Love and Work – The myth of separate worlds

“One can live MAGNIFICENTLY in this world if one knows how
to work and how to love.” Tolstoy

Not so long ago the linking of ‘love’ and ‘work’ would have
been considered flaky and soft but now books on love and work, love and leadership, and many others, are filling Amazon’s shelves and a quick check on Google this morning revealed 969 million returns for ‘love and work’. Not all of these entries would be considered strictly commercial but my point is that we are talking A LOT about love as if it is the new, new thing in business and leadership.

For many years the love and work connection was dominated by
the HR departments desire to control and deter romance and sexual behaviour at work. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200703/love-work
Quite a useful strategy for keeping people focused, avoiding embarrassment and the whole spectrum of abuse of power that seems to be both real and perceived. But I suspect even the most stringent policy driven organisation has the odd romance and fling going on. It seems that human beings and love are inseparable.

Romance is not the only form love takes at work.  There’s much more to our work- love story. Think about your most inspiring or inspired leadership or work related experiences. Were they the result of some super sophisticated strategy, procedure or process or a gob-smacking vision that blew your socks off? I doubt it. Mine are all completely distinguishable by the difficult to define quality of LOVE.

I once worked in a team that was so highly motivated we worked for weeks at times without breaks or extra incentive. I couldn’t explain it then but looking back our boss inspired us through his absolute faith in our talents and learning ability (which was bordering on crazy at times), but like a proud parent he never doubted any of us for a second and held on to a vision for us even if we couldn’t see it for ourselves. He held our hands through challenging times, he provided support for every risk we took, he worked
restlessly to encourage and promote our personal as well as our work goals, and
he shared and celebrated our successes.

Our boss loved ‘IT’ (our business). He loved our company. He loved his team. He loved the contribution we were making to the business. And that LOVE was the fuel for our exceptional motivation and performance.

Leadership is not about models, theories and process. Leadership is not even about having the best vision, strategy, goals, people, technology or systems. If it were, Apple should never have been so outrageously successful and countless other organisations who invest millions in their technology, systems, processes and people would be much more successful than they have been.

It makes a huge difference to LOVE WHAT YOU DO. Where would Apple be if Steve Jobs didn’t LOVE sexy technology? Where would Microsoft have got to without Bill Gates’ LOVE of clever software? But that’s not the whole LOVE STORY either.

Effective leaders are able to inspire others to have the FAITH TO FOLLOW, even into the scary unknown. They also have the credibility to compel their people to dig deeply and draw on all their talents, qualities and resources to find solutions to impossible problems, to go the extra mile and find whatever it takes to achieve the goals.

Despite uncertainty about the future, true leaders create the conditions for their people to explore, experiment, test, fail, learn and succeed. They foster self belief and belief in the possible. They create a united sense of security and LOVE.

I realised long ago that when I peel away the hard nosed labels on the work I do (executive coaching, capability development, skills training, facilitating change, culture change programmes, team building, etc), what lies beneath is simply this: humans learning to love themselves, to love their work, to love their colleagues and to love the meaning they make of it all.

Powerful leadership is about having the conscious commitment to learn how to love. So, how do we love? Well that’s for another post! Take a few moments now though to look through this short self inventory survey and ponder your own LOVING capabilities at work.

Loving Capability Self Inventory:

So, are your LOVE AT WORK capabilities or LOVING LEADERSHIP
skills in need of some TLC?  Contact us to arrange a personal coaching session, an in-house talk or seminar, or to find out about our next public programme.

With love, Lorraine