Have you noticed the word “love” popping up more and more in business literature? Certainly, when I was doing my MBA at Harvard Business School many decades ago, I don’t recall ever hearing “love” spoken about in class. I welcome this progress.
Yet, “work” is still vilified, despite the growing recognition of how important love is to all aspects of our life .. including, and especially work. The pandemic has highlighted the toxicity of our workplaces in the resistance of many to returning to the office, and indeed to their jobs. Work from home, whilst stressful, may have brought more love into our work hours. Small things like children crawling into our laps during ZOOM calls, dogs nestled at our feet, a cat walking past our screen and resting on the keyboard …. these are expressions of love throughout our day that we have come to accept as normal. And as we embrace the idea that the pandemic is ending, we realise this:
No longer can we continue under the illusion that we can leave love at home, and still lead our teams, serve our customers, contribute to society, and achieve peak performance. Nor do we want to.
Many years ago, I facilitated a Strategic Planning process for a client who had recently made a new acquisition. They were crafting a new winning strategy, and a redefinition of the organizational culture to ensure that their culture did not “eat strategy for lunch”. In my work in culture, I always start with defining and agreeing on Core Values. This exercise is often the one that gets the greatest discussion, engagement, and excitement.
In this workshop, the value of “Love” came up. This is a quote from my February 2013 blog “To be a great leader, all you need is love”:
“In my work facilitating strategy development and implementation over the past 20 years in private, government and non-profit sectors, I have been privy to deep discussions about LOVE as an organizational core value. Some people shy away from it, with comments such as “Love has no place in the workplace”, reflecting concerns about the blurring of love and sex and issues of sexual harassment. Others warm to it, positing that fundamentally, love is the ONLY core value. And others try to find medium ground and call it something else – caring, compassion, empathy, fairness”
Well my group wasn’t having any of it. There was strident objection to the word love, so they chose “Respect” instead.
Over the years, I have faced this conundrum many times: clients speak about love, but do not want to commit to it as a core value, and certainly not post LOVE on their office walls, or website for all to see. I truly believe that love is THE greatest value, so I do my best to support my clients in expressing love at work, no matter what they call it.
I just completed “Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You” by Francis Frei and Anne Morriss. They dedicate a whole chapter, 40 pages, to LOVE. And I am just here for it. One of the things they did that I believe is very helpful to those who believe in love, but are a little timid to declare it as a core value of their organization, is to define love on two dimensions:
- High standards – having and communicating high and clear expectations
- Deep devotion to helping and supporting your team achieve those expectations
Importantly, love requires that you do both – high standards without your devotion leads to a stressed, burned out team, and devotion without high standards leads to mediocrity.
To help us put love into action, Frei and Morriss created 2 lists:
- Ten Ways to Set Higher Standards Tomorrow
- Ten Ways to Reveal Deep Devotion Tomorrow
These “Love Lists” present simple, practical things you can do to turn the experience of work into one of love (without even saying the word “love”). Examples from the High Standards List include: “celebrate a win”, “treat someone like their better, future self”, and “be the standard”. In the Devotion Love List, they suggest the easy – “offer snacks”; the simple, but very difficult – “put down your phone”; as well as the fundamental – “more we, less me”. Underpinning this idea and practice of love is that leadership is not about you – it’s about empowering others.
It’s my belief that people come to work to do their best. It is the leader’s job to help them. And that is what love at work is all about.
“Work is love made visible” wrote Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet. And so is leadership.
This was very first newsletter on February 13, 2015 – ”To be a great leader, all you need is love”
