How you can bring love back into work

In this episode, host Michael Costello interviews best-selling author Marcus Buckingham about his book, Love and Work, revealing why love must come first at work and how to make this happen.

Michael Costello

Hello there. I’m Michael Costello. So pleased you could join us at the Think People podcast. For our last episode we talked about deep purpose being the great unlock for performance. But want about love? I know, right? Love at work. How far have we come. Well, it turns out high performers know exactly how to find love in their work. High performing organisations create an environment where love can thrive. And that the brain in love actually impacts engagement, innovation, problem-solving and a lot more.
In this episode we meet the world-famous researcher and best-selling author, Markus Buckingham in Beverley Hills, who is no slouch by the way when it comes to research. Let’s be clear here, this is a new chapter for leadership that Markus is suggesting. Love doesn’t thrive when we paint by numbers with talent.
My top tip – get ready to press pause as we explore Markus’s red thread questionnaire which will help you find the activities you love at work. Let us know your thoughts on our social media posts and how you got on. You join myself and Markus discussing the concept of love and work.

Marcus Buckingham

My love really from leaving university and going to the US for the first time has always been psychometrics. How do you measure things about the human condition, particularly the human condition at work. They’re really important but are hard to count. So things like engagement or resilience or inclusion, but also things like talents, strengths.
And during all those times at Gallop we were interviewing people who were really, really, really good at what they do. And our process at the time was you start off with focus groups where you’ve got lots of open-ended questions. And then you do a series of open-ended question interviews where you’re just saying ‘tell me about your job’, ‘tell me about a typical day’, ‘tell me about the challenges that you face’, ‘tell me what engages you’. And whenever you interview people that are really, really, really good at what they do – and we must have done, I don’t know, 500,000 thousands of these - we tape recorded them, tape recorded them at the time, transcribed them.
Whenever you talk to people that are really, really good at what they do, you find that they talk about specific activities in the work that they do that they love. When they’re talking about it they say ‘I love doing that, I love doing this, I love doing that, I really love it when…’. In fact one of the best questions you can ask someone about their job is ‘what did you love most about, about your previous work?’, ‘what did you love most about it?’. And people, when they’re talking about it in the real world, they don’t push back on the word love. They’ll use it all the time!
But what’s interesting is, you don’t find that the most successful people live into that cliché of ‘find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life again’. They, there’s actually no data on the fact that the most effective people in any job love all that they do. But what you do hear time and time and time and time again is that they find the activities that they love in what they do. And they don’t all find the same.
So the example I quoted in the book, was kind of a silly example but, you interview the best 8 housekeepers at Walt Disney World. And they’re all amazing housekeepers, so good the guests request to be back into their section of rooms. But they all talk about different activities that they love. So one of them will be vacuuming herself out of the room and she just finds satisfaction in the lines that she creates with the vacuum cleaner. Another one lies on the bed and turns on the ceiling fan because that’s what the guest does after a long day out in the theme parks. Another one sits on the toilet or lies in the tub because that’s the way the guest sees the bathroom and she likes to look at the room the way the guests see it.
So you find different activities but the commonality is, anyone who excels at any job has figured out which are the activities in the job that they love. And that’s what not only makes them good it’s what nourishes them to keep doing it. So when you push on sustainable excellence in any job, and you just ask a person who’s sustainably excellent in any job, and then you shut up and let them talk. They talk about finding specific activities that they love.
And so that was the point of the book was to go we haven’t given this enough credence. We haven’t taken it seriously and, and shame on us. Because now we wonder why people burn out, we wonder why people have mental health problems, we wonder why people are anxious or numb at work. Well, it could be because we haven’t taken seriously the research finding that excellence and love are always seen in each other’s company.

Costello

I think you call it a scavenger hunt. It’s a big part of the concept isn’t it, that ability to find love. And I love that story of the Walt Disney housekeepers putting themselves in the shoes of the customer. So it’s, it’s looking into the task and finding it. So what is your answer then to the cynics that might judge a book by its cover?

Buckingham

Well, everyone’s asking about what’s work for. What’s the role of work in my life. There were going to be some people that came out of the pandemic and basically went – as far as they’re able to go – work’s just a transaction. I sell my time and my talent, I get my money, I go home. Work is not my family, work is not something that I should give of myself in. I’m going to, well it became known right, as quiet quitting, right. Where I’m just going to do the bare minimum of what I need to do because frankly work is amoral.
They might not have used those words but, it doesn’t care about me. Companies like Google, like Salesforce, like Twitter laying off 30, 40, 50%. In Twitter’s case almost 60% of their workforce just like that. So you can see the cynics are right in a sense. Companies clearly, particularly tech companies, who want to juice their earnings and bump up their stock price. They’ll see the flexibility of the labour market as simply an element of an equation. Hey, you’re done, sorry! You know how you’re done? Because your badge now doesn’t work in the door to go in. But you could also see people coming out of the pandemic going – work could be more for me. Work could be a place in which I encounter myself. Work could a place, not the only place, but it could be a place in which I discover some activities, some expressions of those activities, that I love. It could be 40, 50 hours a week in which I’m doing something that hopefully isn’t alienating. It might actually be nourishing. Maybe I should figure that out. Maybe I should figure out how I can find love in work. Clearly this book is designed for the people that went, you know what, I am spending 40 hours a week, 40, 50 whatever it is, hours a week doing something. How can I intelligently use the activities, and there are thousands upon thousands of any activities, take a job like housekeeping. You might think well everyone does the same job. They don’t. There’s huge variety in every job.
And therefore every job, even the one’s that were designed lovelessly, and in that Disney example by the way there were rules and policies that actually prohibited some of the housekeepers doing the stuff that they loved, like do not lie on the bed. So we can design loveless jobs. But the point of the book was to go, even within lovelessly designed jobs, there’s still a lot of different activities, moments, situations, interactions.
And, and some of those you’ll find yourself leaning into. You’ll find yourself getting energy from them. Nourishment from them. It sounds silly but every activity is energetic and differently so for each person. So the point of the book was to go, listen, if you want to be cynical ok. But if you want to try to find nourishment in work then there’s actually a way to do that. And the loves that you feel for certain activities help you de-code that which you love. And therefore if you want to choose to then pay attention to those activities that you love, work will feel different for you. And you’ll be more productive.

Costello

If we get a chance to do something that we love every day, we will be 6 times more likely to be highly engaged so, I’m listening. And to do that, you’ve mentioned that we need to find our red threads. So what are red threads? And how can we begin to start to recognise these when we’re on this scavenger hunt for love?

Buckingham

The red thread notion is that every single day is filled with activities. You can imagine them as threads. Thousands of threads every day. Some of them are black, white, grey, green. They’re sort of neutral. But some of these threads are red threads. They have a certain kind of energetic quality to them. They’re like the housekeeper backing herself out of the room and, whatever stupid reason, she loves the lines. It’s the bookkeeper perhaps who just gets a thrill when it balances. Now not every bookkeeper does that, but like that little shiver of joy when it’s ‘ooh it balances’. There is data that comes out of the Mayo Clinic from doctors and nurses that shows that, for those that are resilient, those that are staying nourished, the data from the Mayo Clinic suggests - not that you have a 100% of what you love - but the 20% every day. 20% of the activities in your job every day are things that you love. When you’ve figured out what those things are and think about it intentionally every day you’re much less likely to be burnt out. Well in the red thread analogy it’s like you don’t need a red quilt. Your job doesn’t need to be a red quilt. You need 20% red threads. That’s probably enough.
And so for you the challenge, for me the challenge, for everyone, the challenge is how do you wake up on a day and rather than thinking of your day as the enemy (as something to get through, which is the language we use ‘to get through the day), rather than thinking about it that way, we need to change our relationship to our own day. And just think about your day basically waking up with you and going, Hey, ‘what about this thread? What about this one? What about this one? What about this one?...’ Your day is basically desperately trying to put on a show for you going ‘is this thread red? Is this?’ And our job as humans is to wake up on a day and go, I'm going to continue to pay attention to those activities that I love every day. My life's trying to show me how to get energy from today. Every day it is, it's trying to show me this activity, this one, this one, this one, this one. If you choose not to focus on that, you won't find these threads and life becomes depleting. We don't have to see work, and the days of work as depleting inherently; a four day work week, why? Oh, I know why, because work is bad and therefore, the less of it we have, the better. The president of Finland last week, we should have a six hour day for four days a week. Why would we do eight hours? No, no, no. Just 24 hour work week says that president of Finland. Okay, fine. But that's based on the premise that work has no red threads in it at all. Yeah. Work is depleting. So the less of it you have in your life, the better. Okay. I reject that completely because based on the research that I've done for 25 years; you study excellent people at work, they're not only doing a good job, they're nourished by the doing.

Costello

I love the idea of keeping a journal, keeping an idea of things that you and, and perhaps other co-coloured threads, things that you loath, or writing a love note. But most of all, I'm interested in us doing our own love assessment, Marcus. And for those listening, of course, they can play along. They can pause the podcast, answer the questions, themselves in their own time. So just relax. Of course, Marcus, there's no right or wrong answers. So, number one, and this is learned from the Red Thread questionnaire. When was the last time you lost track of time, you were in flow?

Buckingham

So, yesterday, I've been asked by PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) to come up on Thursday and talk to their Top 200 leaders about how they can re-energise PG&E. It's the gas and electric company in California. It's huge, but it's had some challenges over the last few years related to forest fires, related to floods. And so I had to put together a whole presentation about how you would redesign an electricity gas company based on love. And when I'm getting into how do I get this across, how do you take a thing and get it across? Two hours goes by in a second, which is one of the signs, of course, of something that you love. Time and love have this inverse relationship.

Costello

That's peak flow. Next question then. When was the last time you were the only person to notice something?

Buckingham

Well, the first time I noticed something weird was when I was watching people do the high jump in when I was 10 maybe at school. And I noticed that when a kid was trying to jump over the high jump every other kid watching, even if they weren't on the same team, as the kid doing the high jump they would instinctively lift themselves up on their toes or kick their foot out in involuntarily. And I noticed it, I asked the teacher about it, I asked the other boys about it and no one even knew what I was talking about. It turns out later, 20 years later, there's something called mirror neurons that when we see somebody doing something, we mirror it in our own brains. So all these other boys watching this other kid jump over the high jump, were almost physically trying to lift him up over. It was, it was cool. Yeah.
But that's the first time I noticed. The first time I was like, ‘oh, that's weird’. I noticed no one else is looking at it. It’s the first sign really for any kid that they're seeing the world in a unique way regardless of race or gender, other socioeconomic situations, which of course are meaningful, but they're also totally unique regardless of their race or gender age.

Costello

And it's, when you notice these things that, that story from school, it's that reaction from everyone else, isn't it? Where they think ‘wow, I never thought of that or I didn't see that’. Or ‘you're totally see coming it from completely different angle’. When you hear those reactions…

Buckingham

Or ‘your nuts’. Right? That that's the other <laugh>.

Costello

Next question. The last time you wished the activity would never end, Marcus…

Buckingham

Well, I love doing this. So I, did a podcast last week and we could have talked for hours, I was talking to my co-head of the ADP Research Institute, Nela Richardson, who's, just a genius macro economist. She was over in Davos and we were doing something together. And when I'm talking about something that I know a lot about and I'm talking about it with someone else who knows a lot about their area of expertise, I'm a huge sort of expertise junkie. I know what my swim lane is and I love being in it and I love being around somebody else who's really deep into their swim lane. And obviously psychometricians and macroeconomists don't often talk to one another, but they're all talking about the economy and work. We're both sort of talking about it from the same lens, but from coming at it from very different disciplines. That to me is, you know, that's my definition of heaven.

Costello

Next question and last question. When was the last time you surprised yourself?

Buckingham

One of the aspects of love, not the only one, is a glimpse of excellence, a glimpse that came out of nowhere, suddenly you did something and people went ‘wait, what?’ Maybe you were harmonising in the shower or something and someone came in …<laughs> That sounds, that's wrong …It's a metaphor, but, you know, ‘wait, what was that?’ Or you hearing your kids start singing in the back of the car and you're like ‘wait, what?’ Or you read a line of an essay that somebody wrote. Just a line, because most of the rest of the essay is a mess, but there's a couple of sentences where you go, whoa, whoa, whoa…
And in this case, it's when was the last time you surprised yourself. When you go ‘Whoa. How, where did that come from?’ Okay, that's meaningful. That is non-trivial. And it might be random. It's like hitting, if you play golf, it's hitting a perfect 7 Iron and then you can't do it again. Okay. It could be random, but it it's worth paying attention to if the moment you surprise yourself by some little thing that you did that worked, that you may not have done before. Yeah. That's a clue. It's a clue. It's a glimpse. And we run through our lives and we kind of ignore all these glimpses and our lives are the poorer for it.

Costello

There's a beautiful section in the book about you overcoming your own stammer at an early age. And I wonder if you could talk us through how that moment was like, almost an unlock…

Buckingham

I use it as an example of find what you love because it, we do know this from your brain chemistry. You do become, you have elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters like oxytocin, norepinephrine, anandamide, and they think that that opens your brain up basically to disregulate your neocortex, which is very goal focused. And it opens your brain up to more information, more input, which leads to more creativity, more innovation, more collaboration…
So your brain in love is just smarter. But your brain in love also helps you deal with problems and obstacles that you face in your life, which we don't really give it credit for.
For me growing up, the thing that kind of dominated my life was that I couldn't speak. I had a really, really, really bad stutter, so I couldn't get anything out. I couldn't say my name, Marcus Buckingham, you know, for a stutterer, that's a really, really bad name to have.
For the first 12 years of my life, I did what anyone does with problems these days, right? You, you study them, you get to dive into them, and you get therapy for them. You read books on them, you, and what happens when you focus on a problem is you bring all of the power of your attention to the problem. And, and because change follows the focus of your attention, the problem gets, I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it gets bigger. Until, for me, certainly my stutter became my life. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. The last thing I thought about at night. Basically it was getting worse and worse and worse and worse. The more I studied about it, the worse it got. Every interaction was fraught because I had so many thoughts about what I was trying to do in the, ah, nightmare, I don’t who it was actually, but somebody picked me and five other people to read aloud in chapel one morning.
I was the first to read and I had hoped that my parents would cancel it or find a way to get me out of it or whatever we would do these days with helicopter parenting and stuff. But they didn't, they just let it happen. And the night before I'd gone up to an empty chapel with the headmaster and I'd taken this little, short piece and I'd butchered it. Just butchered it. And I tried and try, try and I butchered it. And that night, you know, you just think because I was 12, I'm like, my life's flipping over because the people I go to school with are friends, but they're also nightmares. They find a little weakness. You know, you know what kids are like.
Anyway, I got up that morning and I went to the chapel and I got, you know, when it came to the moment, they called me up and I went to the lectern and I turned around and I looked at the 400 people in the, in the, in the chapel. And I'd never seen it before. I'd never had that stimulus that that input of 400 faces at, because no one had ever asked me to do it. Because, because I couldn't speak in a normal conversation, let alone... so it was new. The moment I saw these faces I felt something, and I wrote this in the book, it felt warm around my head like a warm helmet, which I imagined to be, although this could be a total imagining that, that there's a bunch of synapses firing that were there already waiting to fire, but they had never fired <laugh>.
And I said, I spoke the whole piece without a single stutter. I was blown away, I was surprised as everyone else was. And I shared the story, not because I was brave or something, because I wasn't, it just happened… but the only intention in intelligent thing I did, and I didn't use this language at the time, obviously, but I was like, that's a red thread. I can't speak to one person, but you put me in front of 400, I can speak.
Okay? That's something. All the signs of love are there. The fluidity time flying by surprising yourself. People telling you how good you are, okay, then why don't I take that red thread and I'll just weave it. I'll take the thing that I love… this thread over here, which is clearly a part of me, and I'll weave it over here. So anytime I'm talking to somebody one-on-one, which I can't do, I'll just pretend I'm talking to 400 people. I'll literally pretend I'm weaving that thread into these new situations.
And not to be too glib or flip about it, but my stamina went away in a week and love did that. And I don't mean to be too squishy, but I figured out a specific activity that I loved and used its power and we can see neurotransmitters firing differently or the elevated levels of certain neurotransmitters and what they enable you to do that's biochemical. And I just took it and put it into a new situation.

Costello

And boy did you run with it ever since Marcus <both laugh> Keep running with that red thread…
The challenge comes when we need to then start shaping our work to our love. You said, 73% of us believe we have the opportunity to shape our role to our loves… but it seems that we don't take the opportunity up. What's getting in the way?

Buckingham

There's a couple of reasons why we don't do it. The first is that we have been raised in a culture which says there's no you in there. So as you know with selection and recruiting and so forth, people are woeful in terms of describing what their particular loves are. As you said all the way through the book, one of the things I'm trying to do is help people go put vividness specificity detail to the particular things that you love. Whether it's journaling, whether it's doing a ‘love it/loaded’ activity for a week where you just draw the line down the middle of the pad or the notepad and loved it one column, loathed it in another and just paid attention for a week. And to see where the signs of love are and where the signs of love are and write down what you're doing. Just do that. No one will do it for you. No one can do it for you.
The second problem is the tools. I think Marshall McLuhan was the person who said, we make our tools and then our tools make us. All of us live in the world of work inside of human capital management systems. It might be Oracle, it might be SAP, it might be Workday, whatever. But all of these systems are really important to the way in which we experience work; the way we're paid, where goals are set, the way that we do performance reviews... And all of these systems basically say the uniqueness of you isn't just irrelevant to your job, in many cases it’s an impediment to you doing your job. We've defined the job. Look, here's the job description, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's right here in the human capital management system. You probably saw it on the job description when you applied here it is, it's the same for everybody in this job by the way. And our job is to get you to match most closely to a pre-set standard or model of the people in the job. Whether it's a senior leader position or whether it's the frontline housekeeper who's just joined. The uniqueness of you, at least as it exists in these tools, is something we're trying to get rid of.
Companies in general have not figured out how to use human uniqueness as an asset. We talk about our people are our greatest asset, but we don't mean each person is, we mean people sort of generally. And so the tools that we bump into are actively trying to make you fit a pre-set mould. And in fact, success is defined by how closely you fit the mould.
Maybe it's a set of job descriptions, it could be a set of competencies that we then measure you against, and then we'll call that an ‘integrated talent management system’ <laugh> But what that basically means is, we wish you weren't idiosyncratic, we wish you were the, all these nurses, we want all these nurses to be the same and we'll measure you against that. So in a context of a job like that, or tools like that, it's then it's not surprising that it's difficult for people to manoeuvre their job to fit themselves better.
And then the last piece of that puzzle is the manager. The manager lives inside the tools. The poor manager, not the best managers, but most managers. It's like, I'm really busy. Your uniqueness and your loves, frankly really do I care? Not really. I'd rather you just did the job because we've built this whole company on the idea that this is transactional. You've just sold your time and your talent, we give you the money and then you go home. Okay? So take your uniqueness out on your kids at home <laughs> or your hobby at home, but don't bring 'em here. And I'm overstating a little bit, but a lot of managers basically are charged with putting in place the standardised systems that you see in the tools. And you pull that together and it's little wonder that people find their jobs alienating.

Costello

You can go in as a manager perhaps, you know, just wanting an easier life perhaps. But, but actually if you can unlock some of this potential in the way that you've described then, then it’s boom time. But one of the things that you're particularly passionate about was actually checking in.

Buckingham

Yeah so ‘checking in’. What we really should say to every manager is, look, if we're going to try to scale something throughout the year or across all of you managers, the thing we're trying to scale is attention. The secret to engagement and resilience and productivity is attention, attention, attention, attention... and that means what we want you to do. If you got 10 people on your team, the single most important thing you can do is ask them about last week, ‘what did you love and loath?’ ‘What did you get a kick out of?’ Whatever language feels good to you to use… but ask them about where they were kind of at their best last week. Ask them what they're doing this week and how can you help.
Do that 52-weeks a year. It's 15 minutes with each person on your team where you're asking two questions. You're asking, ‘what did you love and loath last week?’ ‘What'd you get a kick out of last week?’ ‘When were you at your best last week?’ And then… ‘what are you working on this week? How can I help? So, short-term past, short-term future, short-term, past short-term future, the world moves so quickly, it's very dynamic. The best solution to respond to dynamic change is, is to have frequent attention, frequent conversations about the person in their work. That's, that's not a massive investment at time. And by the way, it doesn't seem to matter whether it's in person or on the phone or whether it's in app or email. What matters is that the person is asked a question and that, that you respond.
And it's very, in a sense, very simple. You're the, you are at the two-foot level going, ‘what'd you get a kick out of last week?’ Because that's the emotion part of it. It's like the love part of it. And then ‘what are you going to work on this week? How can I help?’ I might tweak, I might alter, I might adjust, I might give you a little piece of coaching advice. I might not because I know that next week we're going have the same conversation. So there's no stress or pressure <laugh>. It's just love and work and love and work..

Costello

Know, when I go and watch my son play football, just standing and observing has an impact. It's almost like an expression of love and them feeling love. We used to have that when we did, you know, management by walking around… so is there an observation of effect as well that's kicking in here?

Buckingham

Yeah, I mean the philosopher Nietzsche called us the beast with red cheeks. We like attention, we flourish with attention. If you want to kill us, you make us lonely, you ignore us…we'd almost prefer someone to criticize us.
I mean we have actually significant data on this. People would prefer to have someone criticise them for their weaknesses and their flaws than ignore them. So the the worst you can do for another human at work is ignore them. And to your point, the frequency, we often think that that everything about leading and managing is based upon the quality of the conversation, the quality of your insight, the quality of your coaching. But when it comes to leading a group of people, frequency trump's quality. If you are touching base with somebody every week in a focus one-on-one way, then it doesn't really matter if one week you don't have a genius coaching moment because you are going to do it next week.
And the person now has that as a predictable expectation. So, you both have the pressure off a little bit because the initial thing is just ‘hey, I'm in sync with you emotionally’. And then in terms of your priorities, that's a pretty human thing to do: where you at? what are you working on? And in the book, of course if you play this out and you just say, all right, well look, the essence of leading people is checking in with them frequently about near-term past and future, near-term past and future…
Then you start to bump into things like span of control. Then you start to understand why nurses are so burned out. We can stand around and clap all we want in the UK for the National Health Service… but if the average nurse supervisor to nurse ratio in an NHS hospital is one to 60, then it's impossible for that nurse supervisor to touch base with or check in with 60 nurses.
He or she's got no time for that. So we've got a systematic organisational structure, which gives those 60 nurses no attention. And it works on a balance sheet. But it doesn't work in for the human people that are part of that ecosystem. They need someone to go, ‘How is last week? What are you working on?’ ‘How is last week? What are you working on?’ And if we don't build that into the way that we run our organisations, we will see the kind of burnout and disengagement …and over here in the United States, the kind of violence that exists in the workplace, when people feel dehumanised, they tend to act in, in-human ways or they burn up. And I didn't see anything in the British press about the fact that burnout and doctors and nurses is a function of we've got span of control wrong. We've built in, people's feeling of alienation and stress. We built it in. And that's not soft and squishy <laugh> it's like, oh my word … we've built organisations as though the humans in them don't have human needs. Yeah. And the solution actually is not that difficult. It's a 15-minute check-in every week. Although… if you've got a span of one to 70, then that's impossible.

Costello

It's impossible. It's, and it's impossible for that, with that span of control to almost support staff crafting that 20%, that that, that minimum of 20% of our love.
I was thinking about the different types of love. One of them that stood out is love lost. There is a risk of that, isn't there? If we, you know, we go into something like teaching, we go into something like nursing, whatever it is, policing… and as we progress through our career, we take on more responsibilities… we take on the competencies that are, your words, built in. And that can be great for some, but there's also a risk of losing that love and what fulfils us and essentially entering into loveless work…
My final question is this, what exactly is your final call to actions to organisations on how talent can be managed, inspired, or fulfilled?

Buckingham

Well, I think it would be three things.
One is that love for the organisation, there's a business case for love. People are measurably more productive, less likely to burn out, more likely to advocate the company in terms of a talent brand to friends and family. And in increasingly tight labour markets, whether you're thinking about productivity at work or whether you're thinking about talent advocacy and talent brand. Companies can't afford to think of love as a nice to have. So that's the first thing. You’ve got to take it seriously, particularly in these labour markets, when Gen Z's coming into the world of work and going ‘I need something more from work, please’.
The second call to arms I think would be to each individual. To go, for you too, love isn't a nice to have.
The beautiful thing about love is that you know what you love better than anyone else does. You know what your red threads are better than anyone else does. There's a way to do it. There's a way to use your life to help you know how to move through your life nourishingly. Don't look to anyone else to do it for you. You can do it. And it is also not a nice-to-have for you. It's a must have because with love if you don't express it, your thing about love lost. If you don't get a chance to express it at work, it's not neutral… love turns into a very caustic, acidic, almost poisonous substance if you don't express it. If you don't have a chance to express that which you love and turn it into contribution, it will erode you where the love needs to be expressed. Love is like an energy force. It's got to come out into work. And when you don't, it stays in there. And I actually put a quote from my mom, well it's not from my mom, but my mom showed it to me from the Gospel of St. Thomas, which was Jesus basically saying, ‘if you don't bring forth that which is inside you, it will destroy you’.
So 2000 years ago we knew that there was, there was something in there.
The third thing is that the prescription for this is not that complicated. If you want to look at where love flourishes at work, there are two conditions. Number one is what we were just talking about, managers and team leaders who can frequently in a light touch way, pay attention to the detail of the love and the work every week. And the second is teams, love work flourishes on teams. Humans do really good stuff on teams and, and teams are places where the managers figured out that you're not all the same. You all sort of need one another because you all bring something a wee bit different to the team. So companies need to look at the team as the most important unit of analysis. And when they don't, companies or institutions ignore teams, we see very, very unhealthy human outcomes. Where do you see no teams? Schools? Teachers aren't on teams and hospitals. There's no teams in a hospital. You might think there is, but I, but actually there isn't. <laugh> Factories, call centres…wherever we see negative human performance outcomes. In the case of obviously teachers and nurses, it's it the, the people that suffer are our kids and our loved ones who are sick. Wherever we see those negative outcomes, we see no teams. So I'm not sort of waxing lyrical about the importance of teamwork. It's that the solution to building more love at work and more productivity and performance and health and advocacy and mental wellness is teams. And when you miss that, you miss the human condition. And that's not a big lift for us. I think it's just we haven't given it rather, like with the attention thing, we just haven't taken it seriously and we've lost sight of what it takes to help a human be nourished and flourish at work.

Costello

Marcus, you are the first ever guest I've spoken to about love. I'm delighted it was you. I think it's an area that, that we're, we're all going to have to get used to talking about. So thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Buckingham

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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35m 24s

Listen to the first episode of the Think People Podcast where Michael Costello discusses achieving deep purpose with professor Ranjay Gulati.

35m 49s

How you can bring love back into work

Listen to this episode of EY Lane4’s Think People podcast, where Michael Costello discusses bringing love back into work with author Marcus Buckingham.

35m 24s

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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