Love as the Practice of Leadership: Learning from bell hooks

Love - the lost language of leadership

I have always embraced love as an integral part of my work as a psychologist, coach, and OD practitioner. In my pastoral role in the church, I can easily preach and teach about love as the essential ethical foundation of Christ’s gospel.

In my corporate roles, however, I often had to find creative ways to bring love into the conversation, always aware of how workplaces tend to shy away from anything that feels too soft or spiritual. Yet I knew intuitively that without love, neither staff in corporate settings nor my psychotherapy clients would experience sustained healing, wholeness, or growth.

When I later joined a global human rights NGO and continued consulting with non-profits, I found the sector more open to conversations about freedom, power, oppression and justice, but still hesitant to use the language of love. I also encountered the toughness of burnout activists and battle-weary feminists.

Permission to Embrace Love in Leadership

This changed for me earlier this year. While serving on a design team for a social justice leadership programme, I was introduced to liberatory practices that explicitly named love, joy, care, and compassion. My feminist colleagues posed a provocative question: What if we engaged leadership not only through the politics of justice and equity, but also through the politics of love?

This invitation opened a door for me to explore more intentionally what I had long intuited: that love is a necessity for empowering leadership. As I researched further, I encountered the writings of feminist author-activist bell hooks (pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, chosen to honour her grandmother). My instinct was to capitalize her name, until I learned that its lowercase form is part of her chosen embodiment of humility in service of her writings.  

“Love as the Practice of Freedom”

hooks’ essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom” has become a grounding leadership text for me. It gives me the language and permission I needed to speak confidently about love in non-religious organisations: love is not sentimental; it is an ethic, a discipline, a practice of freedom. Without it, movements for justice risk replicating the very domination they resist.

From this integration, I have drawn what I call the Five Practices of the Love Ethic in Leadership, inspired by bell hooks and adapted as my practitioner’s guide:

1. Lead with Love as an Ethical Choice

In “Love as the Practice of Freedom”, hooks insists that love is a political and ethical act, not mere sentiment. She argues that genuine love demands courage: to commit to the growth of oneself and others, even when such growth is uncomfortable.

For leaders, this means making love a conscious, daily choice, especially in contexts of conflict, injustice, or systemic dysfunction. Love here is discipline: it requires rejecting domination, fear, and control, and instead nurturing spaces where people can flourish. hooks writes that without love, “our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.” Leaders grounded in this ethic choose growth over comfort and accountability over avoidance.

2. Integrate Struggles, Break Blind Spots

hooks highlights that oppression is interlocking patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism reinforce one another. She warns against single-issue struggles that ignore other forms of domination.

Leaders practicing the love ethic must therefore resist narrow visions of justice. Love compels solidarity across lines of difference, expanding empathy beyond “my people” or “my issue.” In hooks’ words, “love illuminates matters of difference.” It demands humility to confront our blind spots, where our own privilege perpetuates another’s suffering. A leader who integrates struggles builds movements of connection rather than competition, where liberation is collective, not partial.

3. Heal Trauma and Confront Despair

hooks writes that domination leaves not only structural damage but also psychic wounds. Movements often falter, she notes, when grief, anger, and despair are suppressed or pathologised rather than addressed.

Practicing love in leadership means creating spaces for lament, vulnerability, and renewal. It is an acknowledgment that trauma is both personal and political. hooks emphasizes the need to hold despair without succumbing to it, so that movements do not reproduce cycles of violence and burnout. Leaders embodying love invite honesty about pain, while holding hope for transformation. They recognize healing as integral to resistance.

4. Build Beloved Community through Service and Dialogue

Drawing from Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of Beloved Community, hooks argues that love flourishes in sustained community practices, not in isolation. For her, community built on love is where dialogue, service, and accountability are woven into daily life.

Leaders who practice love reject hierarchical domination and embrace servant-leadership, grounded in humility, listening, and responsibility to the collective. hooks notes that domination fragments relationships, while love restores mutuality and care. Dialogue is central here: not abstract debate, but “honest speech,” where power dynamics are acknowledged, and empathy is deepened. In such spaces, communities move from fear and suspicion toward belonging and accountability.

5. Envision Transformation, Not Just Resistance

hooks cautions against a politics that is solely oppositional, defined only by what it resists. She writes that “without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination.”

Love, therefore, expands leadership beyond critique to creativity. It inspires leaders to ask: What are we building together? Transformation requires imagination, the ability to envision futures marked not by domination but by freedom, joy, and dignity. Leaders practicing love help communities move beyond reactionary energy into constructive re-creation, sustaining the long arc of justice with hope.

Closing Thought

bell hooks’ framing of love as a liberatory practice makes it clear: leadership without love risks reinforcing the very systems it seeks to dismantle. To practice these five commitments is to live into what she calls a love ethic—one that transforms both the leader and the community.

Reference: https://wp.stolaf.edu/art343/files/2022/11/BellHooks.pdf