What's love got to do with it?

Mary showed us Love as a leadership code, a force capable of shaping worlds, but to understand what it asks of us, we must first see the cultural landscape of leadership it enters.

A 2025 linguistic analysis of job descriptions found that “manage” appears in 80 percent of leadership roles, “control” in 40 percent, while “love” or “care” surface in under 3 percent. Across two decades of Harvard Business Review articles, fewer than twenty include the word “love.” Even our dictionaries and AI models define leadership through influence and management through control, with love entirely absent from the architecture of institutional language.

In the sites of public life where we most often locate leadership - politics and corporate life - our culture struggles to imagine Love as part of it. Leadership there has narrowed into oversight, optimisation, and control.

But it has not always been this way. When we look older and wider forms of leadership - chiefs, elders, queens, warrior-guardians - we find a wider palette. Authority could be brutal, yes, and often undemocratic, but it also carried threads of devotion, inspiration, and a sense of being chosen by lineage, by community, by the gods. People followed because they believed something lived in that person worth following. Even when the systems were flawed, the idea that leadership involved spirit, duty, or moral force mattered.

We had the chance to evolve beyond the harm while carrying forward the depth, to transcend the brutality and keep the potency, but instead we flattened everything into a disenchanted form of leadership. We kept control and discarded devotion. We stripped leadership to a single dimension, reward, punishment, efficiency, and in doing so, removed the conditions where Love could live.

So the question becomes: what would it mean to re-enchant leadership by restoring Love as a structural capacity?

I think of capacities like ingredients in a dish. A pinch of this, a dash of that, like a witch stirring a cauldron. Anxiety might be a trace of fear, a wisp of vigilance, a sprinkle of unspent energy. Courage might be desire mixed with fear and a spark of imagination. Different energies made from their own combinations.

Love is one of the most richest dishes we have, a meta-capacity woven from many others. And just as dishes that look similar can emerge from entirely different worlds, think of Korean kimchi jjigae and Russian shchi, Love has many recipes. Yet there are base ingredients that appear again and again across cultures and time:

Forgiveness, the act that makes repair possible.
Devotion, staying in service to what matters.
Integrity, aligning what we are, say, and do.
Passion, the fire that moves life forward.
Care, tending to what needs attention.
Presence, choosing to actually be here.
Humility, softening the ego for the sake of connection.
Courage, acting from truth even when it costs something.
Generosity, giving without keeping score.

If this is at least part of the recipe for Love, and we want leadership infused with Love, then the question becomes how these capacities could be encoded into the places where leadership lives.

Let us imagine it for a moment.

What does care look like in a corporate context?
Would it be a CFO gathering the entire company to apologise for decades of burnout, dissolving punitive performance systems, redistributing power, redesigning the organisation around human wellbeing?

And what does integrity look like in politics?
Would it be a governing party stepping aside because another group could better serve the people?

Can you see it? Me neither.

Because, the architecture of these sites was built from entirely different capacities, and it is structurally incongruent for them to hold the capacities of Love. You can repaint the walls, soften the lighting, even change the language at the door, but the blueprint resists it. The structure still performs the purpose it was made for.

But this does not mean there is no hope. Far from it.
It means we have been looking where hope was never meant to live.

Instead of returning to the sites of leadership that have made the world harder and less human, we can begin where Love is already alive, where it is still palpable:

The home.

The last foundational site of culture where Love has not been exiled.

Try picturing it now.

Forgiveness might be sitting down after an argument and saying, “I’m sorry. Let us start again”.
Presence might be putting the phone face down and turning fully toward the person in front of us.
Generosity might be offering someone rest, taking over the task even when we are tired too.

Can you see it now? Me too.

For many of us this might still be far from the home we grew up in, or even the one we are building, but it is not unimaginable.

And as luck would have it, luck in the old mythical sense, the force that rises to meet us as an ally, the home is not just the only viable place to lead with Love, it is the place that matters most. For the home is where culture re-stories and regenerates.

I have long believed that a new world will not be shaped by what we do, but by who we are becoming. The world we live in now is not an accident. It is the natural result of our collective consciousness, our habits of relating, the ways we see and treat one another. When we shift those inner capacities, the outer world reorganises around them. The future changes because the people shaping it have changed.

And this is not only about parenting.

It is about remembering that leadership is not something we step in and out of. It is not a role waiting for us in a meeting room. It is the quiet, continuous way we move through the world. It shows in how we care for ourselves and those around us, it’s how we speak about and to the other adults in our home, it’s how we meet our responsibilities and contribute to the places and people around us.

What we embody becomes the horizon the next generation grows toward. And the patterns we rehearse in the shelter of our homes become the patterns a civilisation later names as culture. The world does not begin “out there.” It begins in the rooms where we live our ordinary days.

Which is why, in its truest sense, leadership was never really about authority.
It is about the gravity of a life - the way a person’s inner alignment steadies the air around them. Leadership is a quality of being that draws people forward through example.

And this is where Love returns as a radical force.
Not a feeling, but an organising principle - the way a life comes into right relation with itself, with others, and with the world. To lead with Love is to let your way of being become a path others can walk.

To become, in the truest sense, someone worth following.