THE DANCE OF THE “L” WORD

Although business leaders do carefully avoid the use of the word “love,” they still perform a delicate dance around the subject of love, and occasionally they come quite close to it. They use phrases and sentences like the following in their mission statements, or in their statements of values, beliefs, or principles:

• “We believe that our first responsibility is to our customers.”
• Our goal: “To establish a workplace where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and be satisfied with their work.”
• “Our second responsibility is to our employees.”
• One of our values: “Tolerance for honest mistakes”
• A value: “Heroic customer service”
• A motto: “People as the source of our strength”
• “Give full consideration to the individual employee.”
• “Spend a lot of time making customers happy.”
• “Make people away from home feel that they’re among friends and really wanted.”
• “We are in the business of preserving and improving human life.”
• “Treat each employee with dignity, as an individual.”
• “Respect and concern for the individual”
• “To bring happiness to millions”
• “Leading at a higher level is the process of achieving worthwhile results while acting with respect, care, and fairness for the well-being of all involved.” 
• “Freely sharing information”
• “Open communication”
• “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
• “Sharing power and decision making”
• “High level of collaboration”
• “Recognition and appreciation for employees”
• “High degree of collaboration among employees”
• “A concern for employee morale”
• “A respect for the intrinsic worth of all human beings”
• “Caring about employees as people”

A careful reading of all the above phrases easily reveals that each of them is a variation on expressing a concern for the happiness of another person, which is the definition of Real Love. 

Buckingham and Coffman (First Break All the Rules) carefully analyzed surveys from a million employees and 80,000 managers, and from that mountain of data they distilled twelve questions that, when asked of employees, revealed the health of a workplace. One of these questions, for example, was, “Is there someone at work who encourages my development?” and their discussion of all twelve questions is well worth the reading.

The responses of a million employees certainly deserve—even demand—our attention, and it’s difficult not to notice that of the twelve questions, ten can be distilled into a single question: “Do the people at work—especially my supervisor—demonstrate a genuine concern for my happiness?” In short, the health of a workplace is inextricably related to how much love is felt by the people who work there. And for those who are more oriented toward the profit and loss side of business, feeling loved has been proven to have an enormous impact on the bottom line. Buckingham and Coffman analyzed 2500 business units and 24 companies and discovered—hardly a surprise—that the “happy” employees who tended to answer yes to the twelve questions demonstrated a consistent superiority over other employees in the all-important business outcomes of productivity, profitability, employee retention, and customer satisfaction.

Happy employees are simply more productive and profitable. They tend to stay in their jobs longer and give better service to customers. Considering these overwhelming business advantages, you might think that every business would take whatever steps were necessary to encourage the development of happy employees, and you might also think that the word love would be on the tongue of every manager in the world. But such is not the case. As I indicated above, we dance around the word in every possible permutation, but we diligently avoid using the actual “L” word.

One reason for this avoidance is that business people have accepted many of our general cultural misconceptions about what love is. Allow me a moment to refute some of these misconceptions. Real Love in the workplace is not

• soft and weak. Certainly that would be intolerable in the corporate world, where dogs eat dogs and where any display of feelings is considered a sign of weakness comparable to blood in the water.
• a license for people to walk all over you.
• unnecessary. Real Love creates a localized change in the corporate environment and thereby a natural increase in morale and productivity, which are essential to the health of any business.
• touchy-feely, a characteristic that is particularly frightening to most men. It seems feminine and alien. I have spoken to many men who have been decorated for heroic behavior in battle, as well as men who have been heroic as firemen and policemen, and these men have acknowledged that unconditionally loving others on a regular basis takes more courage than running into battle or into a burning building.
• romantic.
• permissive or coddling.

Despite our aversion for the “L” word, however, if we want to optimize our profitability, we must begin to use the word love, because love—or Real Love—is the word that most accurately describes the single element or ingredient most important in the development of a whole and happy human being, a human being who is most productive in the workplace. Allow me at this point to illustrate in yet another way why it’s so important that we not avoid this word.

AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa

As of 2005 about 40 million people in the world were living with the HIV/AIDS virus—70% of that total in the southern half of Africa alone. There are entire countries in Africa where as many as 35% of the adults are infected. Families, neighborhoods, and entire villages have been—and are being—decimated, even eliminated, by this monstrous disease. Unbelievably, however, in many villages, and in many entire regions, they’re hardly even talking about the ravenous destruction, because AIDS is primarily transmitted sexually, and in their culture sexuality is not a subject that decent people talk about.

These people have sex, of course—the rapid spread of AIDS would not be possible without extensive sexual activity—but they’re not talking about it. When people die, AIDS often is not even recorded on the death certificates. Instead, they write tuberculosis, or diarrhea, or pneumonia—whatever infection finally killed them because of their AIDS-impaired immune system. Most people don’t even know they have the virus until they’re at death’s door.

This disease is killing people on the scale of a world war, and a great number of its victims are standing idly by, allowing it to mow them down. Relief agencies come into villages and try to talk to the men, but they refuse to listen to their manhood be insulted in that way. The native women try to talk to their husbands, who react by beating them and throwing them into the street. Volunteers are frustrated by a culture that values, in the words of one Time magazine article, “its dignity over saving lives.”

Fortunately, this avoidance of discussing AIDS is slowly changing, so some of what I am describing here applies to circumstances as they existed a few years ago.

For many years the tragedy of AIDS has continued to grow precisely because those afflicted with it have refused to accurately name it. Without receiving the precise diagnosis of AIDS, many people have been treated only for the secondary diseases and symptoms: tuberculosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, diarrhea, pneumonia, and so on. Treating these conditions, however, is like repeatedly mopping the excess water off the floor when what we really need to do is unclog the kitchen drain and turn off the faucet. We have to get to the root problem, not treat the consequences of it.