How To Unleash The Most Powerful Force In Business

In Marcus Buckingham’s latest book, Design Love In: How To Unleash The Most Powerful Force In Business, he details the one hidden skill at the heart of all the best leaders today—and what you can do in your own working life to cultivate it.

The skill is leading lovingly—what Buckingham calls Design Love In (DLI). Being a leader, whom people say they love working for and for whom they’d walk through walls. A leader who gets the absolute best out of their employees and who builds the kind of team employees desperately want to be on.

“Love fuels our resilience, sparks our creativity, and bonds us together as collaborators,” shares Buckingham. “Love means a passionate commitment to something or someone. Love means deep loyalty. Love is advocacy. And, of course, love can also be hard-edged, hence ‘tough love.’”

Buckingham recommends leaders create experiences that:

Make employees feel bigger.
Allow employees to feel safe enough to open up.
Help employees flourish.

Further, Buckingham explains that authenticity in a leader breeds confidence in the followers. That is because authenticity is the cousin of predictability, and predictability is the foundation of followership.

Finally, the book demonstrates how love—the deep connection that makes people feel seen, valued, and inspired—isn't just a soft feeling. It's a measurable driver of performance and growth. Specifically, you’ll learn how leaders, as experience-makers, can intentionally "design love in" to everything they do: interactions with team members, company policies and practices, the products and services and as mentioned above, the experiences they create for those they lead and serve.

“When we do this, we not only unlock deeper commitment, higher engagement, stronger customer loyalty, and lasting business results, but also we strengthen the human connection between us and create a better world,” says Buckingham.

Featuring vivid stories of global brands, current research, and personal experiences, Buckingham illustrates that tapping into this force is not simply about being more "warm and fuzzy"—it's a concrete strategy of utilizing loving experiences to drive behaviors to drive outcomes. The book provides step-by-step advice on how to "design love in" to all your actions as a leader.

Buckingham is a global researcher and authority on what the most effective leaders and highest-performing people do differently. He is the New York Times best-selling author of two of the most popular business books of all time, First, Break All the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Marcus’ 2019 Harvard Business Review cover article, "The Feedback Fallacy," was recently selected by HBR as one of the most influential articles of the last 100 years. Marcus is the creator of the StandOut strengths assessment and the co-creator of StrengthsFinder.

Learn more about Leading Lovingly from Buckingham.

He currently guides the research agenda of the ADP Research Institute as Head of People + Performance.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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