I just read a post flamboyantly declaring that "#LEADERSHIP IS LOVE!" Really?! Have we all been so blind to such sagacious truths, or is it that academics writing about leadership perhaps need to spend more time "on the shop floor" to ensure they are not losing touch with reality? ;-)

I reckon there is a bit of both. The perennial gap between the armchair and the assembly line is no small matter—but perhaps the deeper issue is that much of what passes for leadership studies has become insufficiently interdisciplinary. We could use a greater dose of political theory, moral philosophy, systems thinking, and the hard-won insights of organizational psychology. These might yield more robust frameworks than pure emotionalism—or, for that matter, pure managerialism.

Often, when someone posits that leadership (or work, or politics, or...) is “#love,” they are tapping directly into a wellspring of 19th-century romantic anti-Enlightenment revisionism, where, to put it too simply, the “heart” was pitted against the “cold rationality” of a mechanistic worldview. Raw emotionality was lifted to moral heights, with heroic individuals allegedly following their hearts while roaming pastoral paradises reminiscent of a reimagined Garden of Eden. Notably, the Augustinian notion of charity, as the love of God—materialized through divine grace in Christianity—was swiftly secularized. Our own subjectively “felt” love became sufficient to guide our actions, and to lead a good life. Hence, rationality was rejected, and, at the same time, the need for any transcendent or shared telos—so integral to the original eschatological formula—conveniently forgotten. Positive psychology, or selfism (as Paul Vitz puts it), became all we need.

Of course, such utopias often prove less than helpful in the real world. Undoubtedly, love—or agape in the sense of Socrates' Symposium—is a powerful force for transcendence, necessary not only to care for ourselves and others, but to sense the very beauty of the good ("kalos kagathos" in Aristotle's writing). Yet it is equally clear that love alone provides a problematic guide for leaders seeking to create just institutions and "#goodorganisations" at scale, pursuing both ethical and productive outcomes.

Perhaps the fundamental tension is this: a personal virtue of love is a necessary but not sufficient condition for responsible leadership. Good leadership—at least in any organization worth its salt—demands that love be embedded and integrated within broader frameworks of practical wisdom (phronesis), institutional character, and collective ecosystemic responsibility. The challenge, after all, is not merely to “care,” but to make hard decisions in conditions of existential and systemic complexity, under constraints that often allow no obvious or benevolent choices.

Indeed, when it comes to practical challenges in organizational leadership, decisions often arise in the midst of radical uncertainty and, more often than not, offer no evident positive option. The supposed clarity of "just love" is shattered by the messiness of pluralistic human systems, where our love for multiple stakeholders or positions (including our own) generates not only complexity but also contradiction. Love not only fails to resolve dilemmas—it often multiplies them. This is precisely where a leader's self-consciousness, systemic awareness, capacity for abstraction from particular to universal, and commitment to the common good become indispensable—not to mention the deep professional and technical expertise required to sustainably intervene in any organizational system. It's no surprise that we find scant robust evidence that "love-based" (however defined) leadership consistently outperforms other models such as transformational, transactional, or authentic leadership on hard metrics. "Relational complexity" is not just about feeling more, but about seeing, diagnosing, and shaping the system as a whole.

‘Leadership is love’ certainly works nicely as a bumper sticker—much like other Simon Sinek or Adam Grant-style pills of “wisdom.” But I fear—by itself—it fails the test of both practice and ethics. And of course, that is no surprise; indeed, practice is likely what most proponents of these theories lack… or perhaps prefer to ignore; and most of them have never worried about their own "ontological grounding". The real challenge is to integrate care, reason, virtue, and the courage to act in a world whose complexities are never resolved by a single principle, no matter how profound.

Originally published: 10.07.2023