Did You Learn Anything New, Any Flashes Of Insight?

It is linking the person’s loves to the work they are being tasked to do, every week, for the entire year. This is what leaders do. Burnout, like bankruptcy or falling asleep, happens gradually and then suddenly. Yes, you may well have some weeks where you find precious few red threads. And yes, during those loveless weeks you and your team leader may just have to agree that you need to push through. But at least you now know that you’re going to be able to start feeling the pull of some red threads soon, maybe not next week, but the week after. And most importantly, you know that your team leader knows where you’re at. There’s something very comforting and therefore powerful in knowing that they know what you know about yourself, your loves, and your work. Those team leaders who check in every week drive their team members’ engagement scores up 77 percent, and their team members’ voluntary turnover in the next six months down 67 percent. What matters is simply that it happens. Leaders who wind up actually having this interaction with the team member about the four questions/answers drive statistically higher levels of performance and engagement in their team members. Here, too, it doesn’t matter if the interaction is voice to voice or text to text.

Bent, But Not Broken

You’re going to check in again next week, and maybe something will strike both of you then. When it comes to leading, frequency trumps quality. Think about it not as something you do in addition to leading. For a leader, checking in is akin to brushing teeth. It’s just what you do, all the time, a nonnegotiable. You are paying them attention. If you think that you’d love to check in with each of your team members, but you can’t because you’ve got too many people, well, then you’ve got too many people. The perfect span of control for you, the team leader, isn’t actually a function of control. It’s a function of how many people you can pay attention to each week. Span of control should be renamed span of attention. If you can’t give each person weekly attention in some disciplined way, some way that starts with them and their answers, then you will be driving love out of your workplace, with all of the negative repercussions that come with it. The same applies to schools, or distribution centers, or call centers, or manufacturing plants.

Us And Them

Make it your standard leader behavior, and you’ll bring love back into the workplace. Growth comes from analyzing and eliminating blind spots. Growth comes from learning about love. There’s nothing inherently good or bad, or noble or ignoble, about your loves. All they are is a power source. What is good, what is noble, is when you take them seriously and use them to create outcomes for the benefit of others. This doesn’t just happen though, does it. It usually requires help from someone else, someone who can help you step back from yourself and show you those little sparks of love. You know what they feel like, but someone else can show you what they look like, and the effect they’ve had on others. You’re not doing this to get a pat on the head, but rather, as the glorious painter Marc Chagall confessed, you’re doing it so that you can make more things, better things. You’re doing it so that you can innovate. If you are a team leader, try to become known for being really curious about what your people love.

Nothing Is Real

You might start with recognition by saying, Hey, well done on that project last week, but you won’t stop there. Was that fun for you? What did you love most about it? We’ve got another similar project coming up. Anything you want to tweak or change this time around? You’re not trying to answer these questions yourself, of course. Even though you may be more experienced than your team member, you don’t share their precise red threads, and so all you’re trying to do is nudge them back into the middle of the activity that they loved. This way you aren’t the teacher inhibiting your student with your preset answers. You are the curious catalyst, using your attention to allow the person to come up with answers and insights that, frankly, you’d never have come up with yourself. And yet his discovery was absolutely perfect for him and led to outstanding performance. When Ashley let his heart flow, everything did. You can love your people too much. More love is always better. Is it appropriate to speak of love when, on some occasions, it becomes necessary for organizations to lay off those they love? After the movement opened a window onto exploitation at work and finally let the light shine in, is it inappropriate and even dangerous to speak of love at work? To love someone is to see them, all of them, the best of them, to accept what you see, and then to do everything in your power to help them be the biggest version of themselves. Your love is expectant, it wants the other person to take seriously the unique loves they feel, and then turn them into contribution. Your love is insightful and kind, intimate and individualized and inspiring. It can lift up the other person to flights of performance and creativity they never dreamed of. But no, it is not that soft. It is the antithesis of soft. Your love for another can’t stand the idea that they are not living into all they could be. Your love will challenge them, and cajole them, and never leave them be, and if, at some point, you see them heading in a direction that will hurt them, or shrink them, you will push them out of harm’s way, even if they themselves can’t yet see the love in what you’re doing. If you love someone, you do for them what is right for them, not necessarily what they want.