Years ago, when I was an undergraduate student taking a night class in leadership, one of my adjunct professors told us a story I have carried with me ever since.
The instructor was Dr. Anthony “Tony” Bonanzino, former president and CEO of Hollister-Stier Laboratories, now Jubilant HollisterStier. As I remember Tony telling this anecdote, an executive had made a decision that failed spectacularly. Not “we missed a deadline” or “somebody forgot an attachment” but a decision that cost the company millions.
The executive knew they were finished, so packing up the office seemed obvious. That is, until the CEO walked in, saw the executive packing up, and asked what the hell they were thinking.
As expected, the executive explained the obvious and how their decision had just cost the company millions. The executive assumed termination was the next natural step, so they were simply saving the CEO the trouble by packing up prematurely.
The CEO looked dumbfounded and responded with what I remember Tony saying as, “Now, why would I fire someone I just invested $2 million to train?”
I don’t remember every detail of that story told during a night class two decades ago, but I never forgot that lesson.
People make mistakes, especially smart people. Experienced people, exceptional leaders, and beginners, too.
But leaders often build cultures in which mistakes are treated primarily as evidence of incompetence. As they do, people eventually learn exactly what their leaders taught them: hide, minimize, and deflect. They will defer decisions upward so somebody else owns the consequences. They will stop experimenting and instead, choose the safe idea over the potentially transformative breakthrough.
Eventually, their greatest proficiency become blame avoidance, which doesn’t look so great on a resume.
I’ve always wanted something very different for the teams I lead, so I tell new team members immediately how I not only welcome mistakes of every flavor, but that I encourage them to take risks large enough that failure remains a genuine possibility.
In doing so, I tell them that when making mistakes, I have only one rule:
Never make the same mistake twice.
That rule changes everything. It tells them failure is acceptable while learning is mandatory. Ownership doesn’t disappear when something goes wrong; it actually becomes more important.
Accountability isn’t punishment but means understanding what happened, owning your part in it, extracting everything the experience has to teach, and carrying that lesson forward with you like a badge of honor. Because you earned it.
Success, after all, is rarely built upon an uninterrupted sequence of previous successes. Success is built upon failure examined, understood, and transformed.
Years later, while working on my dissertation on how fathers introduce the concept of leadership to their children, I encountered research that gave me language for something I had already begun to conclude instinctively. Jean Le Camus (1995) studied father-child interactions in aquatic environments and Daniel Paquette (2004) later drew on this work while developing his theory of what he called the father-child activation relationship.
One observation stuck with me.
In infant swimming environments, fathers most often positioned themselves behind their children, orienting the child outward toward the environment. Mothers more often positioned themselves in front, creating greater face-to-face interaction.
I don’t view that as a biological commandment about what mothers and fathers predictably do because human beings are far too gloriously complicated for that. What interested me was what this orientation meant.
Paquette (2004) argued that an important feature of the paternal relationship was helping children become more open to the world by encouraging exploration, introducing manageable uncertainty, allowing risk, and even occasionally destabilizing the child while simultaneously maintaining enough security that the child could safely encounter the unfamiliar.
In this model, the child explores because they know someone trusted is there to protect them if things get too crazy. That image never left me.
One form of love stands in front to protect.
Another walks a few steps behind and says, “Go ahead and try. I’m still here.”
I think today’s leadership desperately needs more of both, but particularly the latter.
When I talk about leading with love, I’m not talking about making work soft, eliminating standards, avoiding difficult conversations, or protecting people from every consequence. That isn’t love.
You open the people you love to the world. You don’t hide them from every bruise and scrape or prevent them from encountering difficulty merely because it’s uncomfortable. You give them the security they need to explore beyond what they already know while letting them struggle, solve, and yes, occasionally fail. You always remain close enough that failure becomes experience rather than exile. That’s a paternal form of leadership that interests me.
Don’t equate this with patriarchal leadership, which is built on hierarchy, obedience, and control. This idea of paternal leadership is closer to stewardship, which accepts responsibility for the development of the people in your charge while refusing to steal their development from them.
Think about our families. We allow family members to make mistakes. We accept that about them without rejecting or disowning them (ideally) while we expect them to learn.
That creates a fundamentally different bond between leader and team.
Leading with love sees unbounded possibility ahead and connects with team members as though they genuinely matter. Such leaders accept responsibility for those in their charge by treating them like family to create unique bonds that can cultivate psychological safety, giving them permission to take risks.
Those risks create a living learning lab that predictably yields stronger competence. More than that, risk generates ownership by converting competence into a form of love-based stewardship that’s fueled by invitation and attraction and not command, control, or force.
The progression looks something like this:
Love creates the bond > Bond fosters psychological safety > Psychological safety permits risk > Risk creates experiential learning > Learning cultivates competence > Ownership converts competence into stewardship.
That last transformation means a hell of a lot more than we often realize.
The Wikipedia Principle
I have long described a version of this phenomenon to my students and team members, calling it The Wikipedia Principle.
In my public speaking book, Messages That Matter, I used a ridiculous albeit semi-truthful case study of a fictional person called Asphalt Aaron.
In this case, Asphalt Aaron is obsessed with the process of asphalt paving. It’s his livelihood, his passion, and practically his reason for waking up in the morning. So, one evening he discovers, to his amazement, that Wikipedia had no such article on his beloved career choice.
That’s when Asphalt Aaron set out to create one. Nobody assigned the work to him, nobody put it in his performance goals, and nobody promised him a bonus. Aaron voluntarily took the time to learn the platform, figure out the rules, research the topic, find sources, write the article, navigate the editorial process, respond to revisions, and eventually witness his masterpiece published live online.
Aaron was pleased — until disaster struck, when his arch-enemy, Concrete Chris, edited Aaron’s beautiful asphalt article to include the utterly dishonest claim that concrete paving was superior.
What happened? Aaron didn’t shrug and say, “Whatever. That’s Wikipedia’s problem now.” To the contrary, that’s Aaron’s article! He was the one who took the time to learn the system and build it. He had to wrestle it through revision and embed his hard-earned knowledge within it. And his decisions shaped it. So when somebody threatened it, Aaron protected it with his very being.
Nobody assigned Aaron stewardship. Stewardship emerged from authorship, which is what we get when people genuinely own and love their work.
The project stops being some thing to complete for someone else. It grows into something that’s uniquely a piece of themselves and what they love doing. Their judgment, their mistakes, and their learning lives within it. Their fingerprints are all over it, and once that happens, leadership requires dramatically less push because you facilitated the pull.
Organizations spend enormous energy and resources trying to manufacture engagement from the outside. We create campaigns, recognition systems, performance goals, values statements, incentive programs, and mandatory innovation initiatives.
We push.
Ownership behaves differently. You can’t command care. You can only cultivate the conditions in which caring becomes possible.
That’s why love belongs in conversations about leadership, no matter how uncomfortable the word may make organizations accustomed to antiseptic language like “human capital,” “resources,” and “headcount.” Love changes the relationship. When people genuinely believe they matter and are cared for, mistakes no longer automatically threaten their sense of belonging.
When belonging feels secure, psychological safety grows, allowing people to take meaningful risks that create learning experiences that stick.
That leads to stronger competence, and when people are permitted to exercise that competence over something they genuinely call their own, ownership turns to stewardship.
They stop asking, “What do you want me to do?”
They begin asking, “What does this need from me?”
And that transition is extraordinary because it sits upon the dividing line between compliance and commitment.
That’s the chasm between merely renting someone’s labor and inviting their whole person into the work, between pushing people forward and creating something with gravity so powerful, it pulls them toward it.
I think back often to that executive packing his office. Imagine what happened psychologically when he learned that his $2 million mistake had not severed his relationship with the organization. I have no doubt his failure still mattered a LOT.
The money was still gone, accountability still had to take place, but the mistake had been transformed from a verdict into an education. Imagine the care with which that executive approached the next major decision. Imagine how unlikely they were to make that mistake EVER again.
Imagine the message everyone else received when they heard that story…
You are allowed to try here.
You are allowed to be wrong here.
You are expected to learn here.
One bad decision will never erase your value here.
Just don’t make the same mistake twice here and all will be forgiven.
That’s psychological safety with teeth. That’s accountability without fear. That’s the guts inside a living learning lab.
And underneath it all is something we rarely allow ourselves to name in leadership literature because the word feels too intimate, too emotional, too difficult to reduce to a KPI.
Love.
Love doesn’t always walk ahead and clear the road.
Sometimes love walks behind and close enough that people know you are there while being far enough away that they’re forced to encounter the world themselves.
When leaders get that distance right, something remarkable happens.
People stop waiting to be pushed and they move toward possibility on their own.
Eventually, what they create becomes something they love fiercely enough to protect.
References
Le Camus, J. (1995). Les interactions père-enfant en milieu aquatique [Father-child interactions in an aquatic setting]. Revue internationale de pédiatrie, 255, 7–17.
Paquette, D. (2004). Theorizing the father-child relationship: Mechanisms and developmental outcomes. Human Development, 47(4), 193–219.
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