April 2015, Baltimore, USA — a city in flames. A burnt-out pharmacy, torched by rioters, frames the backdrop.

After days of uproar, a peaceful protest turns ugly when a bottle is thrown at police. The advancing police line deploys pepper spray. The media converge, knowing this is going to turn ugly fast.

Suddenly a line of African-American men moves forward, positioning themselves between the police and the protesters. They raise their hands. Are they surrendering? They touch the tips of their index fingers and thumbs, creating a heart shape held above their heads.

The police freeze and the protesters back off. Neither side is willing to escalate the confrontation. One of the men leans forward and explains to the confused journalists, who have never seen anything like it before: ‘It's a comfort line — a love line'. He turns to the camera and says, ‘Kids, be positive. Don't do anything stupid. We love y'all'.

What defused this ticking time bomb? Nothing but love.

Machiavelli believed it was better to be feared than to be loved. Is it? Is that what you want, as a leader?

In Baltimore that day a row of ordinary citizens took a stand for change with the best four-letter word in the world: L-O-V-E.

Does what you do light you up?

In the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast (spoiler alert!), the beast turns into a handsome prince. Belle, the beast's love, achieves the transformation. Note: she doesn't set out to change him — her love does.

Ahh … the power of love!

Talking about love in a business context may make us uncomfortable. It may even seem inappropriate — isn't business all about head, not heart? When we talk of love in a business context, as an influence tool at work, we don't mean romantic love. The love we describe is multifaceted. It is love for what we do (passion), love for the people we do it with (identifying with and caring for our teammates) and love for the people we do it for (concern for our customers).

I love TED talks and have spent many pleasant and productive hours watching and listening to remarkable and informative speakers. One of my favourites is Benjamin Zander. He so obviously knows and loves his subject (classical music), and has an infectious passion and enthusiasm.

Zander's love for classical music lights up the stage and the room. He seems to genuinely believe that his audience will share his love of classical music; they just don't know it yet. It's a brave idea, and it works.

Passion is a word tossed around too loosely these days. In a business or work context, you can define it as a deep knowledge and expertise combined with a fervent enthusiasm for the topic, the product and the people with whom you engage.

Where passion is concerned, there are two extremes to avoid. A lack of passion is as persuasive as a dead fish, while excessive passion — obsession, evangelism or zealotry — can be equally off-putting. People will immediately sense when leaders are insincere or faking passion.

Are you passionate about the topic, product, service or strategy around which you seek to exercise your influence over people?

Heart over hype

I have a confession. I'm addicted to the Australian series of Shark Tank. It's a dramatic reality-TV series and a master class in negotiation, pitching and influence, all rolled into one. Shark Tank has budding entrepreneurs pitch to potential investors (sharks). The sharks decide whether to invest, and negotiate deals for equity and ownership.

It works because the sharks are all successful businesspeople in their own right. They offer insight and business nous that is sometimes brutal but often priceless.

You also see the dark side of passion on the show. In a recent episode, an entrepreneur was pitching his product in an overzealous, evangelical way. A progress worm at the bottom of the screen allows the audience to vote for or against a prospect in real time. As his pitch proceeded, he turned off more and more people.

While passion is important, we have to learn not to bludgeon people with it. One thing Shark Tank has taught us is to get out of the passion prison.

Passion fails to impress the sharks, and the show is littered with passionate entrepreneurs who miss the cut. What the investors look for is commitment, execution and persistence. Passion on its own is an empty tin cup, but passion supported by other values and qualities resonates like a temple bell. People buy heart not hype in the passion game.

Do you love your co-workers?

The latest research shows that people who love their co-workers have a superior attendance record and perform better. This is not romantic love but companionate love, based on warmth, affection and connection.

In a longitudinal study titled ‘What's Love Got to Do with It?', researchers Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill coined the term emotional culture to characterise workplaces where employees felt loved and cared for, and described the positive, measurable impact on performance and wellbeing this produced.

But it's not only love, which you may find hard to express at work, but making room for other positive emotions such as pride in a job well done, joy and laughter. You'll find power in the small gestures: a handwritten note, a thank you, taking time to ask after people. All make for a happier workplace.

A leader I know who works in a national financial services company knocks engagement scores out of the ball park year after year. He makes a point of connecting personally every day with every member of his large, geographically dispersed team, whether face to face or by phone, or via email or text.

Personal connection for this leader means asking after a staff member's mother's hospital treatment or their son's soccer game. And it's genuine, coming from a deep sense of caring for his team, who as a result feel valued, connected and loved. He influences through love and authenticity. Again, it's heart over hype.

As a leader, you communicate daily on a professional level with people you work with, but do you take the time to connect personally?

Love for customers and consumers

Atlassian (like Google for software developers and project managers) was launched because the two founders were sick of how software was sold to customers. Here's a quote from their web page: ‘In 2002, our founders, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, set conventional wisdom on its ear by launching a successful enterprise software company with no sales force. From Australia. Our first product, JIRA, proved that if you make a great piece of software, price it right, and make it available to anyone to download from the Internet, teams will come. And they'll build great things with it. And they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on'.

In a February 2014 article published in Business Insider Australia, journalist Liz Tay portrays Atlassian's beginnings as a fairytale startup. ‘It ran on a credit card. One of its founders was a university dropout. All the early staff were mates. One of its founding values was a flourish of Sydney brassiness: “Don't f*** the customer” '.

Atlassian's core product, a project management and bug tracking tool known as JIRA, is now a global standard, with customers ranging from NASA to universities to tech giants such as eBay and Twitter.

The art of love bombs

A love bomb is letting people know you love them and their work. Imagine working in an organisation where love bombs explode all the time.

Here are some ways to love bomb your employees and your customers. And while you're at it, love bombing yourself sometimes doesn't hurt either.

Love is appreciation

Appreciation is the love vehicle for power players. We all crave appreciation but are often negligent about giving it, resorting to the occasional cliché such as ‘Good job!' or a generic ‘Well done'. As with passion, appreciation has to be genuine. There are many ways of bringing it into the workplace.

Appreciation is showing and telling people what you love about their work. In reality, this can be tough to do well. We may feel awkward, unsure how it will be received, or perhaps we simply don't have enough practice. As one of my clients put it, ‘We excel at being critical, just not at being appreciative!'

In a wonderful scene from Absolutely Fabulous, Jennifer Saunders' character, Eddy, is trying to teach Patsy (Joanna Lumley) how to smile. All Patsy can muster is a grimace, ugly but very funny. When you first start to practise appreciation at work, it can feel like a grimace. With perseverance, though, and the reward of seeing the impact it has on people, an effortless smile can soon come naturally.

Why not begin a relationship with an appreciation, a thank you? Simple, a banking service startup, sends a thank you after you request an invite to its platform. It takes the place of a standard welcome email and makes a great first impression for the company. Its very first contact with you is a thank you love bomb.

As part of the Slow School of Business faculty in Melbourne, we run a very successful series called ‘Talk on Purpose' (formerly ‘Is There a TED Talk in You?'). Participants work through their ‘idea worth sharing' using a range of tools and advice from expert facilitators. At the end of the program they deliver a TED-style talk in front of a live audience of more than a hundred people. It's a big moment for everyone.

One of the most successful tactics we use is asking the audience to write ‘love notes' to each presenter as soon as they finish their talk, acknowledging just one thing they loved about the speaker's presentation. As a joke we add, ‘No phone numbers or email addresses, please'.

At the end of the night each presenter receives an envelope stuffed with love notes. Some of the presenters are moved to tears. They have described it as ‘all my Christmases arriving at once' and ‘the best present I have ever received'. One shared his love notes with a mentor and was immediately offered a job.

Windows and mirrors

Another way of showing appreciation, or spreading love, is by giving credit where credit is due.

I am a cricket buff. As I was (a little tearfully) rewatching Sachin Tendulkar's farewell speech on YouTube, it struck me how rich it was in ‘window' moments.

I first came across the concept of ‘windows and mirrors' in Jim Collins' Harvard Business Review article on Level 5 leadership. According to Collins, Level 5 leaders always look out of the window to give credit — sometimes even undue credit — to people and factors outside themselves. But they also look into the mirror by accepting responsibility when things don't go well, never blaming external factors or bad luck.

For other leaders the reverse is true: they look out of the window for people or factors to blame, and into the mirror to preen when crediting themselves for things that go well.

Sachin's speech after his 200th and last test in Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai, packed with adoring fans was a masterpiece in looking out of the window to recognise everyone who had a hand in his success. They ranged from his father who had inspired him to chase his dreams, to his doctors who kept him fit, to his legions of fans around the world. In the 20-minute soliloquy, he talked about and thanked so many people in his life, always crediting them for their support. It is both moving and humbling to watch.

What sort of power player are you or do you want to be?

Love frames

Life is seldom perfect. Often we will have to have the tough conversations, manage performance and even use the dreaded ‘f' word — feedback. Can we do this with love, or will that be perceived as weak or confusing?

It is surprising how today's leaders are still coached in the sandwich method of handling feedback: you simply package the negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. ‘It's a common method,' notes organisational psychologist and author Roger Schwarz, ‘but the sandwich approach may be undermining both your feedback and your relationships with your direct reports'.

If you say, ‘You did a great job but …' and follow up with a criticism, then all the person processes is the criticism. As my mentor Sacha Coburn would say, no one remembers anything before the but.

Following publication of my bestselling co-authored book (yes, another plug!) Hooked: How leaders connect, engage and inspire with storytelling, I received a scathing email about a supposed misprint. The writer concluded by saying they were so happy that they had only borrowed the book from the library and not purchased it.

Ouch!

Reading the email on the train to work, I felt like I'd been kicked in the guts. I might even have sworn aloud … all right, I did! As it happens, it wasn't a misprint but an accommodation for a global readership.

So how can love help you do this differently and better? How do you give positive criticism? How do you deliver the type of feedback the receiver is open to hearing and acting on — in short, feedback with love?

You will be called upon to suggest changes for and in others. You cannot avoid change, but it carries with it an implicit criticism of the past, as if all that preceded it was wrong or fell short. When you propose a change, you can at the same time pay tribute to the past. Recognising the good or workable aspects of the status quo, you can couch the proposed innovations as complementing past practice, and in this way encourage positive dialogue and acceptance.

We all crave feedback and yet are loath to give it. Recently we faced the same challenge when running our ‘Talk on Purpose' program. Not only did the participants receive feedback, but we gave it in a group setting. We used a wonderful framework made up of three parts:

• Love — what I loved about your talk
• Learn — what I learned from it
• Leave — one thing I want to leave you with.

This is a love frame that will enable you to influence shift.

A love frame helps people grow. The leave part suggests one thing they could do better or differently next time. This is the tough love part of the love frame and is critical for success. Love always has to include tough love to make it balanced and realistic; otherwise it's all unicorns and rainbows.

Here's another thought about feedback. Love frames today are feedforward, not feedback. Feedback has expired, feedforward is wired. Using feedforward helps the person change their behaviour next time, or at least consider doing so.

Influence without love is like a phone with no data; all you can do is play games.

Hearts and minds

Love power, or love as an influence tool, is about winning people's hearts and minds and watching their feet follow. It's about heart, not hype. Love lets you build advocacy, which can turn into a movement. The era of hype, where information is controlled, is over. The era of heart with transparency and authenticity is here. Susan Steinbrecher, the co-author of Heart-Centered Leadership: lead well, live well, believes people do their best work not through compliance but through commitment to the organisation they work for. At the centre of heart-centred leadership is commitment rather than compliance, and can there be a bigger commitment than love?

The love ladder (illustrated in figure 9.1, overleaf) helps you gauge where your audience is in terms of your message and initiatives. At the bottom of the ladder, they may be totally unaware, or aware but indifferent or neutral.

As power players, you use love bombs, and you practise mirrors and windows and other techniques to help your audience move up the love ladder. Your love bombs advocate heart over hype, and do so with integrity and authenticity, to turn your audience into fans, advocates — and sometimes even evangelists.

Love as an influence tool will help you, your people and your organisation work at its highest level. In the following chapter we'll see how humour and playfulness, used authentically, can also lift your game and achieve great results.