Emotional Wisdom in the Workplace
Tags: Workplace, Emotional Intelligence, Management, Workplace Culture, Emotional Health

Taking Emotional Intelligence a Step Further to Find the True Source of High Sustainable Morale and Personal Power in the Workplace.

Self-realization in the workplace is a promising, new category of outcome in the realm of human potential and organizational development. It’s new enough and different enough that it hasn’t yet gotten much attention. However, I think its day is almost here.

Throughout modern history, goals that are focused strictly on self improvement have not been pursued or supported much in the workplace, and I think that’s, in part, due to the assumption that goals that are “only related” to personal growth are not to be “worked on” on company time . . . as if they were not “of the company” or “for the company.”

Good for People, Good for Business

But when the emotional climate in any social organization is optimal, people feel a lot more like family to each other . . . like a healthy and loving group of people connected for mutual benefit, so that each individual can really appreciate being able to belong to, to be part of. In such healthy emotional environments there is a great deal of caring and support and interest going on between the members of the group — this is a sign of its health. This kind of climate is good for people, and it’s good for business or the functioning of any organization, big or small. The idea is that this may be the “missing link” that will allow us to truly optimize performance AND personal satisfaction. It’s just not easy to offer this in “user friendly” forms, especially for a business organization that has been operating based on a different set of premises, which in one way or another in the typical business organization represent some form of quid pro quo between workers and management.

High Morale, Commitment and Productivity

This dimension of self realization is linked to the health of the social system, and both the person and his or her social context can be assessed and measured as forms of morale. High morale is characterized by lots of love and support exchanged within the system and a context surrounding the social system that encourages it. In the more optimal loving contexts individuals would want to belong and at the same time they would know they are “wanted” by the group. There’s this mutually sought out “stickiness” producing profound bonds and profound “investments” on both sides — the individuals’ emotional investment in the “team” and an investment from the team in the individual. We are all looking to be committed to someone or something, so given the opportunity to do that in the work setting can do so much for people’s morale.

In such an environment most people want to be a part of the organization, you’re happy to play a role, you want to contribute, and you feel very contributed to, and there’s a sense of being significant and validated. There is a healthy and abundant give and take and much support in the interpersonal exchanges. There is benevolence occurring in relation to each other as individuals and toward the larger entity as well.

A New Dimension

Work and career related (and workplace supported) goals have always been more about achievement, performance, and material notions of success. But this “new” dimension of growth and personal development could (it will) prove to be very beneficial to morale building and employee satisfaction — but is there any doubt that this could also conceivably supercharge performance and productivity? In other words, it is “For the company” and it could be “of the company” and this would make the larger entity as healthy and productive as possible.

In essence these higher level positive changes within the individual can be facilitated at work, and largely as the unintended side effect of these personally relevant changes, there would be corresponding benefits to the morale of all the individuals in the “system” or organization. The team as a whole can clearly benefit from certain “side effects” of individual self realization — like wanting to emotionally invest, to “give” and “give back” because of that investment.

What’s Coming: Radical Change, Paradigm Shift

To support the “next wave” transformation of organizations I offer my own definition of love. This “definitional framework” more fully permits the safe, appropriate and “user friendly” introduction of the word love and the idea of love into the ongoing conversation we’re having about the health and well-being of people in the work world in general. This conception of love allows the “healthy family” climate to be a valid and cutting edge “goal” of any organization. This optimal climate can be fostered and maintained in any organization theoretically. It provides clarity about the true and “fixable” problems that cause the “dysfunctional family” emotional environment, supporting accurate assessment of the “pain points” and what is keeping the system “stuck.” This definition of love offers a measurable “breakdown” of the most relevant components of the “stickiness” factors, that heretofore have been unclear of undiscoverable.

Love — It’s a Win-Win!

The process of creating such an optimal climate has certain elements that occur in the realm of human intention — that occur prior to external behavior. At all times people have certain relational motives that guide their interactions with others. Love is what moves them to interact for the purpose of producing outcomes that are of mutual benefit (“win — win”) or to create a sense of belonging (we’re in this together), regardless of the type of organization or the specific “purpose” of the business entity or organization. This intentioning is an autonomous expression of self, and it can be optimized via an “act” of will, perhaps supported by some “expert-veteran” guidance. We can all become “better” at love . . . a lot better actually. And we can do this at any time throughout our lives. When there is love people feel “good” about bringing their “A game” to share with the group/organization, and to “more fully” express who they are and how they feel about the team and its mission/purpose.

Self realization necessarily involves our coming to understand the nature of love, and the role it plays in our happiness, our self fulfillment, our morale, and the sense of what is profound in our lives. Of course the whole “Me too” phenomenon is making it seem simultaneously more inappropriate and more risky to try to “fool with love” as a concept in the work world. But in my mind this current issue just means the time couldn’t be “riper” for this clarifying definition of love to enter into our culture wide conversation . . . the understanding and insight it provides is quite helpful. If we’re able to understand and address “love” in the “right” way, everyone wins.

Love — How It is Defined Makes All the Difference

Love, as a word, has so much conceptual baggage that’s attached to it — it’s all over the place, from sex and love to romance and love; from the love for things to the love for family; and from the love for God and country, to the love of your car or your garden, etc., so it’s no wonder there’s “word shyness” when it comes to the word and our use of it with each other.

My definition circumvents the “need” for us to feel any of that “word shyness” about use of the word love itself. And the understanding of the true “force” involved is very clarifying and validating. When the word love is used in unclarified ways it tends to produce boundary anxiety . . . what does it mean if you say you love me? Do we have to be affectionate, do you want something from me, are you trying to give something to me, does it mean I owe you something? and so on. Love and fear and boundaries are all pieces of a meaningful pie that is loaded with “unclarified” boundary implications, leading to lots of anxiety and interpersonal “mischief.”

The love I speak of is not the love of that romantic or sexual form — it is the transcendent force of love that has the real “magical” properties that we have always intuitively known love has. It is the force that bonds, that supports, that cares about and/or cares for, that lifts us up, that makes us secure and soothed, that makes us “want” to belong or to be a part of, etc.

Stripped of the excess and distracting conceptual baggage, love has a fitting place in all things humans do, especially what they do “together,” and when there is love expressed “well” in any context, it serves as a force for optimizing the health and well being of self and others in so many different ways.

This definition makes it safe, and potentially of enormous benefit, to talk about love at work. To change our minds, our preconceptions about what it means to love and what it means to be on a team that has a safe and clear idea of what love is. The definition makes it possible for us to view love as a kind of “missing link” that can transform how we “work on improving work” — more substantive improvements in the experience we have in the workplace are made possible.

A Sense of Purpose and Intention

The process of identifying love differently, and “appropriately,” alone can catapult people and organizations to levels of functioning that have been otherwise limited due to conventional conceptualization about human motivation, employee and employer relations, and the ideal emotional environment in the workplace that have existed from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The new view may enable us to make the workplace just as fulfilling for the average person as any other part of life . . . and maybe even more so.

If love is part of what you intend, or if love is part of what you want to intend, then you should be able to intend it at work too. And you should feel that your work world has as much or more capacity to foster the sense of purpose and connection — fundamental love based interests — as anywhere else in your life, with the exception of immediate family.

Maybe even more importantly what you will realize is that it’s the underlying and “under-recognized” intentionality that makes you “lean” in the direction of your goals before they become your goals. I want something and I have no idea (really) why I want it so bad. Knowing why you want something helps you get it, or not, and know why you did, or didn’t. It also helps you know yourself so much more deeply and “accurately.”

If love is not “in the mix” of your purpose, your mission in life — whether you’re an individual or an organized collection of individuals — then there is woundedness and fear and loathing to “blame.”

If love is in the mix in relation to any of your bigger goals, you’re in luck. Because love is the one reliable source of the profound in our lives.

The Anticipated Outcomes

This methodology can help, in a big way. It reliably leads people to a broad and deep re-calibration of their own values and priorities. Such transformational change is accomplished via enhanced self awareness that can “magically” alter all of one’s self limiting, self defeating, and self destructive patterns of thinking and behaving.

You will learn some of the secrets for stopping the sabotaging of your own success