Recovering the language of life, at work

I recently read the inspiring book I May Be Wrong by Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad. He was a highly successful business executive in the world of financial services with AGA AB. He reached a point where he felt himself split in half, between what the job demanded of his humanity and what his humanity demanded of him. He left the work place and spent the large part of his life as a Buddhist Forest monk, initially in Thailand, then Europe. Paradoxically, at the same time as reading his story I was working on a most interesting executive coaching assignment with a leader within a highly reputable global organisation, who is also a committed Buddhist, training to be a lay Buddhist monk, who is seeking to be who he is within the workplace.

These experiences have raised some interesting questions for me.  The primary one being, that if you live and work from a truly value centred life, whether you can still perform to the highest levels expected of a global brand and whether you can lead a team to do the same? Can a value/principled centred leader ‘cut it’ in the market place in 2022? 

My hunch is that the underlying issue beneath this question is the language that we are using to explain what we do in the work place and how we do it.

At some point in the past decades the language of the workplace changed. Two main influences in society powerfully shaped the narrative, not just of work but how we approach life itself: Machines and Sports.

Machines – the mechanised view of reality. This is based on the idea that everything can be described as a machine. Inputs, outputs, parts, resources, cogs, well oiled, functional and purely left-brain-rational focus that have shaped our view of work. Brains are just computers and bodies are units of production.

Sport – the performance view of reality. This is based on the idea that a human at work is just like a sports person. Time spent, time gained, competitive edge, performance feedback, performance related pay, performance reviews, performance improvement plans, high achievers, under achievers. We need to perform like an athlete, to be better than we were yesterday and outperform everyone else around us, both within our company and in our sector.

We have stopped asking ourselves where these words and their model of humans at work, came from and what impact do they have on our humanity. My Amazon delivery driver is monitored to the second and had to wait yesterday because he arrived 60 seconds earlier than his schedule said. Global brands compete to be the best against each other, rather than work together to feed the world. No one seems to be asking the questions to challenge these assumptions of humans in the workplace.

When it comes to shaping the world of work, words matter. Why? Because leadership is all about the narrative, the story, we create to effectively influence the story that will get written at every level of society from the individual to the global[1].

So, I would like to dare to suggest that we change two words in the work place that could make all the difference to the humanising of the work place and society along with it.

Contribution

Firstly, let us today ban the use of the words Performance and replace it with Contribution.

We have to start with the existential question ‘why do we exist?’ because every other important question will fall out of that one. We don’t exist to perform like athletes; we exist to become more human and help others do the same. Human and environmental flourishing - EVERYTHING serves that. Power, self-interest, oppression, control, consumerism, all seek to diminish that reality in some way or other. 

Once we know why we exist then suddenly everything is now about contribution. How do I contribute to the human flourishing of all of us, because if we all flourish then that will definitely include me in ‘the all’.

So, now the questions become

Organisational level mission: How does this company/organisation contribute to human flourishing?

Team/Divisional level mission: How does this team contribute to this organisations mission?

Individual level mission: How does my work today contribute to the mission of this team in ensuring the contribution of this organisation within this society? 

Let us stop performance reviews, performance appraisals, performance plans, performance targets. Let’s stop putting the humans, who contribute to the success of this organisation (now judged by its sustainable contribution to the world), against each other as competitors.  Let us put people alongside each other as contributors. Performance creates anxiety. Anxiety is the best inhibitor of ‘performance’. Let’s change the language to the word contribution. 

How would it work? The manager starts with the new recruit and helps them understand how this company contributes to the world (the job now has meaning hardwired into it), they then help them understand how this team they have just joined contributes to this larger mission. What does this team need to contribute in order for the organisation to contribute to society? Then the manger helps the new person to understand how they can individually contribute to the team. How their smile contributes, how the research project they are working on contributes, how their attitude contributes, how entering that data contributes, how each aspect of their work contributes. The managers and leader’s chief contribution is now to help others to see themselves as contributors and help them to know exactly what and how they can contribute and how all this adds together to ensure the organisation contributes. The difficult conversations are about contribution and what is inhibiting it.

Contribution humanises, machines don’t and sports metaphors don’t. 

Kindness

The second thing we could change overnight, is to put the word Kindness at the centre of how we do all that we do. If we are to understand the best culture to motivate people to contribute, to enable people to look at their short comings and to make changes in themselves, to create the best environment for change within a team or organisation, then a few thousand years of human history and perennial wisdom give us a very bold clue as to how to do this.

Put kindness at the centre. 

Kindness is the oldest wisdom on transformational theory and practice. Somehow it got lost because of the belief that you can’t control people with kindness, you can’t oppress people with kindness, you can’t limit human rights with kindness, you can’t demand with kindness, you can’t get things done to their most efficient, productive, highest performance, with kindness..

In Project Aristotle Google ran their, now famous, piece of research in to what creates the best performing teams. The world held its breath awaiting the results. The number one factor?

Psychological Safety. 

People need to feel safe in order to flourish at work and in society. And what is the core condition of psychological safety? Kindness. You can’t feel safe, while you feel under threat of the performance-police, when you are being treated as a tool, a cog, a function, a disposable asset, a human ‘resource’, a number in an accountants ledger, a victim of your bosses’ ego, of directors unjust pay differentials…the list goes on. Kindness is core to making humans feel safe to become more human and so bring more of themselves to work, in order to contribute more to their job, as part of an organisation that contributes to society.

Kindness is often seen as ‘soft’, a nice to have, but not real-world enough to deal with the harsh realities of life in the work space. But we just need some language training here. Kindness includes firm, decisive, boundaried, alongside of you, being with you and for you. Hard, aggressive, ‘push’, defensive, bullying, kick-ass, manipulative, oppressive behaviours will diminish the work forces ability to contribute every time. Valuing the person, building and leaving a good relationship, will always be the greater contribution for all of us. 

Kindness is how I recognise you; touch, affirm, your humanity to make it safe for you to grow and develop as a contributor. 

Contribution is how we add to everyone’s human flourishing at work and beyond.

[1] ‘Leadership is the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others’. Howard Gardner in Leading Minds