A series on Leadership lessons from the book: The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet speaks to autonomy, responsibility, love, and meaning. This series explores its timeless wisdom through a leadership lens, offering reflection for those building cultures that value both performance and humanity.

Gibran’s take on work is provocative. It contrasts with modern workplaces where work is often discussed in terms of productivity, efficiency, and performance metrics.

Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet:

“Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.”

Today’s leaders are facing concerns about burnout, disengagement, and “quiet quitting” (aka disengagement). The common response is to frame these as performance problems or issues of motivation, accountability, or work ethic. What if some of these issues are meaning problems?

Output Without Meaning Is Unsustainable

Most people don’t disengage because they suddenly stop caring. They disengage because the work stops connecting them to purpose. When work becomes only transactional, tasks in exchange for pay, people will do exactly what is required.

Gibran’s framing of work describes work as an expression, contribution and visible form of care.

When leaders reduce work to output alone, they risk stripping it of the very thing that sustains effort over time.

Burnout Could Be a Crisis of Purpose

Burnout is frequently misunderstood as exhaustion caused by doing too much. Research on burnout consistently points to something deeper: a loss of meaning, agency, and alignment. People can work very hard for long periods when the work feels purposeful. They burn out fastest when their efforts feel disconnected from value.

This is why disengagement can show up even in high-performing teams. People may still deliver, but they no longer feel invested. Quiet quitting is about withdrawal from work that no longer feels worth giving more to.

Work as Contribution, Not Just Consumption

Gibran continues:

“And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart.”

People want to know:

• Does my work matter?
• Does it help someone?
• Does it connect to something larger than myself?

Leaders play a central role in answering these questions. When leaders help people see how their work contributes to customers or colleagues, motivation changes. It shifts from external pressure to internal commitment to the mission.

Purpose Is a Leadership Responsibility

Meaning doesn’t emerge automatically. It is shaped by leadership behavior. Purpose-driven teams aren’t created by posters on the wall. They’re built when leaders:

• Connect daily tasks to real outcomes.
• Acknowledge effort and results.
• Invite people into the why, not just the what.

Modern research supports this. Including information from Dan Pink in his book “Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” on intrinsic motivation. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are far more powerful drivers of sustained performance than rewards or fear.

People want to do good work. Leaders determine whether the environment allows that impulse to survive.

Quiet Quitting Is a Signal

When people pull back, leaders often respond with tighter controls, more monitoring, or louder messaging about expectations. Disengagement is feedback though. If you see engagement numbers dropping, it’s a signal that the relationship between effort and meaning may have been severed.

The leaders who respond wisely ask, What has made this work feel less worth giving to?

Love Made Visible, Reconsidered

To speak of love in work is not to deny that work can be hard, repetitive, or imperfect. It is also not meant to say that we can only do work we love. It is to recognize that people bring more than their hands to their jobs. They bring attention, energy, and identity. They bring their minds and hearts.

For the employee, Gibran’s words serve as a reminder to bring love into what we do, even if we aren’t in love with what we do. Work becomes “love made visible” when leaders treat people not as units of productivity, but as contributors to something that matters. When meaning is present, effort follows. When meaning disappears, no amount of pressure will restore it.

A Question for Leaders

Before trying to fix performance ask yourself:

• Do people understand why their work matters?
• Have I made space for contribution or only for compliance?
• What part of the work has lost its meaning, and why?

People are sustained by what their work means. Leaders who understand that build workplaces where people want to give their best.

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