Love has motivated many of the greatest innovations and achievements on record, from sports teams to scientific breakthroughs to life-changing humanitarian efforts.
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Culture is the ocean we swim in at work. It is the multiplier that enables or undermines excellence.
But love? In the workplace? You bet.
Love has motivated many of the greatest innovations and achievements on record, from sports teams to scientific breakthroughs to life-changing humanitarian efforts. Love is the space of possibility; the territory of commitment. Love proliferates in connection. It inspires our best performance.
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Before the Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers in this year’s extraordinary NFC championship game, their free safety, Earl Thomas said, “We love each other. We just feel strong inside. Everybody’s connected.”
The foundation is that “everybody’s connected.” It is through connection that strength and love become possible.
Imagine the connection between two people as a pipe. That pipe can be as narrow as a thread, wide and open, filled with debris, cracked, broken, or optimized for effectiveness. The pipe shrinks or grows as the two individuals interact, become known to each other, share themselves, their ideas, their authentic joys, genius, and vulnerability.
The resilience and strength of individual relationships depends upon the depth, range, and capacity of the connection itself. It enables or constrains what can flow and evolve between two people.
But what happens to teams when every pipe, when every connection between every possible pair of team members is open wide enough for information and energy to pass freely between them? What results when everybody’s connected? That’s when teams begin to act like living systems: self-organizing, attuned to their environments, adaptable, and self-repairing. Living systems, such as forests, are maintained by the energy, information, and matter that flow efficiently through many channels. Similarly, the weave of connections on teams is the precondition for collective intelligence to emerge. Humberto Maturana writes that, “Fear can only separate us. Love—allowing the other to be a legitimate other—is the one emotion that expands intelligence because love connects us.”
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Unfortunately, few teams operate in ways that actualize their full value or activate their full potential. Instead, connections that are too narrow, too few, and too often colored by fear limit risk-taking, commitment, and possibility. The results of disconnection and fear are predictable and the costs are real.
The challenges we face at work are ever more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And since we are smarter together than any one of us is alone, teams that can benefit from the alchemy of their differences, that can harness the diversity of their members’ ideas, experience, intuition, creativity, and passion are better able to make sense of complexity, determine and commit to strategy, innovate, and pull hard in the same direction to get things done.
What does it feel like to be a member of such a team? What’s it like to be a thread in a tapestry of interconnection that’s strong enough, and that we trust enough to bring everything we’ve got, our whole selves?
I imagine the Seahawks’ Earl Thomas might say that it feels strong, flexible, and ferocious. He might say it feels like love.
Love is not the goal of working on teams; it’s our hearts’ appraisal of the experience of working together. It’s what can arise when we cultivate more range, more authenticity, more depth, more curiosity, and more challenge in our connections.
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Love and other workplace virtues are symbiotic. Love grows strong in their soil, while fertilizing them in return. I asked half a dozen leaders, “What results do you see when there is love at work?” Their answers included many of the mindsets, behaviors, and conditions that promote organization success.
They answered: genius, creativity, connection, selflessness, altruism, service, courage, compassion, respect, acceptance, risk-taking, joy, bigger bandwidth, expansion, belonging, evolution, growth, truth, freedom, excellence, openness, capacity, possibility, range, and resilience.
To see what takes root in fear, I asked “What results do you see when there is fear at work?”
Their answers included: separation, contraction, constriction, withdrawal, avoidance, protection, rigidity, excitement, fight, flight, discernment, smallness, distortion, illusion, helplessness, collapse, lack of connection, amplification, lack of clarity, and bad decisions.
Love is like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Plants with strong roots can hold on through big storms. They need sunshine after rain and wind to keep growing. Deadlines, pressure, and fear can drive performance. But when fear is too great or lasts to long, it leads to overwhelm, shut-down, and fragmentation that reduce capacity and quality.
We’ll look at the most effective ways to bake more love and connection into our work teams in a future blog.
But what’s true for you now?
Please share your experiences and join the conversation. How do love and fear impact your work? What results? In terms of sustainable high performance what would better look like?
Photo credit: Bernie Zimmerman
Jody’s implication in the opening lines says it all for me: Love enables excellence. To the degree we stay in the experience of love is the degree we achieve excellence – especially in the face of countless invitations to operate with fear and finite mindsets.
I greatly appreciate Jody Gold’s post on love and fear. I might add that when we start calling the love we see at work by it’s proper name — love — we shall be that much closer to being able to create the conditions for its flourishing. It’s not good when there is a taboo against talking directly about a force as powerful for good as love is at work.
Ancient Greek has four distinct words for love: agápe, éros, and philía. English having only one word for love and that word being so used, abused, and misunderstood creates a challenge for us in appreciating just how significant Gold’s comments are. Having served in the Army I can really appreciate what love of teammates can mean.
This is a powerful post. What is meaningful to me is the idea of creating a culture of connection in the workplace. Feeling like we are part of team means caring for and connecting to our coworkers. When teams do this well, their performance is stronger and more sustainable. I also agree with Brent’s comments above that our use of the word “love” in this culture presents challenges for its use in this context. I’m not sure where that takes us in the conversation, but I think there may be language more accessible to our society that will get this… Read more »
I don’t know if you will read this Brent, but Hi. I’m Jody. Thanks for bringing your voice to the conversation and creating a link between us by commenting on this post. Affection, high regard, loyalty, willingness to fight and sacrifice on one another’s behalf—whatever lives between two people, or what is available as a resource for a group, is limited or enabled by what can fit in and flow through the connections between them. I totally agree that the one word for love in English limits its non-romantic power in our lives. Love is like art; it’s easier to… Read more »
As Gold notes: 1) It is common knowledge that high-functioning culture matters and 2) Knowing does not equal manifesting. I hope this bold and compelling statement convinces more organizations to focus productive attention on creating cultures that bring out the best in people.
Love this post. In the work I do with teams nothing is more true than how fear gets in the way of everything productive. Mr. Gold has it right when he says fear creates: “separation, contraction, constriction, withdrawal, avoidance, protection, rigidity, excitement, fight, flight, discernment, smallness, distortion, illusion, helplessness, collapse, lack of connection, amplification, lack of clarity, and bad decisions.” I may not have used the word “love” as the antithesis of fear but I get the connection. All organizations, and families for that matter, should be working diligently to extinguish fear from all relationships.