What’s love got to do with performance and culture?

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Everything – When It Comes to Performance and Culture

February is Valentine’s month, which makes it a perfect time to talk about love. And before we go any further, let’s clear something up. When we talk about love in organisations, we’re not talking about being soft, sentimental or “nice”. At Heartstyles, we see love as one of the most misunderstood drivers of performance and culture.

In fact, when leaders dismiss love as fluffy, they often miss a powerful performance lever hiding in plain sight.

Love and performance are not opposites

Think about elite sport. High-performing athletes love the game they play. They love the team they belong to. They love the discipline, the challenge, the pursuit of excellence and the feeling of winning. That love doesn’t dilute performance, it sharpens it.

The same principle applies in business. When people genuinely care about the organisation they work for, what it stands for and what it is trying to achieve, they show up differently.

They are:

• more engaged

• more committed

• more resilient under pressure

• more willing to stretch beyond “good enough”

Engagement is not a “feel-good” metric. It is a performance driver.

  Culture starts with how people feel when they show up

Culture isn’t what’s written on the wall or stated in a values document. Culture is the emotional climate people experience every day at work.

Most people, whether consciously or not, are answering three core questions:

• Do I love the organisation I work for?

• Do I love the work I do?

• Do I care about, and feel connected to the people I do it with?

When the answer to those questions is yes, energy, collaboration and ownership increase. When the answer is no, disengagement, defensiveness and apathy creep in. And when that happens, culture and performance both take a hit.

 Love requires trust, and trust accelerates results

One of the most important things to understand about love in organisations is this: love cannot exist without trust.

People are constantly assessing:

• Do I trust the organisation’s values and direction?

• Do I trust the way leaders lead and make decisions?

• Do I trust the capability around me, and in myself?

• Do I trust the intent and character of the people I work with?

At Heartstyles, we talk about trust across culture, capability and character. When trust is strong, commitment deepens. When trust erodes, performance follows.

 The Heartstyles behaviours: love in action

At Heartstyles, love shows up through four key behavioural sets. These behaviours are not soft, they are strategic, deliberate and performance-focused.

Relating
Relating is about truly knowing your people. Understanding what motivates them, how they want to be led and what helps them perform at their best. When people feel seen, heard and valued, engagement rises and so do results.

Encouraging
Encouraging is about recognition, inspiration and belief. When leaders consistently acknowledge effort and progress, people are more likely to repeat the behaviours that drive success and to stretch themselves towards bigger goals.

Developing (including tough love)
Development says, “I care enough not to leave you where you are.”
This is where honest feedback lives. This is where performance conversations happen. Avoiding these conversations doesn’t protect people, it limits them. Tough love, delivered with care, is one of the strongest drivers of growth.

Compassion
Compassion is about listening with an open mind and recognising that people bring different experiences and perspectives. It creates psychological safety, making feedback, learning and collaboration possible. Without compassion, people feel like “just a number”. And when people feel like a number, they disengage.

 When care is present, standards rise

Here’s the paradox many leaders miss:

When people feel genuinely cared for, they don’t lower their standards, they raise them. They want to contribute. They want to grow. They want to perform well, not just for themselves, but for the team and the organisation.

When care is absent:

• engagement drops

• collaboration weakens

• culture deteriorates

• performance declines

 So, what’s love got to do with it?

Everything.

Not the romantic kind. Not the fluffy kind.

The intentional kind.
The kind that builds trust, reinforces accountability and creates environments where people, and performance, can thrive.

That’s where culture and results truly meet.