How Can We Work With Love?

Last weekend on LinkedIn, I ran across an interesting article. The image of bright multi-colored chrysanthemums immediately caught my eye. The title “OD and Love” drew me in. As an Organizational Development (OD) professional, I knew that its objective is to improve an organization’s capacity to handle its functioning and relationships. More recently, its scholars have begun to examine the discipline from an emotion-based standpoint.

What is so unique about this article by Helena Clayton, Leadership Development Consultant and Executive Coach, is that she was asking questions, not providing answers. She was mostly wondering about the relationship between OD and Love. Helena is planning a workshop on November 4 in central London where she will bring in other OD practitioners to explore the topic. 

In her article, she asked a number of questions as a starting point. Suddenly, I became passionate about researching and addressing her inquiries. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend in person. Here are seven of her questions and my thoughts around them:

In what ways are organizations loveless places at a high cost to others? 

Various negative reports regarding workplace conditions and worker treatment have surfaced about Amazon. One former Amazon warehouse worker described their work conditions as “grueling” and “depressing”. According to Vox he said:

"I got a sense in no time at all that they work people to death, or until they get too tired to keep working. After two months, I felt I couldn’t work there and maintain a healthy state of mind."

Another example is Tesla. Quartz quoted a former Tesla executive as saying:

“Everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon.”

The routine was repeated so often, it became known as 'the idiot bit’. If you made a mistake or said something that rubbed him the wrong way, he would determine you're an idiot and nothing could change his mind.  

Where does love already have a presence in organizations?

Bob Chapman, Chairman and CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, imagines a world where every person matters. He sees a world full of caring work environments in which people can realize their gifts, apply and develop their talents, and feel fulfilled by their contributions. He believes that people will leave work each day fulfilled and be better spouses, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, citizens of the world.

“Because everyone—including you—matters.”

Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani yogurt said in an interview with Forbes: "if you go inside the walls of Chobani, you know it is really a people's company. The first thing you feel is the human spirit. Whatever background you have, there is acceptance.” When he found out that there were refugees in the local area that couldn’t get jobs, he brought them in. He also gave 10 percent of the company back to employees in shares of stock. His view, similar to Richard Branson’s of Virgin:

"Take care of your employees and your employees will want to take care of your customers."

If love were more present, what difference might it make?

To the degree that compassion is related to the emotion of love, we know that it serves many benefits. Compassion not only improves workplace culture, but it can also help a company’s bottom line. Creating a compassionate environment can reduce adversity and improve relationships for a win-win for everyone.

• Employee retention
• Decreased stress
• Improved health
• Higher productivity

When people are treated with compassion, they tend to feel good about themselves. As a result, they tend to want to pay forward those positive feelings to others.

“Office productivity is much more likely to soar when co-workers are cooperating, rather than competing with one another’s efforts.”

What are the values of OD and do they include love?

Marguilies and Raja (1972) explained the humanistic values of OD as follows:

• Opportunities for people to function as human beings rather than resources
• Chances for both the organization and member to develop to their full potential
• Seeks to increase the effectiveness of the organization to meet all of its goals
• Attempts to create an environment to find exciting and challenging work
• Opportunities for people to influence the way in which they relate to work, the organization, and the environment
• Treats each human being as a person with a complex set of needs, all of which are important to their work and their life

Merriam-Webster defines love as an intense feeling of deep affection or a great interest and pleasure in something (noun). Affection on the other hand is a moderate feeling of emotion. Can we agree that:

“Love in the workplace could be about a feeling of emotion for our organization, the work we do and those that we work with?”

What is OD’s responsibility to solve tough human problems?

According to Wiki.org, OD’s responsibilities includes a number of objectives based upon an optimistic view of the nature of man:

“that man in a supportive environment is capable of achieving higher levels of development and accomplishment.”

Some of these objectives include: better interpersonal and group processes, more effective communication, greater ability to cope with organizational problems; more effective decision processes, appropriate leadership styles, improved capacity to manage destructive conflict; and improved levels of trust and cooperation among members. The scientific method: inquiry, a rigorous search for causes, experimental testing of hypotheses and review of results is vital to OD and effectiveness.

What OD frameworks have the scope for love?

Appreciative Inquiry is about discovering what works and gives life to an organization and building the organization on these life giving properties. David Cooperrider, the founder or Appreciative Inquiry describes it this way:

"More than a method or technique, the appreciative mode of inquiry is a means of living with, being with and directly participating in the life of a human system in a way that compels one to inquire into the deeper life-generating essentials and potentials of organizational existence."

Appreciative Inquiry has five phases:

Define: Awareness of the need for development including preparing for an appreciative process and commitment to the positive.

Discover: What is the best you've been, involving interview process and gathering of life-giving experience within organization.

Dream: What is the world and the community calling us to be and what could our organization look like in five years’ time. Developing common images of the future and visioning the ideal.

Design: Aligning ideals, values, structures and mission. Developing achievable plans and steps to make the vision a reality including a dialogue about what should be.

Deliver: Achieving the Organization's Destiny by co-creating a sustainable, preferred future. Who, What, When, Where, How as well as innovating what will be?

GTE was one of the early major corporations to use AI in its organizational development. Tom White, the company’s President described the relationship between Appreciative Inquiry and problem solving:

"Appreciative Inquiry gets much better results than seeking out and solving problems…. It is a complex science designed to make things better. We can't ignore problems - we just need to approach them from the other side."

By mid-year 1995, GTE had undergone major reorganization and consolidation, a substantial acquisition, process re-engineering and significant downsizing. In February of 1996, the senior leadership team found the results of the annual Employee Opinion Survey disturbing and responded with a call to action. Hourly employee scores were up in only two categories while flat or down in seven of nine categories. 

Knowing that GTE hourly employees served in excess of ninety percent of GTE’s customers, the Telops senior team agreed that something must be done to positively engage front line employees. David Coopererrider and Diana Whitney were brought in as consultants to use Appreciative Inquiry as the process for bringing about the much needed organization change.

The results were unprecedented. The local support for the union-management partnership was contagious. A process called Appreciative Inquiry Issues Resolution replaced conflict resolution. The positive orientation toward partnership began spilling over into relationships between the front line and headquarters staff. The company culture council, seeing the potential of Appreciative Inquiry to bridge differences and to help create a truly employee centered culture, decided to use it as the integrative philosophy and methodology for culture change.

Leadership and management began to put employees first and truly cared about them. I know because I was an employee at the Irving, Texas headquarters. At the time my mom, in her mid-fifties had terminal cancer. My manager told me to take off whenever I needed to sit with her during treatments. One morning I woke up knowing that I needed to report to the hospital, not work. He showed up for my mom’s funeral the next Saturday to support me. This culture was the closest thing to love that I have ever experienced in a company. I always wondered how the change came about. Then many years later, after becoming an OD professional, I read about this case study.  

What are the things we could do from love yet still be considered an OD intervention?

Digital transformation in the 21st century will continue to drive exponential change in the future of work. Human skills like empathy, critical thinking, problem-solving, and sound decision-making will be more important than ever. In Human + Machine, Accenture leaders Daugherty and Wilson explain the missing middle between human-only activity and machine-only activity. This is where human and machine hybrid activities take place. Not only will humans complement machines but ultimately artificial intelligence will give humans superpowers.

The application of Change Management in organizations will be more important than ever. In “An Invitation to the Positive Revolution: Appreciative Inquiry and Culture Change at GTE”, the authors wrote that asking people to change often meets resistance. 

“Involving people in co-creating the future of their organization – their future – tends to evoke a spirit of cooperation and contribution.”

I don’t see any reason why the Appreciative Inquiry framework would not be a viable intervention to convert other profit-focused bureaucracies to a people-first culture where love in the workplace is about a feeling of emotion for our organization, the work we do and those that we work with.