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OD Chat Group: Put Love to Work: The Business Case for a Bold New Culture Strategy
What if the most important frontier of workplace culture isn’t just innovation, artificial intelligence, and agility, but love?
At a time when the prevailing culture has produced widespread disconnection, disengagement, and burnout, a new, high-impact opportunity emerges: make love, not fear, the foundation of your leadership and culture strategy.
Renee Smith, MSOD, grounds this session in primary qualitative research with more than 90 leaders and employees across industries, integrated with insights from neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and organizational change. This is applied work: designed for HR and L&D professionals, OD consultants and teams, coaches, and graduate researchers who want a clear evidence base and tools they can put to use.
Renée shares evidence of the costs of fear-based culture on individuals, teams, organizations, and the people they serve. She contrasts this with case studies from government agencies, social service organizations, and corporate teams whose cultures pair trust and courage with results and meaning.
You’ll leave with a practical framework for building a culture of belonging, a set of specific practices you can apply in your own organization or practice, and the research foundation to make the case to others.
This session doesn’t ask you to be soft or permissive. Quite the opposite! You’ll be challenged to be brave and bold enough to lead with love.
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize how fear-based norms and behaviors quietly shape workplace culture and erode engagement, inclusion, and well-being. Identify where these patterns show up in your own organization or client work.
- Understand the research-backed case for love-centered leadership and culture, and apply a practical framework for embedding compassion, respect, and psychological safety into leadership behaviors and organizational systems.
- Examine real-world case studies of love-based cultures and leave with a personalized action plan of practices you can implement to strengthen connection, trust, and team performance.
Connect with Renée: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneesmith-ahumanworkplace/