Stop doing what people don't want done

I recently reread C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves, a book he published in 1960 about the four kinds of love the Greeks identified: Storge (affection), Philia (friendship), Eros (romantic love), and Agape (unconditional, divine love). It is one of those books that reads differently depending on where you are in life. The first time I read it, I was mostly struck by the beauty of the writing. This time around, I couldn't stop thinking about leadership.

Not because Lewis was writing about leadership. He wasn't. He was writing about the human heart and the ways we love and fail to love the people closest to us. But that is leadership. That is the whole thing, actually. Everything else is just org charts and calendar invites.

We reward the wrong things

There is something broken in the way we have organized professional life, and it starts with what we celebrate. We reward people who act as though they don't care about the important things. We celebrate the leader who is "above it all," who never gets emotional, who treats relationships as transactions and human beings as resources. We call that person strategic. We call that person tough.

Meanwhile, we also reward people who care enormously about things that don't matter at all. Titles. Credit. Being seen at the right events. Having the right people in the room. Performing busyness. Performing authority. Performing expertise they don't actually have.

Sincerity gets punished. A leader who admits they don't know something is often perceived as weak. The leader who says "I was wrong" loses credibility in the eyes of people who have never once been right about anything important. The leader who genuinely cares about the people on their team, who loses sleep over whether they're making the right call for someone's career, who takes the time to know what's actually going on in someone's life, that leader is told they're "too soft" or "too emotional" or "too involved."

And the leader who performs caring without actually caring? Who gives the speech about "our people are our greatest asset" while quietly optimizing headcount like it's inventory management? That leader gets promoted.

Something is upside down.

Lewis saw this dynamic clearly, even though he was writing about families and friendships rather than companies. He tells the story of Mrs. Fidget, a woman whose family visibly brightened after she died. She "lived for her family," everyone in the neighborhood agreed. She did all the washing, even though she did it badly and they could afford to send it out, and they begged her to stop. She sat up every night to "welcome" them home, which meant of course that they couldn't go out without guilt. She made hot meals they didn't want. She knitted clothes they had to wear. She controlled the doctor's conversations with her own daughter.

Mrs. Fidget was performing love. She was not loving. She was meeting her own need to be needed and calling it sacrifice. Lewis writes that she continued all these practices because, if she had stopped, she would have faced the fact she was determined not to see: that she was not necessary. And the laboriousness of her life whispered in her ear, "How much I must love them if I do all this!"

I have known leaders like Mrs. Fidget. I suspect you have too. I suspect, if I'm being honest, that I have been Mrs. Fidget at certain points in my own career. Working harder than anyone asked me to, not because the work required it, but because the exhaustion itself was proof of something I needed to believe about myself.

What if the reverse were true?

What if we built organizations and a culture that rewarded sincerity instead of performance? What if we actually valued the leader who keeps their promises over the one who makes impressive ones? What if we promoted the person who shows decorum and courtesy over the one who "tells it like it is," which is almost always just a person who enjoys being cruel and has found a socially acceptable wrapper for it?

What if we rewarded leaders who stopped doing what people don't want done?

That last one sounds strange, but it might be the most important. So much of what passes for leadership is Mrs. Fidget behavior. Unnecessary meetings called to demonstrate engagement. Feedback nobody asked for, delivered with the pretense of "radical candor." Reorganizations that serve the leader's need to feel like they're doing something. All of it exhausting. All of it performed for an audience of one.

Lewis observed that in families, the people who claim they "can say anything to each other" are almost always the ones who say terrible things and call it intimacy. They confuse the liberties that deep affection earns with a license to be careless. "Affection at its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind," he wrote. "In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented."

That sentence should be framed on the wall of every CEO's office. In public, anyone can perform leadership: the speech, the all-hands, the town hall, the LinkedIn post. A ritual will do. But in the actual day-to-day of leading people, in the one-on-ones and the hard conversations and the moments when nobody is watching, you must have the reality that the ritual represented. And if you don't have it, the ritual is worse than nothing. It's a lie.

Friendship and the loneliness of leadership

Lewis believed the modern world had made a catastrophic error in demoting friendship from a primary love to a social convenience. The Ancients considered it the happiest and most fully human of all loves. We treat it as something that fills the gaps in our schedule.

He made a distinction I think about constantly. Lovers, he said, are face to face, absorbed in each other. Friends are side by side, absorbed in some common interest. You don't become someone's friend by staring into their eyes. You become their friend by fighting beside them, reading with them, arguing with them, working beside them on something that matters to both of you.

And then this, which may be the best sentence Lewis ever wrote: "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."

Leadership is lonely. Everyone says this. It has become almost a cliché. But I wonder if it's lonely because we've been taught that it has to be. That the distance between a leader and their people is a feature, not a bug. That "it's lonely at the top" is a law of nature rather than a failure of design.

What if the loneliness is a symptom of having substituted companionship for friendship? Lewis distinguished between the two carefully. Companionship is enjoying each other's company in shared activity. It's the matrix from which friendship can grow, but it is not friendship itself. Friendship begins at the moment when one person says to another, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

Most leaders have plenty of companions. Fellow travelers in the same industry, the same stage of company, the same set of problems. What they rarely have are friends in Lewis's sense: people who share a common vision of the truth, who see the same things as real and important, who would rather be honest than comfortable.

Lewis also warned that the great danger in friendship is pride. A circle of friends can become a "little self-elected aristocracy, basking in the moonshine of our collective self-approval." Sound familiar? I've watched it happen in boardrooms, invite-only events, and industry conferences. People who once came together around shared conviction slowly become a club that exists to be a club. The original vision fades. What remains is exclusivity for its own sake.

The antidote, Lewis argued, is remembering that you did not choose your friends. They were given to you. "The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others."

Love becomes a demon the moment it becomes a God

This is the line from Lewis that I cannot stop turning over in my mind, and it is the one that I think matters most for leaders.

Every human love, Lewis argues, has a tendency at its height to claim divine authority. It tells us not to count the cost. It demands total commitment. It insists that anything done in its name is justified. And the terrifying thing is that this happens not when love is at its worst, but when it is at its best. A shallow, performative love will never claim to be a god. Only the deep, genuine, self-sacrificing kind has enough gravity to pull us into orbit around it.

Think about what this means for leadership. The leader who doesn't care about their company will never be destroyed by it. It's the one who cares deeply, who has poured their identity into the mission, who has sacrificed everything for the vision, who is in the most danger. Not because caring is wrong. Caring is the whole point. But because caring, unchecked, untethered from something higher than itself, will claim your entire life and call the claim righteous.

I have watched founders destroy their health for companies that didn't need them to. I have watched CEOs sacrifice their families on the altar of a mission statement. I have watched leaders become so consumed by their love for what they were building that they lost the ability to see the people standing right in front of them. And the worst part is that the whole time, the culture was telling them this was noble. This was what commitment looked like. This was leadership.

Lewis would say it's idolatry. And he would say that the love which has become a god does not remain love for long. It curdles into something else. Resentment. Control. Bitterness. The founder who "gave everything" to the company and now resents the people who didn't match their sacrifice. The CEO who "lived for the team" and now holds it against them, subtly or not, every single day.

"For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves," Lewis wrote. "They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred."

What it actually means to lead with love

So what does it mean to lead with love? Not the LinkedIn "How great am I?" version. The real version, informed by someone who spent an entire book examining what love actually is, where it goes wrong, and what it requires of us.

It means keeping your promises, not making grand ones, and keeping the ones you've made.

It means practicing courtesy, which Lewis distinguished sharply from manners. Manners are a public performance. Courtesy is the private reality. Courtesy means giving no preference to yourself, not when people are watching, but when they aren't.

It means stopping doing what people don't want done. This is harder than it sounds. It requires the humility to accept that your version of helping may not be helpful. That your sacrifice may be self-serving. That the hot meal nobody wanted is not love.

It means showing up as a true friend, which means caring about the truth more than the relationship, and caring about the person more than the outcome. Lewis said that in a circle of true friends, "each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about any one else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history." What if we brought that spirit into the way we lead? What if the people on our teams were not "direct reports" or "human capital" but simply themselves?

It means living with true humility, which Lewis did not define as thinking less of yourself. He defined it, across all his work, as thinking of yourself less. The humble leader is not the one who makes self-deprecating jokes in the all-hands. It's the one who can receive feedback without defending, who can watch someone else get credit without correcting the record, who can sit in the discomfort of not knowing and not pretend otherwise.

And it means holding your love for the work, the company, the mission, the people, in its proper place. Not as the highest thing. Not as a god. As a good and beautiful thing that will destroy you and everyone around you if you let it become more than it was meant to be.

Lewis compared natural love to a garden. It is no insult to a garden to say it cannot weed itself or prune its own trees. A garden teems with life and beauty that no gardener could have invented. But without tending, it becomes wilderness. "Even for their own sakes," Lewis wrote, "the loves must submit to be second things if they are to remain the things they want to be. In this yoke lies their true freedom; they are taller when they bow."

The same is true for leadership. The leader who holds their mission as the highest good will eventually be consumed by it. The leader who holds it as a good thing, a beautiful thing, but a thing that must bow to something higher, to integrity, to people, to God, to the truth, that leader can sustain the work for a lifetime. And they can do it without losing themselves in the process.

The shape of the gap

Lewis ends The Four Loves with one of the most honest confessions I've ever read. He admits he doesn't know if he has ever truly experienced the highest love, the supernatural love of God. "Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting," he writes. "Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached."

I can't stop thinking about that line. It is easy to imagine the leader you want to be. It is easy to write about it, to talk about it, to build a framework around it. It is another thing entirely to live it on a Tuesday afternoon when you're tired, and someone has just said something that made you furious, and nobody would blame you for reacting badly.

Lewis says that perhaps all experience merely defines the shape of the gap where our love of God ought to be. "If we cannot practice the presence of God, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise."

To know that one is dreaming, he concludes, is to be no longer perfectly asleep.

The same is true for leadership. Most of us are not yet the leaders we imagine ourselves to be. But to know the gap, to feel the distance between what we practice and what we preach, to refuse to paper over it with performance or pretend it isn't there, that is something. Maybe it's the beginning of everything.

What matters is not the title, the stage, the credit, or the performance of caring. What matters is the keeping of promises, the practice of courtesy when no one is watching, the willingness to stop doing what people never asked for, and the humility to hold even our deepest convictions loosely enough that they remain loves and never become gods.

That is leading with love. Not the kind that announces itself. The kind that shows up.