“A place of work ruled by progress, guided by justice, and fired by the light of beauty” – Mario Labó (about the Olivetti designer-manufacturer most famous for their typewriters)
If we could all be so lucky. We are. Build it!
“[O]ur sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue, even though it is partly derived from the prudent understanding of our own interests.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.
Being serious about sustainable impact means we might want to be serious about growing human resilience by way of cross-boundary, interdisciplinary learning and routine practice of “love-based leadership” values, “the how” we workers and citizens build the clarity we need to pursue excellence when building shared value partnerships and finding common ground and solving challenges.
VÁCLAV HAVEL writes in The Art of the Impossible, “[c]onsciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around…the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.” DANIEL J. SIEGEL writes about “Interpersonal Neurobiology” (IPNB) in The Developing Mind that “[m]ind, brain, and relationships are not three separate elements. Instead… they are “three aspects of one reality.” — that is, energy and information flow.” ROBERT QUINN in Deep Change shares how sustainable staff empowerment is about risk, growth, trust, and teamwork. BELL HOOKS explores in All About Love, “… [L]ove is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Connecting these unique and many other related thoughts to experience lead me to two ideas:
IDEA 1. Relationship with self and colleague, the underpinning for an empowered, impact-making work team, can only be built through unpacking and practicing a set of leader values and their corresponding disciplines referred to as the disciplines of love, i.e., collectively termed love-based leadership mentioned above. These values and their disciplines are experientially learned, malleable and thus scalable across culture, class, and office department.
IDEA 2. Relationships with self and with other people change our neural brain structure and evolve our mental framework, no matter the age, social or economic station. Brain growth and mind development affect how we relate; this we know from the interdisciplinary science called Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). The disciplines of love-based leadership enhance our ability to relate and therefore our minds or consciousness. Increased consciousness leads to people creating and managing trusting relationships, the special sauce for using the systems and processes a staff needs to make sustainable impact in line with tactical goals. These relationships drive and sustain an outfit’s ability to secure the resources it needs to keep making sustainable impact. This is a generative cycle.
“The more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.” – Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
To know is to be known. To see and be seen. Authentic engagement is key to achieving excellence in a creative workplace, most possible when we grow down into our best self and allow, encourage even, the same in our peers.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing – the main thing… Great artists, inventors, and world change agents do not bear greater gifts than anyone else, they just live truer to the gifts… You too have powerful gifts and contributions to offer; you just have to let them be more important than trivial tasks or obligations that do not add to your joy…” – Author unknown
Inspiration does not just come from philosophers, writers or global icons. Each human is remarkable, they influence us profoundly, often when we need them the most. Trust, respect, humbly listening, reciprocal sharing, this is solidarity, our way to sustained progress.
