The Business Of Love

A sign in Albert Einstein’s office allegedly read, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

It’s one of my favourite quotes, it totally summarises one of the biggest challenges we have in business today. We have tried to make business into a science hence we can only trust things that can be researched, modelled and indeed counted. And yet so much of what makes business fantastic are those things that are way more nebulous and fleeting and imprecise.

Top of the list for me would be love.

It’s not particularly fashionable to connect the word love with business as it smacks to many of sentimentality, weakness and emotion. And yet I believe it should be one of your KPI’s if you are hoping to win in the future.

In a previous incarnation I joined uber talented fledgling innovation agency called ?What If!. Whilst working on the agency values I fought hard to include love amongst the likes of bravery and freshness. I figured we could live all those other values quite easily and still be assholes. Without love as a way of being we could value money above the people, the fame above the personal growth and the politics above our friends.

There is growing evidence that demonstrating love and compassion within a business has huge impacts upon employees engagement and general feeling of well-being.

Jane Dutton, from the University of Michigan, investigated this: ‘ we found that employees who experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their co-workers and the organisation in a more positive light. Statistically, they demonstrated more positive emotions such as joy and contentment and more commitment towards the organisation.’ These results were consistent regardless of whether employees receive compassion or merely witnessed it.

Regardless of what research can tell us about the benefit of love in business we all know deep down that it’s true. Just notice if the cynic within you is now saying ‘well is it?’ — That’s one of the major problems we have in organisations. Evidence for everything: trust our human instincts and we get better answers every time.

If someone in your team is having a hard time outside of work there shouldn’t be a question as to whether we help them or not. We should just do it.

There are numerous reasons why business leaders struggle with this. We are working way too fast on way too many things. When we get bombarded by too much stimulus our brain flicks onto standby.

Standby is a coping mechanism and is designed to get us through our to-do lists and not react to the avalanche of messaging around us. But standby makes us numb, it’s a mode from which it’s impossible to engage with emotion holistically. We are like little robots and only the big emotions get noticed. The big stuff is created by big emotional shifts that knock us sideways; we are left reeling and reaching for a cappuccino, a whisky, a spinning class….to balance ourselves out again.

To become confident in spreading the love in business we need to slow down and appreciate what’s needed here and now and get off standby.

Appreciate — people bring so much more than professional knowledge to work, they bring their heart and soul and that needs to be appreciated. Every time you work with somebody take a moment to spot one thing that you love about them. By doing so your selective attention becomes attuned more to the positives and therefore will see more every day.

Check In — take a moment in your schedule to sit straight, breathe deep and smile and enjoy the emotions that you are feeling now. By getting off standby and activating your emotional system you will find much easier to connect with others on the same level.

Love yourself — note down a few things every day you have done that you think is fantastic. By being more positive about yourself and the way you behave you will spread more of that naturally around those you get to play with.

Slow down — stop running from meeting to meeting. At that pace we cannot connect with people and we cannot connect to ourselves.

Leave time in your diary to hang out with people and find out what’s going on for them.