My Delusional Hope for Love in the Workplace
Love is the key that can unlock every desired business outcome
Prelude
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Truth be told, I had to muster my courage to publish this. I spent months wondering if anyone would “get” this in a business context, if it would be helpful. When I stumbled on this quote, I got my answer. Mistake or not, and I’ve made plenty, there’s still the possibility it could be useful to someone. So I danced with my fear, got out of my own way, and sent this into the wild with my intent to leave someone, anyone, a little better than I found them.
The beauty of life is that it boils down to one simple truth. Whether we know it or not, acknowledge it or not, feel it or not, we are bound to one another by love. It’s where we come from and ultimately go to. It’s our very essence. It grounds us. It gives us life.
Love binds us at birth with unimaginable joy.
I’ve held all four of our grandchildren shortly after their birth. There are no words for this experience. It is pure love, pure bliss. It’s the same overwhelming bond I experienced with our three children — witnessing their first breath, watching in awe as they filled their lungs and poured their love into my heart with their first cry.
Love binds us at death through inconsolable grief.
My wife and I have buried all four of our parents. The last was my dear mother. We watched her peacefully take her last breath in my childhood home, in the same living room where I’d play for hours, lost in time and imagination with my Lionel trains around a Christmas Tree dripping with silver tinsel. We waited for the inevitable last beat of her heart as it slowed and weakened until we could no longer hear or feel it. Like the births we’ve experienced, her death was breathtaking. Greeting a new soul, and parting with another, is the same love experience. Bliss and grief are connected to the same truth, bound by the same love.
But in-between. Ahhhh in-between. In-between, we get very, very busy, caught up in life’s work and challenges, all of its busy-ness. Linda Ellis poetically refers to this time as “The Dash” — the dash on our tombstone between the dates of our birth and death. Caught up in our “Dash,” we often forget this love that binds us. A love so evident at life’s endpoints. A love that literally gives us life and sustains us.
Too strong? Imagine a world entirely devoid of love. Remove it. All of it. Mothers don’t love their babies. Fathers don’t love their wives or children. Children don’t love their parents. What drives us now? What does this world look like? How long would we last without the sustaining power of love?
We spend the bulk of our waking hours working, yet we dismiss love from our work lives. Even mentioning the word in a work setting makes people uncomfortable. But imagine the extreme — a workplace where everyone is focused purely on self, with no love, no true caring for co-workers, clients or customers, no genuine compassion for anyone. What does this look like? Apathetic? Disengaged? Cut-throat? All out war? How does this make you feel? How do you imagine clients and customers feel? While large scale environments this extreme are reserved for wars, they do, unfortunately, also exist in microcosm workplace skirmishes. I’ve witnessed them. I’ve been in them. The influence of even one person lacking love, particularly in a leadership position, can cast a long shadow over an entire organization. Or a country. History is replete with examples.
I led a retreat a few years ago for the “rising stars” of a large company whose senior executives I was coaching. I was engaged to help these geographically and functionally diverse executives and leaders come together in the spirit of their common cause. The problem was that the organization was stretched to the limit, and factions were competing for resources. A startup just a few years earlier, they had gone public and grown rapidly. The founder’s entrepreneurial spirit was now competing with the energy required to fuel their earnings per share. It was a divisive pressure cooker. My role was to create a safe space where everyone could speak their truth. There can be no lasting change without first knowing the truth. And you can’t know the truth without a safe space to speak it.
“I’m treated like a machine…
It feels horrible.”
I opened up that space on the first day. The leader of a key technical support group spoke up. She exposed her distress, sharing her heart with the group.
“I’m treated like a machine. People make demands in email like they’re putting money in a vending machine. We’re overwhelmed. We’ve been working seven days a week for months to meet our deadlines. Everyone here is doing the same. But no one seems to care about the people who are on the receiving end of their demands. It feels horrible.”
As her voice trailed off, a young executive on the other side of the room slowly stood up and turned to her. His office, several hundred miles from hers, made use of her group’s services.
“I am so sorry, Maddie (not her real name). I’m guilty. I had no idea how I was making you feel. I will never do that to you again.”
He saw her, perhaps for the first time, as the person she was, not a machine into which he places work orders and awaits results. You can call his response many things. Empathy. Caring. Concern. Even guilt. But at its core, it is one thing — love. His was a love response. In that moment, he felt her pain and regretted causing it. In that moment, he loved her more than he loved getting his results from her.
If that sounds awkward, if you want to run from my use of the word “love” here, you have felt my point. Love is at the core of our being human, our essence, at home and at work. We aren’t “sometimes” human. If allowed, love will connect us powerfully to our co-workers, clients and customers. Changing our understanding and relationship to the word is a necessary step to changing the dynamics of the environment where we spend the majority of waking hours — our workplace. And in these days of working more and more from home, it is even more crucial as our workplace melds with our homespace.
So there you have it. My hope for love in the workplace. A love that rules how we treat each other. How we speak to one another. A love that guides our decisions and directs our actions. A love that spans our “Dash,” beginning to end, at home and at work.
Delusional? Perhaps. But all hope is delusional until it comes to pass. Then, it’s visionary. The only thing standing between delusion and vision is choice. Your choice and mine. I choose love. I invite you to join me and invite others.
“…whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
― Vincent Van Gogh
