All You Need Is Love In The Workplace
06.01.2006 | Chris BaileyWhen you talk about love in the workplace, most folks think of inter-office romances or tawdry office affairs. At the very least, our culture teaches us that love should not be part of our workplace vernacular. That’s unfortunate since it is love which energizes us toward new heights and gives us courage to take authentic action.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reflecting on what Dennis Bakke in Joy At Work says about love and its place in our worklives. Rather than running away from love because it’s “mushy” or “soft” or simply “inappropriate,” what else is there?
It is love that allows us to give up our power of control. It is love that allows us to treat each person in our organization with respect and dignity. Love sends people around the world to serve others. Love inspires people to work with greater purpose.
As for when we feel attacked or misunderstood in our work, Bakke continues with his own experience:
Love helps me understand why some colleagues, supervisors, board members, and subordinates did not subscribe to my theories or behave in a manner consistent with our highest principles and values. Love makes it possible for me to forgive those who derided my views and caused me so much pain. Because love is directed toward others, it allows for the possibility that my critics were right and I was wrong. And, if I was wrong, I would hope that love would enable my detractors to forgive the forceful way I pushed my philosophy. (italics mine)
And as for why bringing love to our workplace is so important:
I continue to believe that love is the final and crucial ingredient in a joy-filled workplace. It is a state of mind that requires no extra costs and no difficult trade-offs against competing organizational goals. It does not demand higher compensation or fancy offices or sophisticated information systems or more specialized staff people. Yet love is perfectly consistent with even the most aggressive economic goals.
Some folks may bristle and disbelieve that last statement about the compatibility of love with making a profit, but I share his faith. In today’s world, profit is really easy come, easy go. Even those companies and non-profits who have enjoyed consistent growth can’t accurately predict the future or increasingly fickle customers. But, love is always there for us, always within us to bring to our work and those we work with. That’s the challenge, though…often it takes courage to bring that love to places where love may not always be present or to folks who don’t believe it belongs in a professional office environment.
Today, keep the Beatles in your heart and sing, “All you need is love, love, love is all you need.”
13 Responses to “All You Need Is Love In The Workplace”
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Chris,
Your intentions are beautiful and connecting. Interestingly, I was chaperoning my 5 year old daughter’s class today on a field trip. They have been rehearsing a few songs for their pre-school “graduation”.
One of the songs is All You Need is Love. I discussed it with a few kids today (talking about John Lennon and what love means to me and what it means to them).
My goal in life is to bring more love into the world. I have an agapic love for myself.
The points that you and Mr. Bakke touch on in the context of business is also fascinating to me. I believe that it’s a frame of reference thing.
I think one of the main ways love is lost in the workplace is a lack of honesty (not dishonesty really but just a reticence to be honest as a byproduct of a life of illusory conditioning).
I’ve found that I have been effective at bringing love into the workplace by building a compassionate bridge using words that feel approachable to people relatively unfamiliar with the idea in that context.
The kicker is that honesty (or even self-actualization) is a key component to long term sustainability of just about any organization.
Thanks for sharing this.
Hi Tim…and thank you for sharing. What a great song for a pre-school graduation…it’s always been one of my favorites.
What you say about a “reticence to be honest” really resonates with me. I believe most folks really want to speak the truth, but also don’t want to show to much of themselves to others. It’s being vulnerable that usually hangs us up. I remember reading one time that a leader is never supposed to reveal themselves and share their feelings (fear, joy, sadness, etc.) with others. That BS must come straight from the school of fear-based leadership. A true leader is someone who is confident enough to be vulnerable and fearless…and who can be honest enough to own their own humanity.
[...] Chris Bailey writes that, “love is the final and crucial ingredient in a joy-filled workplace” at BaileyWorkPlay [...]
About fifteen years ago. I am observing a meeting of about 100 people who work for the Mediterranean division of a US company. The Divisional CEO is Italian. The audience are people from Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal. The CEO tells them, “Of course we must love our products and our customers. But our best hope for success will come from loving one another.” My first thought? “Beam me up Scotty. I’m on another planet.” I thought he was right of course, but I wasn’t, and still am not, accustomed to hearing it stated so boldly and simply.
Fifteen years ago, I admit that that must have seemed shocking. Heck, right now I figure it still seems shocking to most folks. We continue to believe that professionalism and intimate emotions such as love have no place together. Yet, we don’t seem to have nearly the same queasiness when it comes to openly allowing hate to seep into our working world. We’re going to need to discover how to live the energy that love provides in our work…else, I do wonder if business will survive? Or at least survive in a form where anyone wants to actually do business. What’s your thought, Dick?
I do believe that emotional immaturity is a serious workplace problem: not only love, but also other emotions such as fear, loneliness, and sorrow are all held at arms length. And then we wonder why workplaces are thought of as dehumanizing. And emotional immaturity is matched as well by spiritual immaturity. We will have these problems as long as we continue to worship intellect at the expense of other forms of human energy, thereby valuing people only for their thoughts.
You might have a look at this: http://www.ongenius.com/c2m_article_intro.htm
Dick…wow, great article…it really puts these ideas into a broader framework. It seems that our organizations are still so mired in an industrial-age concept of work, particularly where processes are ‘engineered’ and employees are replaceable cogs.
I like how you put it in terms of immaturity…the great challenge that folks like you and I face is how to help our businesses and nonprofits grow from adolescence (or even infancy in some places) to adulthood.
Thanks for sharing the article and keeping this dialogue going. I think it’s a particularly rich one.
@ — mired in an industrial-age concept of work, particularly where processes are ‘engineered’ and employees are replaceable cogs.
That’s it exactly Chris. The issue is really one of consciousness — about how we think of ourselves in relation to our work. I explored this in some detail in my first book, Artful Work. I studied how artists think about their work and what the rest of us might learn from them if we approached any and all work “artfully.” It is a complex subject, and your focus on love is right at the center of it — love of self, others, customers, products, etc.
ooops! Almost forgot one of the most significant “loves” with regard to work — love for your work process, for the actual doing of the work. There can be no artistry without it.
Dick, I’d absolutely agree in the importance of loving the work process as hard as it is at times. Without this love, not only can there be no artistry, but you can get folks who only care about the ends (with little or no concern about the means of achieving those ends).
Chris – by “artistry” I mean engagement of the whole person. Artists know that mind, body, feeling, and spirit must come together — centered — in order for them to do their work. So, no love, no artistry; no fear, no artistry; no connection with whatever you call God; no artistry. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was a curator at a museum in Boston in the 1930s: “Industry without artistry is brutality.”
[...] Notes and Links:—The header of this post is a quote from Ananda Coomaraswamy.—The impetus for this post came from a dialogue with Chris Bailey at BaileyWorkPlay.—I explored artistry at work in detail in the book Artful Work. [...]
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