Why The Best Leaders Make Love a Top Priority with Matt Tenney [Guest Post]

Love in business is a concept as new as it is old. For years, organizations have built their business on the simple foundation of servant leadership. Businesses that operate in this way, with a focus on their employees as their top priority, have found growth not only in profit but also in the way their employees show up every day.

Matt Tenney, social entrepreneur and the author of Serve to Be Great: Leadership Lessons from a Prison, a Monastery, and a Boardroom, recently covered this topic in a TEDx Talk entitled, “Why the Best Leaders Make Love a Top Priority.” I was able to interview Matt for a deeper look into this concept of leading with love.

At one point you were a monk, and then you transitioned to being a social entrepreneur. What facilitated this transition?

There were a couple of reasons I decided not to fully ordain as a monk for the rest of my life, both based on a desire to be of greater service to others.

First, although for most people the idea of being a monk for life would sound crazy, that way of living actually sat really well with me. I was fine with the ideas of never owning anything again and never having a romantic relationship again. In fact, that way of life was too comfortable for me. I knew that if I wanted to grow the most, and thereby be of better service to others, I needed to challenge myself by trying to live and train essentially as a monk, but out in the “real world.”

Second, it occurred to me that to most effectively help others, it would be better to be more relatable. If a monk gives a layperson advice, I think, to some degree, it’s taken with a grain of salt. People think, “I’m not sure what works for you would work for me. Your life is so simple. You just meditate all day and do some simple chores. I have two kids, a demanding job, etc.”

I believed that if I could apply the monastic way in the “real world,” both personally and professionally, I would be much better able to help others achieve the same results I was achieving.

So, I decided to live and train as a layperson.

But I wasn’t interested in much other than serving others as directly as possible, so I naturally started seeking out ways to apply my skills and experiences to serving, and ended up co-founding and leading a small nonprofit, and then another.

I have been a social entrepreneur ever since.

It seems that a lot of companies have a difficult time making love the top priority. Why do you think this is? The evidence for the benefits of taking good care of employees seems to be overwhelming, but very few companies seem to do this. What’s holding them back?

There are a lot of reasons that companies fail to prioritize people over profit.

In some cases, sadly, it’s because owners and senior leaders are greedy and self-serving and only care about enriching themselves. However, I think this only accounts for a small percentage of profit-focused companies.

I believe that the vast majority of leaders want to prioritize people over profit, but there are many forces conspiring to thwart their aspirations.

In the case of most publicly traded companies, leaders face tremendous pressure from the board of directors to maximize stock performance. Sadly, most shareholders have no connection to a company other than the stock certificates they own. They’ve never met a single employee in the company. The company is essentially numbers on an exchange listing to them.

As a result, they only care about whether those numbers are going up or down. And, they want them to be going up every quarter. Thus, most boards hire and incentivize senior leaders based on their abilities to make those numbers go up every quarter.  A couple of bad quarters and leaders start losing their jobs.

That type of pressure to hit the numbers in the short term makes it extremely hard to do things necessary to create a culture that drives long-term success, a people-first culture.

But all leaders face pressure to hit the numbers to some degree.

And the bulk of conditioning all leaders have received their entire lives has likely been to prioritize winning, or hitting goals, over loving well. This just seems to be what our modern culture values most, especially in the business world.

This conditioning to focus on goals and winning is not easy to overcome, and it hinders our ability to love well.

What is something any company can do right this second to start transforming their culture to be more focused on loving employees?

Start measuring how well leaders are loving employees, and make positive results a part of the requirements for promotions and bonuses.

One of the well-known business axioms is: “What gets measured gets done.”

Most companies are great at measuring sales, COGS, overhead, gross margins, net income, etc. However, very few have effective ways of measuring how well leaders take care of employees.

Although it’s very difficult to create binary metrics—the best metrics to use—for measuring how well leaders love employees, a Likert scale measurement is fairly easy.

The company just needs to create a list of behaviors that indicate a leader is loving employees, and get anonymous feedback from her or his direct reports.

Some examples include:

• My leader ensures I have everything I need to succeed in my job.
• My leader helps remove obstacles that inhibit my performance.
• My leader cares about my professional development.
• My leader cares about my personal development.
• My leader cares about how happy I am work.
• My leader cares about how happy I am away from work.
• My leader is present with me when we interact.
• When I speak with my leader, I feel heard.
• My leader has a positive impact on my emotional state.

What are some examples of major companies, other than Southwest, that make loving employees the top priority?

There are many, many companies that work to make loving employees one of the top priorities or the top priority.

Most of these companies explicitly state that they practice a form of leadership called servant leadership— a style of leadership in which leaders work to serve all stakeholders, not just owners, with a heavy focus on employees—or something very similar.

Not coincidentally, many of these companies end up becoming among the best places to work—and highly successful as a result.

As Ben Lichtenwalner pointed out on his blog a couple of years ago, five out of the Top 10 companies to work for from Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For practice servant leadership.

The following seventeen organizations from Fortune’s list are also companies working to practice servant leadership, even if imperfectly (which most of us do):

• SAS (#1 on the list of Best Companies to Work For)
• Wegmans Food Market (3)
• com (6)
• Nugget Market (8)
• Recreational Equipment (REI) (9)
• Container Store (21)
• Whole Foods Market (24)
• QuikTrip (34)
• Balfour Beatty Construction (40)
• TD Industries (45)
• Aflac (57)
• Marriott International (71)
• Nordstrom (74)
• Men’s Wearhouse (87)
• CH2M Hill (90)
• Darden Restaurants (97)
• Starbucks (98)

Matt, you mentioned that you had a deeply transformative experience that led you to make love your top priority. If you don’t mind sharing, what was that experience and why was it so significant?

There were actually several such experiences and a gradual transformation that occurred over time.

But in the TEDx talk, for the sake of simplicity since I only had 9-minutes, I was referring to the most impactful transformative experience, which was the most significant turning point.

About one year into my time in confinement, I started learning about and practicing mindfulness.

Within about six months of starting the practice, mindfulness allowed me to realize unconditional happiness in a place that most people would consider close to hell on earth.

I had been learning about the practice principally from monks, who devote their entire lives to living and training in mindfulness.

Since what they taught was so powerful and effective for me, I decided to adopt as many of the monastic disciplines as possible, and essentially ordained as a novice monk, along with a friend who practiced very intensively as well.

The heart of the monastic path is to devote oneself entirely to being of benefit to others and cultivating unconditional love for all people.

So, the deeper I went along the monastic path, the more I made cultivating love my top priority. This was the gradual transformation I was referring to above.

However, a little more than two years into my time in confinement, there was a particularly powerful and transformative experience that occurred, which is what I referenced in the TEDx talk.

I had been practicing mindfulness very intensively in a solitary setting. During one particular period of practicing mindfulness while sitting still, the ego suddenly dissolved entirely.

I had a very deep insight into the truth that, while conventionally we are clearly all separate people walking around, the deeper reality is that we are so interconnected, it is essentially impossible to see any real separation between us.

It became so clear why love is the universal truth in our world.

It is because your well-being and my well-being are so deeply interconnected, they’re essentially the same thing. Helping you is helping me.

Having seen this very deeply, it also became clear that there is absolutely nothing more important in this life than to love well, serve others, and spend as much time as is necessary to improve our capacity for loving well and effectively serving others.

Love, and training to love better, have been the top priorities in my life, by far, ever since.

About Matt Tenney:

Matt is an international keynote speaker, a trainer, and a consultant with the prestigious Perth Leadership Institute, whose clients include numerous Fortune 500 companies. He works with companies, associations, universities, and non-profits to develop highly effective leaders who achieve lasting success by focusing on serving and inspiring greatness in the people around them. Matt envisions a world where the vast majority of people realize that effectively serving others is the key to true greatness. When he’s not traveling for speaking engagements, he can often be found in Nashville, TN. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.