first time I heard the phrase elevating the human experience was at work. It was the spring of 2018 in a meeting with my new boss and his newly formed leadership team. I thought, “He is crazy if he thinks we will ever say those words out loud to each other, much less to a potential client.” They sounded like an aspiration, worthy of striving towards but just out of reach. I wondered what they could possibly mean for me, for my colleagues in the world's largest professional services firm, for our clients and the people they served. For some of my peers, who had been laboring and loving quietly for years, the words were affirming and inspiring like a Zen koan: You know you have elevated the human experience because your heart feels full when you are done. For others, the words “elevating the human experience” were easy to mock, for all of the ways we daily fall short of living up to them in the workplace, for all the ways we feel anything but worthy of love when we show up at work.
I can hear the objections now. “Love is best left squarely in the domain of one's personal life,” so let's define love. Love is not a warm feeling or attachment. It is not only about the romantic or erotic. There is a lesser-known version of love the Greeks called eudaimonia, often translated as “human flourishing.” Building on the Greeks, and adapting from Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving, let's define love as the choice to extend yourself for the purpose of your own or another's growth. We grow people and we grow things that we care about. The outcome of this love is flourishing.
Equally, my philosophy of leadership is a philosophy of love. People become, people grow, and people are capable of remarkable things when you believe in and love them. These people are our family members and friends. And these people are our co-workers, because our co-worker is child to some parent, friend to some friend, all worthy of love.
“Worth” is often used to mean something or someone's extrinsic value that can be externally verified. It is the sort of worth derived from something else. But it can also mean something or someone's intrinsic value, just for being, before they say or do anything. This book is about love that leads to growth and worth that is intrinsic to each of us. Putting them together, Elevating the human experience is about acknowledging intrinsic worth as a human, and nurturing growth through love. Sometimes the person we need to see as most worthy of love is ourselves. Sometimes it is another person. Sometimes it is a group of people who have been unseen.
There is an overabundance of books about the possibility of transformative growth for individuals or transformative growth for organizations. Digital transformations. Customer transformations. Employee transformations. But how do you transform an organization, which is a community of living and breathing humans, if you don't grow and transform the humans? How do you build a movement to inspire and motivate people to think, believe, and act in new ways? Where is the new source of untapped potential energy if not inside the human heart and the transformative capacity to love? There are compelling visionary leaders who know intuitively how to tap into the heart as well as the mind, but what about the rest of us who show up to work every day? How do we tap into the transformative power of love and intrinsic worth that helps us flourish in our lives and in our work?
Before we jump in, let's acknowledge the fact that just putting the words “love,” “worth,” and “work” together in a sentence feels risky and provocative. There are those who might believe work is nothing more than a means to a livelihood, not a place to find their worth. Equally, I imagine as I write these words that you may conjure images of inappropriate workplace relationships and be more than uncomfortable because we are talking about love and work in the same breath. We could use another word for “love.” We could talk about making another's experience better through respect or purpose. We could talk about care or well-being. But why should we? Why should we shy away from using the word “love” to describe our experience in the workplace? Why does it make us feel uncomfortable to consider loving our colleagues or our boss or being loved in return? We care for the people we work with and want to be cared for. Love is indeed present at work; we just don't feel comfortable talking about it.
I can only speculate as to the many reasons it is uncomfortable for most of us to talk about love at work. Here are some of mine. It makes me uncomfortable because, until quite recently, I had a distorted and monochromatic view of what “love” means. I thought it was reserved for my closest personal relationships, not for my professional persona. I thought, as a woman, using the word at work would instantly be viewed as feminine and weak. I thought that for a mother it might be seen as the opposite of smart, logical, and strong. I thought it would make it even harder to prove that I belonged at the table and should be taken seriously. And, worst of all, I thought talking about love and worth in the workplace would be a short walk to unwanted sexual advances and innuendo.
My male friends and colleagues have told me that it makes them uncomfortable to talk about love and worth at all, much less at work, because from a very young age—four or five years old—they were taught that it was not acceptable for a boy to show emotions. “Boys who cried or showed weakness were beaten, mocked, or both,” one male friend shared with me. And so, my friend concluded, it is not surprising that talking about love and worth at work feels as dangerous as the third rail. Anything that approaches the type of closeness that might be called love in the workplace is rife with potential danger, misinterpretation, and unnamed boundaries that might accidentally (or not so accidentally) be crossed. For him, and for many men like him, work is simply about “what needs to be done.” It is safer that way.
Equally, there are many who believe that a company exists primarily because of its ability to create a financial impact. If it did not create that impact, it would cease to exist. A company exists to create both a financial impact and a human impact, for the employees, customers, partners, shareholders, and broader community of stakeholders. What I argue is that every exchange in the workplace has two outcomes. One is the outcome of the transaction, which leads either toward greater or lesser financial profit. The second is the outcome of the human experience, which leads either to a better or worse impact for the humans. While never losing sight of the need for performance for a business to continue to exist, this book is focused on the impact of the human experience and the paths to love and worth in the workplace that ultimately contribute to better performance.
Why Elevating the Human Experience Is Necessary
I have come to believe that elevating the human experience is not only possible at work, but it is also necessary to fuel growth that leads to the joy of human flourishing for four reasons:
1 Elevating the human experience is necessary because the fundamental human condition is one of suffering.Every religious tradition, every culture, has its way of articulating the unmistakable fact of suffering through loss, craving, aversion, and distorted views of reality. Suffering doesn't know the boundaries of our personal or professional selves, so we bring our very human, suffering selves to work with us each day. Our suffering is exacerbated because we spend the majority of our waking hours not surrounded by our related and chosen loved ones, but rather we spend them at work. Collectively, in the US, we currently work more than any other culture at any other time in history. Working more, for many, can make us feel increasingly lonely and isolated. And yet, as our time spent working increases, our time spent in civic, neighborhood and religious institutions, which have traditionally provided a sense of meaning, purpose, and worth, has declined. The number of people who identify as atheist or having “no particular” religious affiliation has gone up from 17% in 2009 to 26% in 2019, according to Pew research. Prior generations, and other cultures, might well be mystified both that we spend so much of our lives working
