Leading with Love: The Key to Shaping Your Trajectory
Leadership is a journey, with highs and lows, successes and failures. However, two things that can drive a great leader are love and intuition. Leading with love means putting your team first, investing in their growth and well-being, and creating a supportive environment where everyone can thrive. At the same time, trusting your gut and having the confidence and courage to take risks, make tough decisions, and challenge orthodoxy.
These two traits can shape the trajectory of your leadership- changing the way you relate to your team, approach challenges and opportunities, and achieve long-term success. In this interview with Lynne Fuller of College Flight Path, we'll delve into the importance of leading with love and trusting your gut and how they can transform your leadership style and elevate your organization to new heights.
What do you think is your greatest strength as a leader & why?
After taking so many insight tests including the Strong Interest Inventory, Strengths Finder, CDR, Birkman, and Character Trait the clear trait that has been illuminated is: LOVE. I wear a necklace with a small heart on it because it embodies my motto: “lead with love”. It is a constant reminder that if a situation or decision is not speaking to the intersection of my heart, head, and gut then it is not right for me.
We as women are told so often to not trust our instincts or ignore how we are feeling, but that instinct and how our heart feels is guttural…something our bodies were trained to do over thousands of years. So my greatest strength is to lead with love, trust those who carry the same passion for their craft, and when I do, the work I produce, either individually or collaboratively, is at a premium.
What is one characteristic that you believe every leader should embody & why?
Perspective. In any one moment someone is bringing the weight of their world into our shared space. Perhaps their day, week, month, or year has been heavy. My job is to meet my client, colleague, husband, friend, or stranger where they are to help them process what they need, but then also offer tangible steps to help them get unstuck and move forward.
A good portion of my job is counseling - whether it is academic planning, college admissions, postsecondary success or career counseling - but these are all indicative of life stage and changes happening within a family system. Identifying the needs of every player, meeting people where they are, honoring their journey and asking good questions helps elicit the path that becomes clearer for the young adult taking this voyage. Learning how to perspective take, interpret, and process has helped me support students and families navigating what can be a difficult time, not to mention be a better friend, colleague, boss, and wife.
What are the most important decisions you make as a leader of your organization?
The most important decision I have had to make is learning who to build my table with. This year I am scaling and pivoting my business model. It has been scary. But instead of living in fear, I threw open the flood gates to invite those who live this shared perspective. This decision challenged me to carefully navigate who I want to build this new model with.
This has forced me to investigate who will help frame my vision including everyone from the my website developer who feels called to a holistic approach to counseling, to the photographer who has been able to capture the care I put into my work, to the videographer who asked all of the right questions to elicit responses that are personal and impactful to the viewer, to the SEO specialist who is going to optimize and amplify my voice, to the team of counselors and specialists who will do the day to day work with.
This process was intentional and took a long time to foster, but I am thrilled to do this work with people who genuinely love adolescents and young adults who are impassioned by providing equity and access in this space. The journey I have been on these past six months is something I could not have envisioned for myself three years ago before going back to school to gain a masters in school counseling. Now that I am on the precipice of launching this revised vision of how I can support students going forward, the path is absolutely clear: build a team that spreads love and purpose in all that it does.
Meet Lynne: Lynne Fuller is a highly creative and results-driven public and independent school leader who possesses an entrepreneurial spirit, postsecondary vision, drive, and commitment to students’ life journeys. More than twenty-four years of experience leading, developing, and supporting student’s secondary and postsecondary educational and career planning, dedicated to matching students’ gifts with career pathways that embrace growth mindset and fulfill life goals.
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