What’s at Stake? Optimizing for Wholeness at Work.
Moving towards a more authentic and human style of leadership.
At the intersection of work and purpose, life presents us with plenty of material to explore deeper questions about ourselves. In big moments, often it can seem like there’s much at stake. So much can arise in our organizations at any moment, in any myriad of situations that rub against issues of culture, relationships, and our own internal edges of ourselves: Co-founder conflict, executive team dysfunction, systemic culture issues, running out of money, knowing who and when to hire, knowing when to transition out of a role, your relationship to yourself as you grow as a leader.
So many of these moments are threshold moments that pose larger questions to us that we can choose to lean into or not. Crossing that edge moves you from conflict resolution to conflict transformation, thus opening up whole new understandings and insights. From tension to something wholly more supportive of what’s there for you — or for everybody involved. From a transactional view of work to something more wholly human, more authentic, that supports the sustainable business you’re aiming to build as an organization.
At these intersections are choice points — What’s at stake for me here? What can I lean into? — that may open up a new way of being with work, your organization, or yourself.
My partner Dan wrote a post a few years ago called Wholeness, Not Happiness. In it, he notes how pushing and optimizing for happiness at work is to ignore all the other parts of being human (the non-happy parts), therefore leaving a hole in the experience of those who work with you.
For a lot of us, we feel most divided at work. Yet, becoming an actualized human requires defragmenting yourself from all of the things we’ve divided ourselves from.
While the heart of every chief happiness officer is in the right place, we must remember what really makes us feel better when we’re working are the same things that make us feel better as humans. We need to feel safety and belonging. And, we need to feel like we can be fully ourselves in order to feel those things and to thrive. Without that, people can feel alone and unsupported (there’s nothing happy about that).
Edgar Schein notes that “culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment.”
More often than not, culture starts with the company’s leader and the shadow they cast over the organization. Office lunches and massage days are not going to make up for all the parts of the human being systems that aren’t working well. Far beyond the list of perks, your company culture is the whole feeling tone of your organization and how it behaves.
How do we move towards a more authentic and human style of leadership? How can our companies and workplaces support the human experience more fully? If the most important resources we have at our organizations are our people, what makes us gloss over this keystone principle of wholeness?
The challenge of optimizing for wholeness wrote my partner Dan, “is that it can be downright terrifying. Wholeness requires acknowledging some of the more difficult parts of being human, particularly things that make people uncomfortable.”
How does your company handle bias, inclusion, and diversity issues? How do you handle hiring and firing? How do you handle the tough conversations — are they welcomed or avoided? Do your employees feel safe at work, or are there trust issues? Is your company emotionally literate? Are you able, as a company, to name the bigger dissatisfactions that linger and feel like elephants in the room?
All of these issues require the skill sets of being human and embracing our humanity. If these moments in a workplace environment aren’t handled with attention and care, a list of company perks and benefits won’t fix that. And, these issues cannot be relegated to performance metrics.
How do we optimize for wholeness? What would it mean to our company cultures if our companies were human-centric in this world of chatbots, OKRs, and KPIs? If you stripped away the benefits and perks of your organization, would the company you are left with be the company your employees would want to work for?
Journaling Prompt:
- What kind of company do you want to work for?
- What do you believe to be true about the world?
- What values do you believe the company should embody?
- What do those values tell you about how the people in your organization should engage with one another?
- What is actually happening in the company? How are these interactions? What values are actually present?
- What kind of company are you creating?
