Love In The Workplace
Eight years ago, one of the best bosses I ever had brought me into a conference room after a heated exchange during which I had gone overboard in asserting my authority over a more junior salesperson. We sat down, he looked me in the eye, and he said, “Sloyer, you are good at your job, but you don’t have to prove it to everyone all the time.”
At first I was mortified. I felt so exposed, like I was standing there naked in front of him. He was calling me out for something that I had spent my whole life trying to hide. I, of course, wanted to be admired, but I didn’t want him nor anyone else to know how much I desperately needed it.
When I reflected on this later, however, I realized this was as close to love as I would get on the trading floor at an investment bank. In one simple sentence, he conveyed the duality that I am okay as I am, and yet it is not okay to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Rather than giving feedback about me as a person, he gave feedback about my behavior. He was clear that how I was acting needed to change for the benefit of the team, but he avoided casting doubt on my character or my competency. The way in which he sternly, yet calmly, delivered his message left me feeling like he empathized with the insecurity that was underneath my need to prove myself.
The experience in the conference room that day, which didn’t last more than a minute, had such a profound impact on me that, even eight years later, it has become one of my most referenced stories from my time at the bank. The loving action was truly a black swan event on the trading floor, and it has inspired me to imagine what it might look like if love were to become the standard, rather than the exception, at companies.
What is love?
When we think of love, we usually think of it as a noun: a warm feeling of affection for someone. The problem with thinking about it as a feeling, as the author of Nonviolent Communication Marshall Rosenberg reminds us, is that our feelings can change quite dramatically from moment to moment. So if someone were to ask you if you love someone, you’d have to follow up with a clarifying question: when?
Rather than thinking about love as a noun, it can be beneficial to think of it as a verb. In the Bhakti-yoga tradition, love is defined as devotional service that is free from selfish desires. In order for an action to be truly loving, it must be unconditional. There is no such thing as conditional love. And there is no such thing as love where we are trying to prove something about ourselves. As a result, love is rare. Many of us might think that we offer love to certain people in our lives, but if we were to be deeply honest, is what we are offering really unconditional?
I recently came across an article about unconditional love. The author asked the reader to come up with an individual in their life for whom they have love and posed the following three questions: Have you accepted this person’s failures? Do you see this person’s weaknesses as projects to be fixed? Are you afraid to be honest because this person might not accept you?
If you are like me, your answers don’t paint a resounding portrait of unconditional love. And if most of us don’t offer it to the people we say that we love, it’s very unlikely we offer it to those with whom we work.
Unconditional love at work
Unconditional love is not exactly a frequently spoken phrase in the workplace. This is not surprising given that neither of the individual words that make up the phrase have particular resonance at corporations.
Unconditional
Corporations are built on conditions. Specifically, they are built on the conditions that:
Customers will buy goods/services if the corporation produces desirable products
Shareholders will buy more shares if the corporation generates more profits
Employees will work hard if the corporation pays them salaries and promotes them
Pretty straight forward. The transactional spirit behind these conditions naturally filters through to the relationships among team members. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Love
There is a famous verse from Corinthians that starts: Love is patient, love is kind.
Patience and kindness take time. They take dealing with the messy insides of real human beings feeling real human feelings and making real human mistakes. Corporations don’t have time for this. Because if the above conditions are going to be satisfied, then efficiency and productivity cannot be sacrificed!
Insecurity disguised as inspiration
When I worked at the investment bank, I would often write emails to my boss letting him know about the contributions of one of the junior members of my team and would share my perspective that this person was doing a great job. My boss would inevitably respond, “Awesome. Thanks for letting me know,” and then I would forward the email to the junior person.
On one hand, it was an expression of validation and genuinely helpful for this person’s career. But there were unspoken conditions. The conditions were loyalty, compliance with future requests, and having my back if I ever ducked out early for the day. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. There was also an implicit understanding that I would continue to advocate for him in this way as long as my conditions were continuously met.
Another initiative I often took when I worked at the bank was to serve as a mentor for the analysts and associates. I would offer my time for coffee catch ups, guidance on how to navigate company politics, and advice on initiatives they could take to further their careers. On the surface, these were acts of kindness and generosity. Under the surface, these were forums where I could justify my own career choices to a very eager audience and present all the wonderful things that I had done as a model for what could be possible in their careers. I was disguising insecurity as inspiration. I also knew I was earning a reputation as a “culture carrier” that would likely get rewarded in the next promotion cycle.
Our insecure egos
Unconditional love is really hard. The reason why it’s so hard is because of our insecure egos. A key part of the nature of our ego is that it keeps us from feeling complete. This lack of completeness is existential for the ego. It does everything in its power to keep us wanting more.
The Inner Critic, as we share during our Upbuild workshops, is the mouthpiece of the ego. It likes to tell us things like: you are not enough, you’re falling behind, you need more of this, you need more of that. This can be especially true in the work setting because many of us derive the majority of our self-worth from our work. Our Inner Critics lead us to believe that we have a giant hole inside of us that must be filled with stuff from the outside.
We recognize that we can’t meet the relentless demands of our Inner Critics by ourselves, and so we need other people to help us. Really, we are hoping they will do it for us. We also recognize that others are dealing with their own Inner Critics, and so we consciously or unconsciously enroll them as co-conspirators in our quests to prove ourselves to ourselves and to one another. We treat people transactionally and allow others to treat us transactionally as a strategy to get stuff (validation, loyalty, promotions, compensation, etc.) to fill holes that can never be filled with transactions.
But this all needs to change. Love needs to become the standard. Whether it be on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or in the two-person lemonade stand startup currently being manifested in your parents’ basement, we need to take steps to make our work environments more reflective of this ideal.
Practical ways to show the love at work
Using the definitions from earlier, love in the workplace means that we unselfishly serve our colleagues and take actions that stem from a deep awareness of and connection to their intrinsic value as people. Love must always have a person as the object, but since it can get confusing when we are also trying to serve other team members and the organization as a whole, we can think about trying to do the most loving thing to serve the situation. In other words, we do what we believe will most beneficially serve the greater good. If we serve the situation, then we also serve the individuals, even if the individuals involved don’t like it in the short run.
This might all feel a bit theoretical, so on a more practical level, here are some ways you can immediately offer love to your colleagues:
As a disclaimer, all of these actions could be motivated by a desire to optimize performance, create a more comfortable work environment, or demonstrate leadership skills. While these motivations can be constructive, they would not constitute love. Love can only come from a pure place in our hearts where we are not trying to get or prove anything.
Prioritizing rapport and nuance over efficiency. In our constant quest for performance, we like to give others candid feedback as efficiently as possible. In practice, this usually means squeezing what should be a 30 minute nuanced discussion into a 5 minute blunt-force soliloquy on why the other person sucks. Before taking action, we can ask ourselves the question: What would be most beneficial for this person and our team one year from now?
Giving feedback about the behavior, not the person. There is a feedback model that I like to share with my clients called SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact). As an example, one might say: during our Zoom call with the team yesterday (situation), when you asked David for his point of view without also asking me (behavior), I felt disappointed and like my work on the project wasn’t appreciated (impact). With the SBI model, we keep hearsay and defensiveness to a minimum.
Lots of meta-conversations. Meta-conversations are conversations about conversations and relationships. They are not about the work itself, but about how the work is being done. They usually begin with something like: Hey I’m feeling a little tension between us, would you be open to talking about it? or I noticed that you were very patient with me during yesterday’s meeting. Thank you for that.
Taking responsibility for our insecure egos. In the mentoring example I shared earlier where I got an ego boost from the validation of my mentees, if I had been more aware of my own insecurities, I could have shifted how I acted and what I shared with them by one degree to better serve them. I could have spent less time telling them the details of my own war stories about great trades that I had made (which were always slightly exaggerated), and more time asking questions to help them discover for themselves about how they might take the next step in their careers given their specific circumstances.
Giving validation from the heart, only. Many of us use validation to get others to like us, to win the corporate political game, and as a carrot to keep others performing. Validation should not be used as a currency to get something. It is an expression from our hearts. Before giving validation, we can ask our hearts: what would you like to express to this person? And if the answer is, nothing, then maybe save it for another time.
Being clear with boundaries and our needs. Unconditional love does not mean that we are doormats for others. It does mean we clearly outline our boundaries. As Brene Brown suggests, clear is kind. Clarity is a great service to our colleagues, and thus can be an act of love, especially if it makes us uncomfortable in the short run.
Taking people at their word and giving the benefit of the doubt. Our egos, under an existential fear of not being seen the way that they want to be seen, are on guard for getting “screwed over” and being let down. This fear leaks into how we treat others. By giving people the benefit of the doubt, we build the trust that is required for two-way unconditional love. And if we don’t trust someone, we need to be able to have nuanced and mature meta-conversations before we move forward with the task at hand (see #1 and #3 above).
As you can see from this list, unconditional love does not always feel good. It doesn’t imply passiveness or inefficiency, and doesn’t preclude actions such as negative feedback or firing someone. Unconditional love takes courage and a sincere effort to determine what would be the most beneficial action to serve one another and the situation as a whole.
“Love is the answer”
Even in our hyper-competitive and ego-driven work environments, underneath the chaos, we are all wanting to give and receive love. There are lots of well-researched benefits to creating a loving workplace environment (higher employee satisfaction, more teamwork, fewer sick days, better client outcomes, etc.), and although all of these are critically important, they don’t quite get at the core of it. The reason why we need to bring love into the workplace is because we are made of love. As espoused by just about every wisdom tradition, unconditional love is the reason for our existence. And we spend a lot of our existence at work.
John Lennon put it precisely when he wrote, “Love is the answer, and you know that for sure.” When we are not operating from unconditional love, we are operating from a place of delusion. Conditional and transactional relationships are based on the false belief that we need to have more and be different than who we are at our core. Unconditional love is based on the truth we have nothing to prove, and so we can love without conditions or fear.
When I was a kid, my siblings used to say to me: Michael, I don’t like you, but I love you. We don’t always have to like the people with whom we work, but let’s take one step toward loving them.
Looking at the ways of expressing unconditional love in the workplace above, which one will you make an effort to do in the next few days? And by doing so, what impact might this have on you, the other person, and the relationship?
