It’s a LOVE Thing, but What’s Love Got to Do With It?
If we’re going to keep a clear purpose that truly drives us to lead effectively at the top of our minds on a daily basis, understanding how we’re wired certainly matters, but our best long term results will be from pursuing something we love! As I said before though, the idea of loving everything we do, every single day, is just plain unrealistic. However, we absolutely need to love at least some of what we do to be able to press through the tough times and be the leader our teams deserve!
Here’s where you’re likely asking, “Wes, what’s love got to do with it?” - and possibly even in Tina Turner’s voice… To answer that, I want you to think back to the Harvard Business Review article by Leah Buchanan that I referenced several times in What’s KILLING Your Profitability?, and once before since we’ve started down this path on leading with a clear purpose, called Things They Do For Love, where she shared this:
“Company leaders won’t be surprised that employee engagement—the extent to which workers commit to something or someone in their organizations—influences performance and retention. But they may be surprised by how much engagement matters. Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort—that is, employees’ willingness to exceed duty’s call. That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement and an 87% reduction in the desire to pull up stakes, according to the Corporate Leadership Council, which surveyed more than 50,000 employees in more than 59 organizations worldwide.”
We’ll look at how this ties to providing a clear purpose for the teams we lead later. For now, I want you to consider the best leader you’ve ever worked for and the worst boss you’ve ever reported to. Now think about how that discretionary effort came into play for you. Even for the most accountable and driven among us, I’m willing to bet that there was still a notice difference in the extra they gave for the best leaders as compared to what they gave when following the orders of a miserable boss!
That same thing applies for us when we’re the one in that leadership role, we just need to make sure what we’ve chosen to hold ourselves accountable to gives us the fuel to expend that discretionary effort consistently. And that’s where it becomes a love thing!
I recently heard Marcus Buckingham say that “love is the most powerful force in business for driving behavior.” He went on to explain how predictable behavior is when we’re able to build love into what we do and what our team or customers experience. Assuming he’s correct, and I really believe he is, being able to define the specific things about leading a team or an organization that we truly love isn’t a nice to have, it’s a must have!
Again, we’re never going to love it all so it’s critical for us to nail the specifics down and prioritize the time we dedicate to them.
Leading with a Clear Purpose Drive Profitability!
If we’re going to connect the clear purpose we’re working toward with the kind of love that Marcus Buckingham described as “the most powerful force in business for driving behavior,” we’ll need to draw for the idea we looked at before in Prioritizing to Our Purpose and really hone in our those three R’s! For our purposes here, I’m going to assume (and hope that doesn’t make anything particular thing out of U or ME, if you get my drift) that you’ve done the work of determining which tasks are truly Required of you - and only you! Once you’ve got those identified, we need to take a hard look at how we can connect the Return and the Reward.
Here’s where the Pareto Principle idea we use to isolate which of the Required tasks yield us the best results, understanding that we’ll nearly always get a large part of our overall productivity from a select few things we have to do. But that can’t be where we stop! If we’re going to lead well and lead long term through what can often seem like a zoo (because of the monkeys that decide to throw crap at us), dialing in on where we find our Reward is no longer something that’s just nice to have…
In each of the Emerging Leader Development course lessons where we work through this, we emphasize that making sure the work we do is indeed rewarding will likely be more difficult by itself than both of the first two R’s combined. Difficulty be damned; it’s something we absolutely must do. To tap into the powerful force that is love, we need to be able to pull some sense of Reward from as much of what falls on the Required AND Return list as we possibly can. In detailing how complex this is for many people, I make the point that the person we report to usually has more than a little bit of say in where our time is focused. And this brings us back to Marcus (and his British accent that often makes me want to throw tea in a harbor).
In the same talk, I heard him cite some sort of study from the Mayo Clinic that said (and I’m butchering here, but hopefully you’ll still get the point) some of the best performance they saw came when the people they studied connected love with just 20 percent of what they did on a routine basis! Yep, only TWENTY!!! So much for that idea of loving everything we do, huh? He followed that by suggesting that “we can do anything lovingly,” explaining that this wasn’t a factor of being soft but creating strategies for building love into how we do those things. Buckingham also compared the results we could achieve when we love the things we do to the power that comes from water, specifically steam, when it moves from not boiling to boiling. He described these tasks as the things that seem to make time speed up and give us energy rather than suck the energy from us.
I’m guessing you’re tracking with me on some of this but we’ll go into more specific detail about how we can build love into our tasks soon. Before that though, we need to make sure that this isn’t just about us.
Can We Really Drive Productivity Without Love?
I’ve often heard that you can prove anything with statistics - except facts… I realize that’s something usually said in jest but I’ve also seen the same statistics used to prove contradictory points, and I won’t even get started on how many times I’ve seen scriptures used the same way! When we think about how Leading with a Clear Purpose Drives Productivity, it’s not all that different! In just the first page of results from a quick internet search on the topic, I found three separate articles sharing VERY different perspectives - two of which were from the same overall source!
The first one I looked at from Forbes.com was called The Secret Advantage is Loving Your Job from July 2014 where the author opened with this:
Arguably, one of the biggest advantages you can have over your competition is actually enjoying what you do. Loving your job is not just an added bonus to success, but actually an important precursor. If you enjoy what you do, working at it is easier, and your motivation to improve is somewhat innate, rather than forced…
The highly successful are outworking their competition. This added effort and productivity is essential. You will not reach levels of greatness if you do not work at it. Period. This work is not easy, but those who enjoy their jobs will be more motivated to put in the work.
That sure seems to connect with driving productivity if you ask me! But the next article I found from Forbes painted a different picture. This article was called Do What You Love - And Watch Your Productivity Suffer and opened with these words of caution:
"Follow your passion!" We've all heard that advice. And while it sounds like nirvana, beware! The tasks you love can destroy your productivity.
But just because you are following your passions, doesn't mean you are as productive as you should be!
That author did go on to share some steps we could take to avoid this dip in productivity, each of which would already be taken care of when we applied those three R’s that I’ve referenced a few times to this point!
The third article was from the Harvard Business Review, called Research: Your Love for Work May Alienate Your Colleagues, and advised leaders to be careful with how they rally around by sharing this:
A growing number of companies are seeking out employees whose passion for their work is the driving force behind their performance, and they’re investing in strategies to encourage and nurture this motivation. The research on this topic is clear — more passionate employees are more productive, innovative, and collaborative, and they demonstrate higher levels of commitment to their organizations. Fostering passion is a winning strategy for organizations that aspire to achieve sustained growth, innovation, and success.
However, in the pursuit of nurturing passion, our recent research reveals that employers may have overlooked and neglected the needs of employees driven by other sources of motivation, such as financial stability, social status, or familial obligations. These employees play a critical role in the success of their companies, but may be subject to an invisible penalty due to their perceived lack of passion for their work.
In a recent conversation I had with a good friend, he shared what he had written on a whiteboard just outside his office in the organization where he serves as president, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first!” As we discussed that, I thought of something I heard Jeff Henderson share a while back, “Employees who feel valued value their customers.”
While I understand what the author of the HBR article was getting at, I believe it’s our responsibility as leaders to help ALL of our team members identify a clear purpose they can connect with as they perform the work they do. And quite honestly, I’m convinced we won’t be able to do that effectively over the long haul without first building love into our own tasks! With that in mind, the next thing we’ll work through is how we can clearly define the specific things we do that produce results we can LOVE. Stay tuned!