Love is not a Personality Type
A brilliant data scientist and business leader I barely knew (we'd met once for a relative few minutes) reached out a few months ago, both to share his overall thoughts on this notion of LOVE as a KPI, and to learn about how I was thinking about the metric inherent in the name. Amidst other things, I've been working through LOVE as a literal KPI in the context of business; in sum to answer the question - if Love was a KPI, how would that metric be derived?
I was more than glad to connect; I thoroughly enjoy processing ideas with people and was especially grateful for his brilliance and deep expertise in data, measurement and related concepts.
For one of these sessions, we met for breakfast to talk shop and a few times during our conversation, as we discussed how a metric could be used by various entities in the ecosystem of an organization, he'd interject:
"Oh, I am not the target for this"
and then would keep speaking.
I smiled.
I smiled because it didn't take more than 3 min of meeting him to discern my (now) friend is every bit a data-minded, analytical, logical, left-brain personality if I ever met one. It was apparent from these interjections that he'd concluded that this Love thing is for a more touchy-feely type. For someone less driven by data. Possibly more aligned with people who are more poetic, emotionally expressive or effusive. And perhaps not for those devoted to the scientific method.
The irony here is this - he, a complete stranger, reached out to me, with no other goal than to help me develop an idea and share his very valuable time and expertise; there with nothing in it for him other than to be of help in furthering something he believed others would benefit from.
This is literally Love
Love as a KPI anchors on the premise that when organizations (and inherently, the people within them) are driven by Love for people - regardless of if those people are categorized as ‘customers’ or ‘employees’ (or 'suppliers'... or 'community members'...) - it exponentially drives the financial, operational and strategic success of the organization. Why? Because those very people are at the helm of the operational, strategic and financial success organizations want.
However because this word, Love, is mired by so many associations (many of which are subconscious), it can trigger some assumptions on what it looks like. But Love as it's meant here doesn't have one 'look'. But it does have one goal.
I, Utibe, am naturally (on average) more perceptive of people's feelings/ needs and I am attuned to high performance. I am relatively informal about many things and I am completely driven towards excellence in all things. I am sometimes high-energy, and sometimes withdrawn, needing silence. I share these few attributes as examples because I've gleaned that these pairs are perceived antonyms (or at the very least, paradoxical), but none of these individual attributes make me more or less loving than the other.
This is true for all of us. What makes us more or less loving is not our personality, but simply our openness to being so. This is the definition we anchor on:
Love is the outcome of the perspective, posture and practice that prioritizes the true needs and betterment of another.
The ability to hold the perspective, assume a posture and to act in a way that is best for the holistic wellbeing of people in an organization is not reserved for any one mythical personality type. It applies to all the MBTI permutations and all DISC profiles. It's for the Reds, Blues, Yellows and the Greens on the Insights Discovery wheel. In the case of my friend, it's Love that he was being to a perfect stranger, but he didn't see himself in the story he was in the center of.
As a leader you can rest assured, that the premise of Love as a KPI, and the promise of what it yields, including deeper employee engagement, greater customer loyalty and increased community advocacy, doesn't only hold true for some vs others.
How we express love may and should differ, but the evidence of love is first found in our perception of people, as our actions flow from there. We know this to be true in our daily lives as we interact with family and friends (or whoever we deem 'loved ones') and so it must be true in our "business lives", because well, the delineation between lives is imaginary.
