“Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.”

Wayne Dyer

Valentine’s Day is an ideal time to consider how much love you exhibit to your team and clients. Have you created a warm environment that makes your colleagues genuinely love working with you? Love isn’t something that is relegated only to your personal life. By creating a loving atmosphere at work, you help others achieve happiness and job satisfaction, and you help nourish bonds between people on your team. An article in Harvard Business Review pointed out that employees in workplaces that encouraged affection, tenderness and caring had a better work experience and passed that experience on to others.

Today we explore some ways to feel the love in your business with tips from Steve Farber, a keynote speaker, and leadership expert.

1. Incorporate love into your business model. Think about how you treat your team. Employees mirror how they are treated by their leaders. Do you greet your employees warmly in the morning? Do you take time to ask how they are doing and attentively listen or offer to help? When you do, you help them see that they matter to you. They will pass that caring and kind treatment onto others—including colleagues and customers.
2. Take a few minutes to show your genuine interest. Just like the Golden Rule, demonstrating love in the workplace is no more complicated than treating others how you would like to be treated. Farber encourages leaders to really try and understand the people around them, including colleagues, employees, clients and vendors. Spend five minutes chatting about their weekend or upcoming plans. Talk about the hometown team that won big (or bombed) over the weekend. It doesn’t take much to cultivate a loving atmosphere that overflows with warmth, openness and accessibility.
3. Be the person who exudes love in your workplace. Start today by ensuring that love is part of your business model. Farber says it’s easy to do when you build in extra time for people to talk to each other. Seek ways to humanize the interactions around you. Do this in business meetings but also check in on people and see how they’re feeling. Don’t just send an e-mail but drop by in person when you can and take a sincere interest in hearing about their lives. Instead of thinking of your own to-do list and what you need to accomplish, invest your time in the people who need you. Be the kind of leader who loves his or her work and mission, and you stand one step closer to being the kind of company people love doing business with.

While you might not normally think love has a place in business, leaders who express love will get love in return. A little bit of kindness and appreciation goes a long way at building a team that remains loyal, respects each other and trusts each other. It’s up to the leader to set a loving tone, so consider some ways you can demonstrate love today.

Source: Steve Farber, founder of The Extreme Leadership Institute, is a popular keynote speaker and leadership expert. He’s the bestselling author of The Radical Leap, The Radical Edge and Greater Than Yourself.

Compiled by Audrey Sellers from Promotional Consultant Today.