[Review] Love Works, by Kelly Winegarden Hall

What if the one thing your business is missing isn’t strategy or innovation — but love?

We’ve all been there: the all-hands meeting where employees’ eyes have glazed over and their energy has burned out. A promising new hire quietly leaves before their 90-day review. Tensions build across departments. The numbers look fine on paper, but something beneath the surface is clearly off.

In the constant churn of deliverables and performance targets, it’s easy to lose sight of a simple truth: behind every result is a human being who wants to matter.

That’s where “Love Works: Transforming the Workplace with Purpose and Authenticity” begins. Kelly Winegarden Hall opens with the premise that people aren’t problems to be solved or assets to be optimized, but individuals worthy of care, trust, and meaning. In a business world saturated with culture hacks and leadership jargon, Hall’s message lands with clarity and conviction: loving your people and teams isn’t a liability. It’s the foundation of everything that works.

Drawing on decades of leadership, Hall speaks not as a theorist but as a practitioner. Each chapter presents a concise, story-driven glimpse into real-world leadership: moments when trust faltered and was restored, when performance improved because dignity was prioritized, and when hierarchy gave way to humility. The result is a book that reads like part memoir, part manifesto, and part practical guide.

She shares firsthand accounts of fostering psychological safety during organizational upheaval, navigating teams through layoffs with transparency and care, and championing environmental sustainability as a business imperative, not an afterthought.

Her lens is both personal and systemic, rooted in the conviction that empathy and accountability can — and must — coexist.

The book introduces several actionable frameworks, including her L.A.R.G.E. model: Love, Abundance, Respect, Gratitude, and Equality. But Hall doesn’t stop at acronyms. She illustrates what it looks like to embody these values day-to-day: practicing radical listening in one-on-ones, using gratitude not as a perk but as a practice, redistributing power in meetings to encourage participation, and ensuring that equity is built into decision-making, not appended after the fact.

What sets “Love Works” apart is its tone. Hall isn’t offering leadership as a performance or self-improvement checklist. She’s writing to leaders who feel the gap between what they’re doing and what they believe is possible, who are ready to lead from a deeper place.

This isn’t a handbook for squeezing more output from exhausted teams. It’s a call to reimagine what business can be when it centers on humanity, purpose, and care.

In a time when workplaces are confronting burnout, disconnection, and systemic inequity, “Love Works: Transforming the Workplace with Purpose and Authenticity” offers something rare: not just inspiration, but a path forward rooted in courage, clarity, and compassion.

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