#171: Love+Work
Dear friends
This week the 2023 Booker Prize longlist was announced.
It is wonderful to see the inclusion of Nigerian author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things.
If you missed it, I shared my thoughts about it in this letter (it was a birthday gift from my parents).
It is well worth reading – Adébáyọ̀’s book that is, although I think my reflections are also reasonably useful.
/ strategy
Marcus Buckingham’s Love+Work starts with this quotation from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet
“And when you work with love
You bind your self to yourself,
and to one another,
and to God…
Work is love made visible”.
It is a powerful sentiment and yet we know that survey after survey shows that the majority of us are disengaged from our work.
We are bound neither to ourselves nor each other and that alienation spills over into all parts of life.
It can be overwhelming to know what to do as a leader.
What is clear is that a job and a salary is not enough to unlock people’s engagement. More is needed.
Thankfully Buckingham provides us with research-backed pragmatic actions that make a difference.
Love+Work is a call to action, a manifesto for finding love in work, and a guide for building teams and organisations in which people can find meaning and fulfilment.
The chapters have titles like ‘Where did the love go?’, ‘The Excellence Curse: Your Strengths Are Not What You’re Good At’, ‘The Road to Hell is Paved with Other People’s Advice’, ‘Make Love to Your Fears’, and ‘When You Compare, You Disappear’.
You should already have a sense that this is no everyday leadership text.
Buckingham declares his mission to be to help us “find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it” and says to do this “we need to lay bare what’s causing so much of us to get lost in the first place” and that “this mass losing of self, the is epidemic of alienation, isn’t happening by accident. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system actively designed to separate you from you”.
Remember, Buckingham is an expert on the creation of high-performance work environments. He’s warning us that default organisational practices lead to disengagement. We need to be intentional about creating a different work culture.
People who feel part of a team are 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged, three times more likely to be highly resilient, and twice as likely to have a strong sense of belonging to their organisation.
Creating teams, and more importantly, the feeling of being in a team is the basic building block of a high-performance organisation.
Less than 10% of people who aren’t in a team feel engaged, resilient, and connected.
He advocates that you do a weekly check-in with your direct reports, structured around four questions:
- What activities did you love last week?
- What activities did you loathe?
- What are your priorities this week?
- What help do you need from me?
Following this simple pattern increases engagement levels by 76% and drops turnover by 67%.
It is hard to think of anything that gives you a better return on your investment.
In Nine Lies About Work, his book before Love+Work, he notes that giving people positive feedback about what they’ve done well is “twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people, but we haven’t yet come across a management theory that advocates ignoring people”.
It is a comment that always makes me smile. Whilst there may not be a theory that advocates it, certainly management practices result in it.
How often in the last month have you canceled one-on-ones with your direct reports because you had ‘more important/more urgent’ meetings?
(You can read more about Buckingham’s work on building performance here).
// self
At the heart of the high-performance workplace is trust. It doesn’t matter how seasoned or experienced you are, when you start to feel mistrust, your performance takes a knock.
Buckingham’s research shows that people who trust their teammates, their team leader and their senior leadership are fifteen times more likely to be fully engaged and forty-two times more likely to be highly resilient.
Trust in two of the three pays a dividend, but a much smaller one – engagement and resilience go up three-fold.
What does this mean for you?
“If you are a team leader, you too must be a bringer of trust into your team. Do your check-ins each week; make few and small commitments and keep them all; never talk negatively about one team member to another; always do for people what is right for them even if that is not always what they want; share in detail with each one what you have come to see and learn about them. These are the sorts of actions that, little by little, build trust on your team.”
/// soul
The media coverage of the recent Russia-Africa summit made much of the appeals to conservative values. And, to be sure they are there and are enforced, but as the title of Dipo Faloyin’s book reminds us, ‘Africa is Not a Country’.
Africa has many voices and many possibilities, and we can choose and fight for those that build all people.
I am halfway through David Sengeh’s Radical Inclusion.
When Sengeh wrote the book he was Sierra Leone’s Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer for the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation. Today he is Sierra Leone’s Chief Minister. He is the kind of person that every cabinet in the world would benefit from having in it.
He has a PhD from MIT for his work on creating prosthetics for people who lost their limbs in war, is 36 years old, has registered multiple patents and says that his life’s work – to serve people and make a difference – was inspired by his uncle Dr. J. C. Boima, who was both a surgeon and an academic.
Radical Inclusion is Sengeh’s telling of how he worked to establish the coalition and consensus necessary to overturn a government policy that banned pregnant girls from attending school. I will return to his telling in a future letter, as it is a powerful account of the blend of principle and pragmatism needed in leading any transformation.
For now, I will leave you with these two thoughts:
“It is only when we truly believe in and practice radical inclusion—a commitment to keep fighting for everyone to be included, no matter who they are, where they come from, and how they show up—that we can begin to experience justice in the world”.
And, “Inclusion as a social construct is about accepting everyone and recognizing all they can contribute to our homes, schools, and communities—not irrespective of their differences, but because of them. On the flip side, exclusion levies emotional, financial, social, and other costs that affect not just those who are excluded, but those who exclude and work to keep that exclusion in place. The more inclusive a society, the more it is perceived as a just society, and just societies are safer for everyone. Simply put, the pursuit of inclusion is in everyone’s interest”.
Sengeh is my kind of minister. I hope that our continent and the world get many more like him. We will all be better off.
I wish you a week in which you include yourself in your life, in which you help others to pursue their loves and avoid their loathes.
Karl
PS: I’m a coach and advisor. You can learn more about my practice here. If this letter intrigued you and you’d like to work with me, reach out and let’s have a conversation.
PPS: I recently wrote How Coaches Can Change The World. If you’re a leader committed to inclusion and trust, I’d appreciate you sharing it with others.