Do you have a professional love language? Yeah, you read that right. You may have heard about love languages for relationships and friendships, but I believe there is a professional love language too.

Let me give some examples:

Do you know how you like to have your work acknowledged to feel good about it?

Do you know what motivates you at work?

Do you like frequent check-ins with managers and directors?

Do you like to show progress early or do you like to feel more like you've figured it out before?

How do you like to collaborate?

Are you someone who likes to talk about personal things with managers in 1 on 1s?

How do you like to be supported in your career and in support of personal life from a work angle?

I believe managing people is a two-way street. Taking care of people and serving them - which is what management is - should involve understanding what they need and how they like to be served to reach their potential.

When leading others, I recommend asking mentees/subordinates/people you manage about how they like to be lead. Call them professional love language if you want, it's just what I call it.

For example: I HATE being praised. My love language is having my feedback acknowledged.

I don't enjoy being coddled. I enjoy being HEARD. Listening to my thoughts and acknowledging them is a lot more effective to make me feel good about my work than showering me with compliments.

I think we should have those conversations with our managers and I sometimes give mine a list of my professional love languages to help them cater to what I need more.