Leadership: The Love Cycle

Someone asked me recently what my leadership style is. I gave them the honest answer, and I watched them try to reconcile it with what they expected from a guy who spent decades in the military. My style comes down to three things: love of learning, love of improvement, and love of people. I call it the Love Cycle. Yes, I know how that sounds.

Why Love?

The word makes people uncomfortable in a professional context, especially when it comes from someone with a background built on discipline, hierarchy, and consequence. That discomfort is exactly why I use it. Softer words don’t carry the same weight. “Engagement” is an HR term. “Investment in people” sounds like a budget line. Love means something. It implies commitment without condition and attention without agenda. That’s what I’m describing.

The cycle works because each element feeds the next. Learning sharpens my ability to improve. Improvement requires understanding people. Understanding people deepens the learning. It’s not a linear model with a starting point and an endpoint. It’s a loop that runs as long as you keep it running.

Learning as Competitive Advantage

Every person on a team is a different system. What motivates one person actively demotivates another. What one person calls a growth opportunity, someone else experiences as exposure to failure. You cannot manage around that complexity by applying a standard framework. You have to learn it, person by person, and that learning never really finishes.

I lean into that. I want to know what someone is trying to build in their career, what they find draining, what kind of recognition actually lands with them, and where they feel underutilized. That information is not soft intelligence. It is operational intelligence. A leader who doesn’t have it is flying without instruments and calling it confidence.

The same discipline applies at the organizational level. Learning what the organization needs from the team, what the customer actually wants, what the environment is demanding right now. The leaders who stop learning at scale are the ones who eventually get surprised by things they should have seen coming.

Improvement as the Point

Learning without improvement is just accumulation. The cycle only generates value when it converts knowledge into change, at the individual level and at the organizational level simultaneously.

For individuals, this means figuring out how to align what they want for themselves with what the organization needs from them. When that alignment exists, you don’t have to manufacture motivation. You just remove obstacles. The work is real, the growth is real, and the person stays. When the alignment doesn’t exist, the honest move is to help them find where it does, even if that means somewhere else.

For the organization, improvement means using what I’ve learned from the team, the customer, and the environment to actually change how we operate. That requires the willingness to be wrong about current approaches, which is easier to sustain when learning is already a habit.

People as the Whole Point

None of this functions without genuine investment in people. Not the performative kind, not the kind that gets put in a slide deck about culture. The kind where you actually remember what someone told you three months ago and follow up on it. The kind where you notice when someone has gone quiet in a meeting and you make time to find out why.

The military gave me a clear view of what happens to organizations when that investment disappears. Mission clarity is not a substitute for it. Shared hardship is not a substitute for it. The units and organizations that functioned best, under the worst conditions, were the ones where people believed the person leading them actually gave a damn about them as people, not just as capacity.

That belief doesn’t transfer through policy. It transfers through repeated, small, consistent acts of attention. That’s the work. It takes longer than most leaders want to spend on it. It pays off in ways that don’t show up on a quarterly dashboard and show up unmistakably everywhere else.

The Juxtaposition Is the Point

I am aware that “Love Cycle” is not standard leadership vocabulary for someone with my background. I’m also aware that tough, results-driven leadership and genuine care for people are not in tension. The assumption that they are is one of the more expensive mistakes organizations make.

The leaders I have respected most were not soft. They held high standards, made hard calls, and did not protect people from consequences. They also knew every person on their team, cared about what happened to them, and created the conditions for people to do the best work of their careers. That combination is not rare because it’s hard to achieve. It’s rare because people decide too early that it’s a contradiction.

It isn’t. The Love Cycle is how I lead. It works.