Redefining Love in Leadership and a Commitment to Growth, Not Comfort
- Jul 1
- 4 min read
Marya Kazmi is a Transformational Leadership Coach and educator who helps individuals and organizations to examine identity, unlearn limiting patterns, and build values-aligned leadership using reflective frameworks and community-centered practices.
I once sat across from a school leader who told me, without hesitation, that being a good leader meant being nice. Keeping the peace. Making sure no one felt uncomfortable. I remember my reaction in that moment: a quiet alarm. Because what I was hearing wasn't leadership. It was avoidance dressed up as kindness.
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” – bell hooks
That conversation stayed with me. It made me ask a harder question: what does it actually mean to lead with love in spaces where accountability and justice are at stake?
Why this matters for leaders
In my work consulting and coaching leaders, especially in education, I've watched the duties of the job consistently override the deeper work of leading with love. Leaders default to comfort. They avoid the real concerns, the unhealthy patterns, and the practices quietly causing harm. They mistake niceness for leadership.
Neither approach works. Avoidance and false harmony both lead to the same place: mistrust, compliance instead of investment, and a culture that fractures from the inside while looking fine on the surface.
Love, when it's real, is not soft. It's not the absence of conflict. It's a stance, and it requires a leader willing to do something much harder than keeping the peace.
Love is a stance, not a strategy
Love does not mean avoiding conflict. Love begins with cultivating spaces that honor the full humanity of the people inside them, through relationships that are actually authentic. Leaders who handle conflict well understand something simple but rare: people need to feel safe enough to engage in creative friction, in real dialogue aimed at understanding, not debates aimed at winning.
That safety doesn't come from happy hours or softball games. Team building isn't community building. Community building requires real conversations, the kind that surface the life experiences that shape who we are.
That opens up two things most workplaces leave at the door: identity and personal experience. Both are constantly present, whether we name them or not. Who we are determines what makes us feel threatened or replenished as employees, leaders, and colleagues. Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and all the intersecting parts of our humanity shape how we move through work and how we're perceived by the people around us.
When we don't create space to talk about these things, both as life experience and as something that shows up in how we work together, we lower the odds of risk taking, real conflict resolution, and genuine collaboration. We also lose our ability to disrupt harm with care when it happens, because we never built the foundation that makes that possible.
bell hooks and the practice of love
hooks' words anchor this: love is an action, never simply a feeling. For leaders, that means listening deeply when someone tells you the system is hurting them. It means interrupting practices that protect comfort or default norms simply because "it's the way we've always done it." It means making space for joy, for resistance, and for healing inside the organizations you lead.
This kind of love isn't about being agreeable. It's about being committed.
When I tell the leaders I coach that I love them, I don't mean I coddle them. I mean, I believe in their capacity to grow into who the people around them need them to be.
The danger of niceness
Niceness and kindness are not the same thing. Kindness is honest. It's just. It's brave enough to say the hard thing. Niceness, on the other hand, is often a tool people use to avoid difficult conversations about identity, to sidestep accountability, or to protect their own comfort at someone else's expense.
In my leadership development work, I've watched the moment a leader stops being nice and starts being real. It's uncomfortable. It's also the moment real trust starts to build.
Leading with love means holding people to their potential
Real love for the people you serve, whether that's students, employees, or a team, shows up in how you push the adults around them to be better. I coach leaders to see past the deficits they notice first in their staff or their students. To ask the harder questions instead of the comfortable ones. To reflect honestly on their own identity and the power they hold.
Loving leadership is generative. It says, you're not there yet, but I'm going to walk with you until you are.
Closing reflection
What would it look like if love, the real kind, was the foundation of every leadership decision you made?
Not love as ease. Not love as avoidance. Love as accountability, as affirmation, as action. That redefinition is the work. And it starts with the decision to stop being nice and start being honest.
If this resonates, I'd love to continue the conversation. Reach out to explore coaching, speaking, or consulting for your team or organization, and let's talk about what it would take to build a culture rooted in this kind of love.
Read more from Marya Firdausi Kazmi
Marya Firdausi Kazmi, Transformational Leadership & Identity Coach
Marya Kazmi is a Transformational Leadership & Identity Coach and educator who helps individuals and organizations examine identity and cultivate values- aligned leadership. Her work is shaped by lived experience and years of professional practice, informing the reflective tools she created to support healing, clarity, and growth. She is the creator of the RETURN framework, which guides people through a process of unlearning, reconnection, and coming home to themselves. Marya is also the executive producer and host of Pain to Power, a talk show exploring leadership, healing, and human-centered change. Her work bridges lived insight with practical strategies, inviting others into a healing evolution rooted in self-trust, belonging, and purpose.
