Warm Hearts
I do not believe there is a class in any business school called “How to Warm Hearts.” But maybe there should be.
I am surrounded by people with MBAs, MOLs, PhDs, and other advanced training in sciences such as business management and organizational leadership. A number of them have been educated in the top business schools in the world. I am always honored when these leaders are eager to hear me teach about leadership . . . but at times, frankly, I wonder why. I am aware that when I teach about the more technical aspects of leadership, I probably seldom say anything that these accomplished men and women haven’t already heard. Even though I too have been formally educated in the discipline of organizational leadership, many of the people I speak to could teach me more than I could ever teach them about any number of leadership activities. Like how to develop a strategic plan, for instance.
I have come to understand that these leaders respond to me because I am somehow able to communicate about the enigmatic qualities of leadership that give life to some otherwise sterile leadership practice. I specialize in warming hearts.
“Strategic planning—and every other leadership practice—is infinitely more effective when people’s hearts are warmed.”
I have sat in far too many strategic planning sessions where I just wished I could lie down on the floor and go to sleep. Maybe forever. But I have also been in many planning sessions—and led them—where the atmosphere was pregnant with destiny, where there was a sense of God’s very presence, an ineffable joy, an awareness of near-limitless possibility. Not only did I not want to nod off, but I could hardly sleep for days after because I was so excited with potentiality.
My guess is that you know just what I mean. Sometimes this has to do with the nature of what is being planned, I suppose. But let’s assume the “I’m wide awake” session and the “I just want to go to sleep” session are about the same positive thing.
A leader must work to create environmental conditions that warm hearts
How often I have coached a sincere and highly credentialed leader after they led a meeting about something that should have had everyone fired up and ready to go, but instead was just another boring meeting. I ask them the most simple—even obvious—questions.
Did you fire up your heart as a part of your preparation?
Did you convey that passion in a way that caused people to feel your heart?
Did you connect this meeting to compelling vision? If not, why did we have it?
Did you think through how to help the participants engage with one another in ways that would help them know each other better and facilitate them being unified in your common cause?
Did you plan fun? And so on.
I have observed that many times when a high-stakes meeting is flat, the results are flat. Why? Because every person needs to come away from a meeting like that not only with knowledge and goals and action items, but also with the passion and the will to do the work. This is a matter of the heart, not the mind.
We must pay attention to the soft side of leadership if we want hard results.
Many leaders are most focused on the information to be shared. They spend their time preparing charts and PowerPoint presentations. They are “let’s get down to business, just the fact, ma’am” Joe Fridays. And they miss people’s hearts. We need to spend time planning appropriate humor—framing every “we’ve got to get better” in positive ways—and sharing heartwarming stories of how what we are doing is changing people’s lives. We must do much more than transmit information. We must impart purpose, desire, love.
Then, of course, there is the preparation of physical space. When people walk into a room, they sense whether or not we have been planning for them. We took great care when we designed our present offices to have spacious meeting rooms with invigorating views, comfortable seating, and the obligatory technological bells and whistles. But you can grab people’s hearts in the simplest environments.
I am thinking about a meeting I led some thirty years ago in a darkish, musty Sunday school room in the basement of an ancient church our young congregation was renting at that time. About ten of us were packed in that room sitting around a table, as I remember it. We were having a planning session about the small groups we were about to launch for the first time in our young history. I was passionate about this and was attempting to share my vision of how this would serve so many people so well. I got so fired up, I jumped up on the table and paced back and forth, pouring my heart out like so much molten lava. Thirty years later, people still talk about that meeting. “Do you remember that day you jumped up on the table . . . ?”
I do not jump up on tables anymore. At least not physically. But I still feel that same passion and I work hard to make sure the people I lead feel my heart burn at every appropriate opportunity. And most of the time, their hearts get warm too. When their hearts warm up, they don’t just stay awake . . . they come alive. They open to possibility. They engage their hearts in our mission. Then all my other leadership efforts become an experience, not just some boring process. Hospitable leaders are experts in warming hearts.
Thinking about meetings you’ve been in, can you remember a “wide awake” meeting experience? Drop a comment and share your story.
Adapted from The Hospitable Leader (Baker Publishing Group) by Terry A. Smith. All rights reserved.
Have you downloaded “The 5 Welcomes of Hospitality” based on the primary leadership methodology of Jesus? There’s no time like the present. Get your download.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash