Can Organizations Exibit Love, Actually?

It's a time of year where we cherish those we love... but our society's narratives around love can be pretty distorted. They involve passionate embraces, sex, physical gifts, weddings, and other fairy tales which while certainly part of it is not the core of what love is. To me, deep lasting love is mostly about recognizing another's vulnerability and partnering with them to fill in their gaps, thus making them feel that their vulnerability is alleviated through their partnership with you. It's when you expose your fear or anxiety about something and your partner intercedes to mitigate and address what you cannot and affirms your value in spite of it.

The result of that kind of love is both an intense emotional connection and stronger performance as a human. The negative emotional energy and increased time requirements of doing things one is bad at creates a drag on productivity generally.  In my personal life, having a loving relationship with my husband makes me a better parent, more productive at work, happier, and generally a better person.  That gift of love is wonderful but it also maximizes my potential and my performance as a human.

Looking at love from that perspective, it seems that if we want to maximize the potential of our employees, customers, and partners in the work environment we should, in fact, love them. Instead we tend to have processes that are not only not loving, they are downright hostile.

• The basic assumption of hierarchies is that some people are better than others. Creating this narrative is hostile to love and, by extension, hostile to optimal performance.
• We have 'professional development' plans for colleagues - the underlying assumption is that people need to be fixed versus supported to achieve maximum performance.
• Negotiations with customers often tend to be thought of a zero-sum games - if one wins, the other necessarily looses. In loving relationships, everyone wins.

Until recently I was pretty protective of my insecurities - after all I worked in environments set up to make me defensive and insecure. The drag from hiding those insecurities and weaknesses kept me from fully exploring what I'm really good at because I was so focused on managing my weaknesses and trying to be competent in everything. It's been an interesting personal revelation that exposing weaknesses in trusted relationships reduces that drag considerably and allows me to focus more time on those things that I perform well.  That equation change improves both my individual performance and really has an impact on team performance because as a team, we're better optimized. 

What does this look like in my work context?

• A manager encouraged me to leave a position, despite it being a personal loss for her, because it was limiting what I could achieve.
• A colleague volunteered for a project that, while I could do it, was making me anxious and unhappy because it required a lot of work that played to my weaknesses.
• A customer made a number of referrals to my work, but took the time to also make sure I was presenting the work in a way that looked after my interests, knowing I might not do that entirely well left to my own devices.

I'm not actually sure any of these individuals would ever say they love me although they are definitely all partners and friends, but they all acted in a loving way which increased my performance.

Talking about love in a work context makes people uncomfortable but mostly because I think society has the narrative of love wrong. I'm proposing that love has a performance quotient and those organizations who figure it out will be rewarded. We've figured out hard metrics... it's the soft ones that are where performance innovation lie.

Here's to more love in the coming year.

 

Comments

[Baglion]

I disagree with your assertion about hierarchy. The role of a hierarchy is to divide responsibility. For example, in the military someone has to be responsible for determining where to march. While social hierarchies frequently attach themselves to functional ones, this isn't necessarily so. Great post- thought provoking.

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Gianpaolo -
Thanks for the comment - at one level you are definitely right but I think, in practice hierarchies have become so much more. I don't know that they carry such negative weight in all organizations but the hierarchical structure does have a rigidity that makes it hard for people to grow quickly into their own potential.

I'm not sure my hypothesis is entirely accurate here - it's just something I've been mulling over in terms of how can we set up structures to encourage and support vs. 'manage' and constrain human potential.

[Martijn Linssen]

Interesting post Rachel. I got somewhat triggered (...) at "deep lasting love is mostly about recognizing another's vulnerability and (partnering with them to) fill in their gaps" but that makes sense when you continue to read the post

When there's two people, one is always perceived better than the other. Even if an outsider doesn't judge them, they'll do that themselves

Philisophically speaking I'd say that love is about unconditional love where there are only win-win situations in between people, and that the kind of love where people want to "make the other better" is indeed and alas the more common, also to be found in enterprises

At my former employer they played the word game, and used "way of improvement" over "fixing / better" in order to cover this up, but that only made it smell worse once you finally unwrapped that extra layer

I like what happened at your current one, usually that doesn't happen because the enterprise horizon is very short(-sighted). The horizon is that short, because the calendar usually runs from March till October. Before and after that is spent on personal gain and year start / end boredom, and in the middle there's the Summer holiday. With effectively 6 months to spend, and uncertainties about what next year will bring now, incentives don't span more than a year either

And incentives drive results. Short-term incentives, short-term results, high burn-rate, unhappy employees and unhappy customers - this is never about intimacy, relationships, and certainly not LOVE ;-)

So I'm unsure whether the cause is hierarchy but there is certain correlation. My old adage is proximity equals intimacy, and distance equals anonymity. Once a company grows beyond a certain size, both hierarchy and anonymity happen at the same time, and Love is out the window

Yes it's a harsh world out there with fierce competition but that's only so because we all believe that to be true. And after all this world is ours so we can just change it if we want

I'll gladly toast to more love, but to not scare the big old enterprises: how about incentives that cover 3 years? It will help us to go from short one-nighters to long-lasting relationship. Maybe not marriage, but steady dating at least - and love will originate from that by itself I think, with a little help maybe