Elevating the Human Experience. Amelia Dunlop

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There is an overabundance of books about the possibility of transformative growth for individuals or transformative growth for organizations. Digital transformations. Customer transformations. Employee transformations. But how do you transform an organization, which is a community of living and breathing humans, if you don't grow and transform the humans? How do you build a movement to inspire and motivate people to think, believe, and act in new ways? Where is the new source of untapped potential energy if not inside the human heart and the transformative capacity to love? There are compelling visionary leaders who know intuitively how to tap into the heart as well as the mind, but what about the rest of us who show up to work every day? How do we tap into the transformative power of love and intrinsic worth that helps us flourish in our lives and in our work?

      Before we jump in, let's acknowledge the fact that just putting the words “love,” “worth,” and “work” together in a sentence feels risky and provocative. There are those who might believe work is nothing more than a means to a livelihood, not a place to find their worth. Equally, I imagine as I write these words that you may conjure images of inappropriate workplace relationships and be more than uncomfortable because we are talking about love and work in the same breath. We could use another word for “love.” We could talk about making another's experience better through respect or purpose. We could talk about care or well-being. But why should we? Why should we shy away from using the word “love” to describe our experience in the workplace? Why does it make us feel uncomfortable to consider loving our colleagues or our boss or being loved in return? We care for the people we work with and want to be cared for. Love is indeed present at work; we just don't feel comfortable talking about it.

      I can only speculate as to the many reasons it is uncomfortable for most of us to talk about love at work. Here are some of mine. It makes me uncomfortable because, until quite recently, I had a distorted and monochromatic view of what “love” means. I thought it was reserved for my closest personal relationships, not for my professional persona. I thought, as a woman, using the word at work would instantly be viewed as feminine and weak. I thought that for a mother it might be seen as the opposite of smart, logical, and strong. I thought it would make it even harder to prove that I belonged at the table and should be taken seriously. And, worst of all, I thought talking about love and worth in the workplace would be a short walk to unwanted sexual advances and innuendo.

My male friends and colleagues have told me that it makes them uncomfortable to talk about love and worth at all, much less at work, because from a very young age—four or five years old—they were taught that it was not acceptable for a boy to show emotions. “Boys who cried or showed weakness were beaten, mocked, or both,” one male friend shared with me. And so, my friend concluded, it is not surprising that talking about love and worth at work feels as dangerous as the third rail. Anything that approaches the type of closeness that might be called love in the workplace is rife with potential danger, misinterpretation, and unnamed boundaries that might accidentally (or not so accidentally) be crossed. For him, and for many men like him, work is simply about “what needs to be done.” It is safer that way.

      Equally, there are many who believe that a company exists primarily because of its ability to create a financial impact. If it did not create that impact, it would cease to exist. A company exists to create both a financial impact and a human impact, for the employees, customers, partners, shareholders, and broader community of stakeholders. What I argue is that every exchange in the workplace has two outcomes. One is the outcome of the transaction, which leads either toward greater or lesser financial profit. The second is the outcome of the human experience, which leads either to a better or worse impact for the humans. While never losing sight of the need for performance for a business to continue to exist, this book is focused on the impact of the human experience and the paths to love and worth in the workplace that ultimately contribute to better performance.

Why Elevating the Human Experience Is Necessary

      I have come to believe that elevating the human experience is not only possible at work, but it is also necessary to fuel growth that leads to the joy of human flourishing for four reasons: