“Working here makes us better humans”

A daily thought from Leandro Herrero:

I have had a brilliant two day meeting with a brilliant client. One aspect of my
work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes the culture of the company. This is a set of actionable behaviours that must be universal, from the CEO to the MRO (Mail Room Officer). They also need to pass the ‘new hire test’: would you put that list in front of a prospect employee and say ‘This is us’?

There was one ‘aspirational’ sentence that I put to the test: ‘Working here makes us better human beings’.

It was met with scepticism by the large group in the meeting, initially mainly manifested through body language including the, difficult to describe, cynical smiles. The rationalists in the group jumped in hard to ‘corporatize’ the sentence. ‘Do you mean better professionals?’ The long discussion had started. Or, perhaps, ‘do you mean…’ – and here the full blown corporate Academy of Language – from anything to do with skills, talent management, empowerment to being better managers, being better leaders, and so on.

‘No, I mean better human beings. Period!’- I pushed back. Silence.

Next stage was the litany of adjectives coming form the collective mental thesaurus: fluffy, fuzzy, soft, vague…

I felt compelled to reframe the question: ‘OK, so who is against working in a place that makes you inhuman? Everybody. OK, ‘ So who is against working in a place that makes you more human? Nobody. But still the defensive smiling.

It went on for a while until the group, ‘organically’, by the collective hearing of pros and cons, turned 180 degrees until everybody agreed that ‘Working in a place that makes you a better human being’ was actually very neat. But – there was a but – ‘Our leadership team wont like it. They will say that its fluffy, fuzzy, soft etc… In the words of the group, it was not ‘them’ anymore who had a problem, it was the infamous ‘they’.

The “difficult to describe” cynical smiles are familiar…. indeed I am sure I have perpetrated such smiles more than once myself!

Medicine can be a dehumanising profession, sometimes literally. Dehumanising in both ways – patients, especially some categories of patient, colleagues, but also we ourselves. Of course, the rationalist part of us can pick apart what “better humans” means…

What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in a Long-term Care Setting, Barsdale and O’Neill 2014

I have blogged before about the relationship between morale and clinical outcomes. From 2014 in Administrative Science Quarterly , a paper which links this with another interest of mine, workplace friendships .

Here is the abstract:

In this longitudinal study, we build a theory of a culture of companionate love—feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others—at work, examining the culture’s influence on outcomes for employees and the clients they serve in a long-term care setting. Using measures derived from outside observers, employees, family members, and cultural artifacts, we find that an emotional culture of companionate love at work positively relates to employees’ satisfaction and teamwork and negatively relates to their absenteeism and emotional exhaustion. Employees’ trait positive affectivity (trait PA)—one’s tendency to have a pleasant emotional engagement with one’s environment—moderates the influence of the culture of companionate love, amplifying its positive influence for employees higher in trait PA. We also find a positive association between a culture of companionate love and clients’ outcomes, specifically, better patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the emergency room. The study finds some association between a culture of love and families’ satisfaction with the long-term care facility. We discuss the implications of a culture of companionate love for both cognitive and emotional theories of organizational culture. We also consider the relevance of a culture of companionate love in other industries and explore its managerial implications for the healthcare industry and beyond.

Few outcomes are as “hard” – or as appealing to a certain strand of management – than “fewer trips to the emergency room.” The authors squarely and unashamedly go beyond the often euphemistic language of this kind of paper to focus on love:

‘‘Love’’ is a word rarely found in the modern management literature, yet for more than half a century, psychologists have studied companionate love— defined as feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others—as a basic emotion fundamental to the human experience (Walster and Walster, 1978; Reis and Aron, 2008). Companionate love is a far less intense emotion than romantic love (Hatfield and Rapson, 1993, 2000); instead of being based on passion, it is based on warmth, connection (Fehr, 1988; Sternberg, 1988), and the ‘‘affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined’’ (Berscheid and Walster, 1978: 177). Unlike self-focused positive emotions (such as pride or joy), which center on independence and self- orientation, companionate love is an other-focused emotion, promoting interdependence and sensitivity toward other people (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Gonzaga et al., 2001).

Companionate love is therefore distinct from the romantic love which so dominates our thought when we think about love. As is often the case, we moderns are not nearly as new in our thinking as we would like to see ourselves:

Considering the large proportion of our lives we spend with others at work (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011), the influence of companionate love in other varied life domains (Shaver et al., 1987), and the growing field of positive organizational scholarship, which focuses on human connections at work (Rynes et al., 2012), it is reasonable to expect that this basic human emotion will not only exist at work but that it will also influence workplace outcomes. Although the term ‘‘companionate love’’ had not yet been coined, the work of early twentieth-century organizational scholars revealed rich evidence of deep connections between workers involving the feelings of affection, caring, and compassion that comprise companionate love. Hersey’s (1932) daily experi- ence sampling study of Pennsylvania Railroad System employees, for example, recorded the importance of caring, affection, compassion, and tenderness, as well as highlighting the negative effects when these emotions were absent, particularly in relationships with foremen. Similarly, Roethlisberger and Dickson’s (1939) detailed study of factory life provided crisp observations of companionate love in descriptions of workers’ interactions, describing supervisors who showed genuine affection, care, compassion, and tenderness toward their employees.

There is nothing new under the sun. In subsequent decades this kind of research was abandoned.  The authors go on to describe the distinctions between strong and weak cultures of companionate love:

Like the concept of cognitive organizational culture, a culture of companio- nate love can be characterized as strong or weak. To picture a strong culture of companionate love, first imagine a pair of coworkers collaborating side by side, each day expressing caring and affection toward one another, safeguarding each other’s feelings, showing tenderness and compassion when things don’t go well, and supporting each other in work and non-work matters. Then expand this image to an entire network of dyadic and group interactions so that this type of caring, affection, tenderness, and compassion occurs frequently within most of the dyads and groups throughout the entire social unit: a clear picture emerges of a culture of companionate love. Such a culture involves high ‘‘crystallization,’’ that is, pervasiveness or consensus among employees in enacting the culture (Jackson, 1966).

An example of high crystallization appears in a qualitative study of social workers (Kahn, 1993) in which compassion spreads through the network of employees in a ‘‘flow and reverse flow’’ of the emotion from employees to one another and to supervisors and back. This crystallization of companionate love can cross organizational levels; for example, an employee at a medical center described the pervasiveness of companionate love through- out the unit: ‘‘We are a family. When you walk in the door, you can feel it. Everyone cares for each other regardless of whatever level you are in. We all watch out for each other’’ (http://auroramed.dotcms.org/careers/employee_ voices.htm). Words like ‘‘all’’ and ‘‘everyone’’ in conjunction with affection, caring, and compassion are hallmarks of a high crystallization culture of companio- nate love.

Another characteristic of a strong culture of companionate love is a high degree of displayed intensity (Jackson, 1966) of emotional expression of affec- tion, caring, compassion, and tenderness. This can be seen in the example of an employee diagnosed with multiple sclerosis who described a work group whose members treated her with tremendous companionate love during her daily struggles with the condition. ‘‘My coworkers showed me more love and compassion than I would ever have imagined. Do I wish that I didn’t have MS? Of course. But would I give up the opportunity to witness and receive so much love? No way’’ (Lilius et al., 2003: 23).

In weak cultures of companionate love, expressions of affection, caring, compassion, or tenderness among employees are minimal or non-existent, showing both low intensity and low crystallization. Employees in cultures low in companionate love show indifference or even callousness toward each other, do not offer or expect the emotions that companionate love comprises when things are going well, and do not allow room to deal with distress in the workplace when things are not going well. In a recent hospital case study, when a nurse with 30 years of tenure told her supervisor that her mother-in- law had died, her supervisor responded not with compassion or even sympathy, but by saying, ‘‘I have staff that handles this. I don’t want to deal with it’’ (Lilius et al., 2008: 209). Contrast this reaction with one from the billing unit of a health services organization in which an employee described her coworkers’ reactions following the death of her mother: ‘‘I did not expect any of the compassion and sympathy and the love, the actual love that I got from co-workers’’ (Lilius et al., 2011: 880).

This is obviously a paper I could simply post extracts from all day but at this point I will desist. Perhaps rather than “What’s Love Got to Do With It? the authors could have invoked “All You Need is Love?”

Leandro Herrero – What I learnt from the monks: a little anthropology of leadership and space in one page.

Another Daily Thought from Leandro Herrero that I am tempted to simply cut and paste completely. The whole thing is worth reading. I have blogged on my other site a fair about both the positive side of monastic practice and the risk of romanticising monasticism with the attendant danger of spiritual pride.

Monasteries were, of course, key institutions in the development of Western institutional life and culture. We often like to think that we have moved way way beyond learning from the communal life of monasteries. Of course, the themes and patterns of human interaction recur in superficially different guises:

There is something special about creating space. For me, leadership is mainly architecture: create the conditions, find the spaces, protect them, make them liveable. Architects also have maps, and compasses. The leader needs to provide maps (frameworks, such as the non negotiable behaviours) and navigation tools (a value system). But, above all, it’s about space.

Providing spaces for people to breath, to growth, to deliver something, to get better, to think critically, to interact, to collaborate, to travel together. This is all about space. Space is the psychological sister of place. Space may be only, or mainly, mental. As such, it is a precious asset. No wonder the word space has been often associated to the word sacred. As in sacred spaces. To provide space, to create and protect spaces for others, is something a good leader does. It’s a great deal of his servant-ship.

But we, sometimes, are not very good at this. We take over other people’s spaces by insisting in discussing, wanting to ‘go deeper’, being intolerant with leaving things open, dictating our own terms and providing unreasonable borders to their spaces.

At a threshold point of two people living together in one place, they may come to inhabit one single space. It requires a lot of maturity to live in one single space with others. Occupying one single place, is the easier part, space is not. Indeed, that single space may end up being too much to ask. It may be better to have separate spaces to respect, often overlap. Psychotherapists have known for many years that a temporary split, or making tangential connections for a while, may be the solution to some problems. Un-bundle the spaces that have become blurred, that is.

Leandro Herrero: “A team is not a meeting”

 

Another wonderful reflection from Leandro Herrero, this time I am being more selective in my quoting…:

 

One of the most toxic practices in organisational life is equating ‘team’ and ‘team meeting’. You could start a true transformation by simply splitting them as far apart as you can and by switching on the team permanently. In a perfect team, ‘stuff happens’ all the time without the need to meet. Try the disruptive idea ‘Team 365’ to start a small revolution.

In our minds, the idea that teams are something to do with meetings is well embedded. And indeed, teams do meet… But ‘the meeting’ has become synonymous with ‘the team’. Think of the language we often use. If there is an issue or something that requires a decision and this is discussed amongst people who belong to a team, we often hear things such as, “let’s bring it to the team”. In fact, what people mean really is, “let’s bring it to the meeting. Put it on the agenda.” By default, we have progressively concentrated most of the ‘team time’ in ‘meeting time’. The conceptual borders of these two very different things have become blurred. We have created a culture where team equals meetings equals team. And this is disastrous.

As a consequence of the mental model and practice that reads ‘teams = meeting = teams’, the team member merely becomes an event traveller (from a few doors down or another country?). These team travellers bring packaged information, all prepared for the disclosure or discussion at ‘the event’.