I Will Not Abuse You to Get What I Want
What love-based leadership actually looks like
Some of the most dynamic leaders I’ve ever met are also the most dangerous.
They command a room. Their teams deliver fantastic short-term results. But it comes with a hidden cost. They are so laser-focused on the outcome that they grind through people like a wood chipper, and they end up sacrificing the one thing they’ll eventually need most: trust.
Leaders who break trust in the process of “success” are trading long-term strength for short-term output. They usually don’t realize what they broke until the best people quietly leave, hard-earned knowledge walks out the door, and the culture turns transactional out of fear.
I’ve watched it happen too many times to stay quiet about it.
30 Years of Watching the Difference
For more than 30 years, I’ve worked alongside wood chipper leaders and world-class ones, sometimes in the same organization. What separated the great ones wasn’t talent, or vision, or even experience. It was the way they carried responsibility.
That’s the heart of servant leadership, and I won’t go deep on the framework because you’ve likely heard it before. The punchline is this:
Servant leadership is love expressed through responsibility. It’s choosing to carry the weight so the people around you can do their best work without living in fear.
That’s why a moment from Simon Sinek’s 2014 TED Talk still sticks with me. He opens with Captain William Swenson, a moment caught on a GoPro in the middle of a firefight. Swenson bends over a wounded soldier, and before turning back into the chaos, he pauses and kisses him on the forehead.
A small act. Everything communicated: you are not just a tool to me.
Sinek’s point is that safety changes everything. And he’s right.
But I remember thinking, that kind of safety doesn’t come from a process or a framework. It comes from love. Not love as a Hallmark word. Love as a real posture that says, “I will not abuse you to get what I want,” and “I am going to find ways to help you succeed.”
Safety is the fruit. Love is the root.
Leadership Is Under Attack, and Almost Nobody Is Stopping It
Leaders and companies are accelerating in the wrong direction, chasing short-term outputs by grinding people down, quietly sacrificing the one thing that sustains real long-term results in any organization: trust.
You can watch it play out in every org that keeps “winning” while silently bleeding its best people. When those people leave, they take with them the institutional knowledge, the earned credibility with customers, and the resilience that carries a team through hard seasons. That reservoir of trust takes years to build and minutes to destroy.
Gartner found that employees are 4.3x more likely to trust leaders who explain their decisions, and 6.5x more likely to trust leaders who genuinely care about their concerns. In that same research, 79% of employees reported low trust in change.
So when people say psychological safety is a soft concept, I just shake my head. Harvard Business Review has made it a serious performance conversation because teams don’t take smart risks, admit mistakes early, or challenge bad ideas when they’re afraid of what happens if they do.
The research is consistent: creativity, honesty, and real collaboration are significantly higher where safety is present.
Safety is table stakes. When people believe you won’t punish them for telling the truth, and that you will protect them from unnecessary harm even if it costs something short-term, they stay in the game. They speak up early. They protect customers. They solve problems before those problems become crises.
That’s not soft. That’s the foundation every high-performing team is actually built on.
The System Forces the Wrong Choice
I’ve talked to a lot of executives who are genuinely discouraged right now. They’re being asked to make decisions that cost real people real stability, and sometimes those people aren’t poor performers. They’re your best ones.
Leaders who actually care don’t want to treat humans like inventory. Some are hitting a point where the internal friction is too high, because they’re being told to prioritize the business ahead of people and ahead of customers, and everything starts to feel transactional.
When you live inside that long enough, it doesn’t just tax your calendar. It taxes your soul.
This is why some leaders resign without knowing what’s next. They can feel what the culture is becoming, and they don’t want to be shaped into someone they don’t respect.
And here’s what most companies miss: when you force a leadership culture to choose between results and people, you don’t actually get results. You get results-shaped activity, and a trail of quiet damage that shows up later as attrition, silence, risk aversion, and a customer experience that slowly decays because the people closest to the customer stopped feeling safe enough to speak up.
Three Things You Can Do This Week
No big program. No new tools. Just a simple test you can run right now.
1. Pick one decision and explain it clearly. Not PR language. Not vague leadership fog. The real reason. The real tradeoffs. The real “why.” Trust is built in the moments when leaders are honest about what’s actually happening.
2. Ask one question that proves you care about people, not just output. “What is this costing you right now?” “What are you carrying that I’m not seeing?” “What do you need from me to do your best work without burning out?”
Then listen without fixing, defending, or rushing.
3. Make one protective move. Remove one unnecessary pressure point. A meeting that doesn’t need to happen. A deadline that isn’t real. A policy that’s crushing people. A standard that nobody can clearly explain.
Do one thing this week that signals: you are not just a tool to me.
That’s it. That’s where trust begins to rebuild.
The Trade, Named Plainly
Love-based leadership creates safety. Safety creates trust. Trust creates speed. When trust is high, you don’t need constant defensive meetings or political protection. You get clarity, honesty, and ownership. Those are the real performance multipliers.
And to be clear: this is not coddling. Love doesn’t mean lowering standards. Love means raising standards while refusing to dehumanize the people you’re asking to meet them.
That combination is rare, and it’s why the leaders who practice it become the leaders people will follow through anything. If you lead by fear, you may get compliance, but you will lose trust.
If you lead by love, you will build safety, and safety will produce the kind of trust that holds when conditions get hard.
That’s the trade. It’s worth choosing on purpose and this is a true… Leader Unlock!
Ready to go deeper?
You don’t have to carry this alone. If you’re a leader working through the weight of the decisions in front of you, I’d love to connect. Become a paid subscriber to get full access to the Leader Unlock library, join the Founders Circle for a free 30-minute 1:1 call with me directly, or consider working with me on an ongoing basis.
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Real leadership isn’t about results alone. It’s about protecting your people and earning their trust