gratitude, and ample amounts of it. In today’s modern world, it’s easy to get sidetracked and bogged down at work, unable to remember what you’re thankful for. Gratitude and acknowledgment help you grow both as a person and business owner, and you need them to grow your business too. Whether you work in a small startup or own a large multinational company, there is plenty to be thankful for! If you want to grow a strong and successful business you have to start every step with gratitude first. 

Start by putting your attention to everything that you’re grateful for from your family to your job to everything in between. Instead of counting down the hours till the end of your shift, why not be thankful for the time you have? Instead of dreading your to-do list at work, see it as an opportunity to learn and grow. Instead of hating your job and everything in it, be thankful that you have a job and job security at all! Appreciation and gratitude are contagious, and once it starts they can’t be stopped!

It’s easy to take things for granted when you never stop to smell the flowers. Again, you don’t have to fall in love with your work to appreciate what it provides for you. A little gratitude goes a long way to inspire a positive mindset and work environment. Make an effort to be more thankful and mindful of the good things, and your life and business will prosper. Whether your gratitude stems from your faith, loved ones, or the universe, remember to extend it to your employees and workplace. 

So there you have it! With this guide in mind, you not only understand the importance of love in the workplace but also how to implement it. Start by adopting a service mindset and by becoming more compassionate to your work and coworkers. Learn how to be firm but fair and how to incite respect without fear by forging trust within your company. Focus on being more generous in how you approach your job and remember to lead with gratitude. Keep all of these points in mind and your business is sure to flourish the right way!