"Human beings are essentially love made manifest."
I offered this idea to a friend and colleague recently, and his response was immediate: "That's a beautiful thought, but it doesn't describe the leaders I'm coaching."
He wasn't wrong. And yet.
This view isn't some new-age, self-help fad. It's been woven into the fabric of human wisdom for the last two and a half millennia. Plato wrote that love is the "drive towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."¹ Rumi, the renowned 13th-century Sufi mystic, wrote that "love is the bridge between you and everything."² Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic, wrote that "the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one, and this one ground is love."³ And then, of course, there is modern psychology. Viktor Frankl, the renowned concentration camp survivor, wrote that "love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. It is the highest human value, which he should be willing to fight for and endure hardship for, because it is the only thing that gives life its meaning."⁴ Carl Rogers, the famous psychologist, founded his entire approach on the idea of “Unconditional Positive Regard,” which he later stated meant love.
So if this wisdom is so deep and so wide, my colleague asked the obvious question: "Why aren’t leaders embracing wise leadership and transcendent leadership? Why does it feel so foreign?"
The Problem with "Love"
Use the word love in a boardroom, and watch the room change. Heads turn. Eyes dart sideways. Someone coughs. The word has too much baggage—love, romance, sentiment, softness, vulnerability. Leaders hear the word love and think Hallmark cards, not bottom-line results.
But here it is to them, the ancient Greeks were far more exacting than we are. They had various words for love, each referring to a different phenomenon. The most cited of these for leadership is Agape (ἀγάπη)—unconditional, selfless love that applies to all of humanity regardless of circumstance.⁶ This is not about being warm and fuzzy about your direct reports. It is a basic orientation toward the flourishing of others. Yet Agape is what a leader projects on another person.
And before a leader can project Agape, they must first establish Philautia (φιλαυτία)—self-love.⁷ In a sense, love radiates from a leader who has established self-love.
My colleague raised an eyebrow. "Isn't self-love just narcissism wearing a better outfit?"
The Spectrum: Self-Love to Narcissism
This is arguably the most crucial difference a leader can make.
Self-love and narcissism are on a continuum. The space between the two is huge. On one end of the continuum lies the grounded leader who has a realistic sense of his or her worth and limitations and feels secure. On the other end lies the narcissistic leader who has an inflated sense of his or her importance and is actually insecure, needs admiration to the point of exploitation of others, and has no empathy for others whom he or she has hurt.⁸
Once you understand what you are looking for, it is easy to identify the narcissistic leader. They will accept credit for the work of others. They will resent criticism. They will become angry if challenged. They will maintain their position of power not to move the organization forward, but to feed their ego.
That’s not what real self-love looks like: it's quieter. More stable. Less hungry.
Studies by W. Keith Campbell and colleagues have shown that narcissistic leadership initially seems to work well at first—narcissists often are charismatic and confident—but the damage to team performance, trust, and psychological safety is ultimately worse.⁹ The short-term dazzle gives way to long-term damage.
The Lantern Metaphor
Here’s what I have learned about transcendent leadership: it is something you cannot project onto others. You cannot offer love from a place of emptiness. What you have not cultivated, you will not act out there.
The same is true for leaders. Before you can lead with love, you must draw back the curtain on your own foundation. You have to be aware of the love that already exists within you. That’s you if the philosophers and mystics are correct.
That’s why I employ the analogy of the lantern. A lantern doesn't strain to illuminate. It simply is light. Its nature does the work.
The transcendent leadership journey, simply, is the transition from doing leadership to being a leader. From presence as performance to presence as emanation. The leader, who nurtures true self-love, becomes a lantern in the darkness, not through effort, but through essence.
And when others in the organization start to echo that presence? The culture doesn't just change. It begins to resonate.
Leaders Who Lead with Love
This isn't theory. We have evidence.
Alan Mulally, the former head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and later the CEO of Ford Motor Company when it was on the brink of collapse, traced his leadership principles to the lessons learned about love when he was a child. Mulally's "Working Together" management approach is based on psychological safety, openness, and caring about people. When Mulally joined Ford in 2006, the automaker was losing billions. He turned it around without any bailout money from the US government. He achieved this through a culture that made vulnerability safe and collaboration a requirement.
Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison without any bitterness in him. He chose reconciliation over revenge. His leadership in post-apartheid South Africa was an exercise in Philautia, loving even those who had oppressed him and his people.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy was explicitly rooted in Philautia, and he used the work of theologians such as Paul Tillich and Anders Nygren to express his own philosophy of love as an active principle within himself and a mindset of goodwill towards all people, including his enemies.¹² His leadership changed a nation.
Satya Nadella, who took over as the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, has been very vocal about how his love for his son, who was born with severe cerebral palsy, changed his perspective on empathy and leadership. During his tenure, the culture of Microsoft changed from one of competition to one of collaboration, and the market value of the company went up by over a trillion dollars.¹³
These aren't soft leaders. They are among the most consequential of their generations.
The Obstacles: Why Leaders Resist
And yet resistance persists. In my experience, it clusters around several core beliefs.
Love equals weakness. This may be the most prevalent resistance to leading with love. There are too many leaders who fear that if they lead with love, they will be perceived as weak. And if they are weak, they do not have power. However, there is little supporting data to back up this fear. First, there is the research done by Kristin Neff on self-compassion, which shows that self-compassion leads to resiliency, motivation, and honesty with oneself, all qualities that leaders need more of. Second, there is the research done by Brené Brown on vulnerability, which shows that vulnerability is not a weakness but rather “the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change."¹⁵
Transactional thinking. Many organizations remain stuck in a transactional framework: employees are paid, and that transaction exhausts the relationship. This attitude transforms humans into gears of a machine. People are reduced to interchangeable, expendable, fundamentally mechanical. It disregards everything we understand about motivation, meaning, and the psychological needs that shape whether people perform at a high level or merely show up.¹⁶ Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory indicates autonomy, competence, and relatedness, not merely compensation, drive human performance.¹⁷
Ego! Every leader needs some ego. In the total absence of it, you’d never get out of bed, never take risks, never assert a vision, and never withstand criticism. Whether ego serves the organization or vice versa? Leaders need to ask themselves: "Do I consider myself the smartest person in the room?" "Do I give orders or invite collaboration?" "Am I in service to a mission or is the mission in service to me?" These questions reveal how far you are on the self-love to narcissism continuum.
The control illusion. The command and control leadership style is hard to kill because it provides a reassuring illusion that if I control all decisions, I can control all outcomes. But this fantasy extracts a brutal cost. Micromanagement burns people out. Leading exclusively by Key Performance Indicators treats human beings as data points. The leader who cannot delegate, cannot trust, cannot release control, will eventually find themselves alone atop an organization that has stopped innovating, stopped caring.¹⁸
The Practice of Self-Love
How does one do this? How does a leader transition from intellectual agreement to lived reality?
The truth of the matter, is that it is not easy. Self-love is not an end result, but a process. It is hard work, and it is hard work on many different levels, from learning about yourself, to creating boundaries to take care of yourself, to changing your thoughts from negative to positive, to putting self-care first, to learning to recognize vulnerability as a strength, to reveling in your successes without watering them down, to staying connected to people who help you grow, and many other things.¹⁹This is not self-indulgence. It is the foundation upon which all other leadership capacities are built.
When you neglect your inner well-being, you lead from depletion. Your patience thins. Your empathy contracts. Your decisions become reactive rather than thoughtful. You start managing your anxiety rather than inspiring your people.
That is, unless you focus on yourself and your own well-being. Something else happens. You are the lantern. Not in the sense that you are trying to be the lantern. You are the lantern simply in the sense that you are the lantern. The love that you have created inside of you spills out to other people. That is the way that you listen to other people. That is the way that you challenge other people. That is the way that you support other people. That is the way that you hold other people accountable.
That is the paradox of transcendent leadership: it requires that you turn inward so that you can turn outward.
Becoming the Lantern
I think often about what it would mean if more leaders understood themselves as love made manifest—if they took the wisdom of Plato and Rumi and Eckhart and Frankl and Rogers seriously.
Not as sentiment. Not as softness. But as a foundation.
What kind of organizations do we actually create? We actually create organizations that are a function of the level of consciousness of our leaders. Leaders who lead from a place of fear create cultures of fear. Leaders who lead from a place of scarcity create cultures of hoarding. Leaders who lead from a place of ego create cultures of competition that eat themselves from within.
But leaders who have actually done work on themselves, leaders who have actually cultivated self-love within themselves, leaders who have actually cultivated a shift from presence to loving presence, actually create cultures of flourishing. The journey is demanding. The resistance is real. The ego will fight for its survival.
But the lantern is there, waiting to be uncovered.