Showing Love at Work

Happy Valentine's Day!

On a recent video call to celebrate the departure of a colleague, someone said, “I love you, man. I know you all don't hear that word often in the workplace, but I mean it.”

He’s totally right. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “I love you” in a professional setting. Yet, it comes up all the time.

When talking to people leading through significant change in their organizations, we frequently talk about the need to “show the love” to people and make them feel cared for. 

When talking about the need to provide more feedback and more development-oriented feedback, it’s usually through a lens of signaling to one’s team that you’re invested in them as individuals rather than just seeing them as a cog in your value creation machine. 

And for me, that conversation usually starts from an observation that organizations are judgmental and that they create a context in which people need to continually work to earn the organization's esteem. There's definitely nothing unconditional about the relationship. At worst, people only find out every six months whether they are valued. 

Of course, a relationship in which there is a high amount of judgment and a low amount of affection isn’t one with a lot of love.

Why We Don’t Talk about Love

Of course, one of the reasons we don’t use “love” in the workplace is all of the bad behavior associated with romantic interactions. 

Just recently, CNN President Jeff Zucker and University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel stepped down from their roles because of workplace relationships. Former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook had perhaps the most expensive workplace relationship of all time when he agreed to give back $105 million of severance pay based on not having disclosed his relationships.

This CNN article contained an anecdote that I can’t get out of my head: “Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), said he once asked a roomful of CEOs how many had ever dated someone at work and about 70% raised their hands.”

Yikes!

We also don’t talk about love because our culture in the U.S. values “professionalism.” In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer writes about Roy Chua’s research that found that “Americans, in business, draw a sharp dividing line between cognitive trust and affective trust. [...] The United States has 'a long tradition of separating the practical and emotional. Mixing the two is perceived as unprofessional and risks conflict of interest.’”

Love Could Lead to Better Performance

Though our professional culture tells us not to mix the practical and emotional, this mixing may be the key to unlocking deeper levels of trust and thus greater performance.

Yes, trust is about reliability and competence. But to unlock the deepest levels of trust, people need to know that their colleague cares about them as a human being. 

In The Thin Book of Trust, Charles Feltman writes: “Some degree of intimacy is fundamental to the assessment of care in a relationship. Think of the people you believe have your interests at heart. In every case I will bet they have honestly shared with you some of what is important to them—their values, hopes, dreams, and/or concerns. This is how intimacy is established, how it grows. If you want people to believe you are concerned about their interests, listen to what is important to them and tell them what is important to you.” 

Indra Nooyi offered a great example of this in My Life in Full. She writes:

"Steve [Reinemund] and I also drew closer as friends when he was CEO and I was president of PepsiCo, partly because he had twins about the same age as [my daughter] Tara. [...] I remember driving out to see [my other daughter] Preetha at boarding school once and Steve picking up Tara after school to get her home. I don’t know of any other CEO who was quite so supportive."

Demonstrating a willingness to help a colleague on something unrelated to work is the kind of caring that leads to trust. And I’d argue that trusting someone to take care of your kid is a far deeper level of trust than the trust in someone’s business judgment or the trust that they’ll follow up on their professional  commitments. 

In their Harvard Business Review article “Employees Who Feel Love Perform Better,” professors Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill describe their research finding that greater love supports greater performance: “People who worked in a culture where they felt free to express affection, tenderness, caring, and compassion for one another­ were more satisfied with their jobs, committed to the organization, and accountable for their performance.”

To create this culture, Barsade and O’Neill suggest that organizations’ policies and practices support caring and compassion and that leaders can actively shape how people relate to each other. They write: “Instead of focusing on ‘cognitive culture’ — values such as teamwork, results-orientation, or innovation — you might think about how you can cultivate and enrich emotional culture as well.  Emotional culture can be based on love or other emotions, such as joy or pride.”

So while it may still be tricky to say “I love you,” leaders can imbue their teams and organizations with the spirit behind those words. In another Harvard Business Review article, “Can You Really Power an Organization with Love?,” Duncan Coombe provides this advice:

“You don’t need to use the word love. Is there a word more challenging to define than love? In our conversations with executives who describe themselves privately as love-oriented leaders, we discovered that some explicitly use the word and some don’t. [...] You might prefer to use words like compassion, respect, or kindness. That’s okay. They all speak to the same core idea, which is intentionally expressing concern and care for the well-being of another.”

Leadership Wisdom

“You can’t cause other people to fall in love with the work that you’re doing if you don’t love it yourself. And so I think you can manage for better performance but you can’t manage for greatness. You can’t manage your way into greatness. You’ve got to lead your way into greatness, and so you have to lead with your heart.”

— Jen-Hsun Huang, former CEO of Nvidia 

Something Fun

It's always been funny to me to think of just how many famous couples had workplace relationships that would be deemed off limits today. For example, MacKenzie Scott worked directly for Jeff Bezos before they started dating. And Barack Obama was a summer intern when he went out with Michelle Robinson. I wonder if their courtships match this depiction of the stages of a workplace romance: