I asked my friend what to write about in February. Her answers were, in this order:
- Love
- The Super Bowl
- Why no one should ever be asked to present on a conference call at 5am
Just to be super clear here, when I say ‘love at work’ I do NOT mean it in a Matt Lauer kind of way. I mean it in a ‘fierce commitment to customer service’ way, or in an ‘unconditional positive regard for your team’ way.
Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, defines love as “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Well, if you replace the word ‘spiritual’ with ‘professional’, you’ve just described what leadership is.
When we extend ourselves to help our teams develop new skills and then give them opportunities to use them, they feel seen, fed and encouraged. Daniel Pink’s fantastic book Drive says we all want these three things in our work:
- Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives
- Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters
- Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Build a professional environment that gives your teams autonomy, mastery and sense of purpose and you’ll create a culture full of love! It will be so powerful that it will radiate out past the walls of your offices and wash over your customers too.
But it’s not all about other people. Scott Peck was also talking about loving ourselves. When we extend ourselves for our own growth we make ourselves better leaders, better communicators and better thinkers. When we nurture and support ourselves, we can build better products and better companies. And we feel so much better too.
Who couldn’t use a little more of that kind of love in their lives?
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