Love in Coaching Series – Part Two

Reclaiming Love’s Language in Business

Last time, I ended with some questions for you about love in your coaching, and I promised to follow up with my answers.  Not that mine are any more correct than yours; these are my answers and they may inform your views, but I hope you had the chance to think about them for yourself first.  If not, perhaps stop here and reflect before reading on:

• What are your beliefs about love in the working world?
• How do you display love towards your clients?
• In what ways do you feel cramped in your display of love?

My beliefs about love in the working world

Organisational systems reward individualism through performance management ranking and rating (even when companies purport to get rid of those rankings and ratings).  This drives competition, particularly around promotion time, pay-rise time, and bonus time.  This makes love a diminishing act.

Performance management leads with doing, achieving, growth, completion, and efficacy.  But we are all human beings, not human doings.

“The sad state of lost juiciness is echoed in the world of business.  There, a monomania for tough-minded, cold-blooded competitive correctness has bred the spiritual sensuousness out of most of our human enterprise.  That leaves us with a reality of synthetic personas and pasteboard passions, an epidemic of barren careers and a wasteland of workplaces devoid of flavor.” Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

We’re also seeing plenty of attacks in the wider world on humanity’s being and our interconnectedness.  We are experiencing a peak in isolationism everywhere we look.

Love, on the other hand, is really a collective endeavour, though small but significant acts of kindness are absolutely possible by individuals bucking the system.

I believe that love is central to the long-term success of businesses.  Unfortunately, those businesses that are listed on stock exchanges are driven by quarterly results and the short-termist drive from shareholders. Profit and shareholder dividends are sovereign.

We need to demote quarterly reporting and also IQ, and instead promote EQ, PQ, SQ (Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Quotients) which are more akin to the love of our fellow humans.  Maybe we should aim for LQ – the Loving Quotient. Hmm, I like that.

I asked Claude (Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT) whether such a thing already exists.  Here’s what came back:

“Some dimensions that could theoretically be measured in a “loving quotient” might include:

• Capacity for empathy
• Ability to forgive
• Depth of emotional attachment
• Consistency in showing care
• Ability to maintain long-term bonds
• Expression of affection
• Selflessness in relationships

However, quantifying love presents unique challenges. Love is highly contextual, and culturally influenced, and manifests differently across relationships and situations. Unlike IQ which measures cognitive abilities, or EQ which measures emotional intelligence through relatively standardised behaviours, love’s multifaceted nature makes it particularly complex to measure.”

How we name love in the business world

But isn’t that interesting, the kinds of words that came up as surrogates for measuring love: empathy, forgiveness, attachment, care, bonds, affection, selflessness.

About 17 years ago, I asked myself during a coaching session how I wanted to be perceived by the world.  I came to the conclusion that I wanted to represent a sunbeam.  This sunbeam is warm and nurturing and to me, it is a symbol of love and hope.  I named this blog (now running to more than 460 posts over the years) “Being A Sunbeam” though that is somewhat hidden from sight as I received counsel that it wasn’t professional enough and would put off business buyers of my offerings.  I recently learned that the originators of the Trust Equation, Maister et al, wanted the element of intimacy in their equation to be called love.  They too were counselled that it wasn’t businessy enough.

That was then.  This is now.  And today I would like to holler from the rooftops that I am being a sunbeam.  Bringing love into my interactions, no matter who those are with.  And I have realised something else about the sunbeam – that symbol of light that I was once teased about even back at school when I chose it as my perception of what heaven might be like, this sunbeam is representative of a different level of consciousness.  I am the light.  That’s really rather profound for me to acknowledge.

Back to my point: there are many words that are euphemisms for love, as Claude alluded to above, but none of them quite match up to love.  Compassion – nope.  Care – nah.  Respect – not quite there.  Gratitude – no.  You get my point.  Love is the word that I want to use here.

And that love welcomes all diversity and leads to a sense of belonging.  This is how we flourish as human beings – and as businesses.  Welcoming diversity and creating a sense of belonging [bolded to show my irritation at the current trend for sun-setting diversity policies and scrubbing out all words to do with diversity].

You might remember the clarion call by Blakey and Day back in 2008 after the financial crisis that asked, ” Where were all the coaches when the banks went down?”  In a similar vein, I’d like us all to ask, “Where are all the coaches when humanity was being stripped away by capitalism?”  Or clearer still:

 “Where are all the coaches when love is being cast aside by capitalism?”