Creating a kick-ass work environment where you can take a step in the direction of your dreams and love the people around you can be joyful.
In her 2018 Wellesley College Commencement Address, Tracy K. Smith, the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States, offered a beautiful reminder that to achieve our ideals, we need to bring love and joy to the work.
We tend to avoid that word [love] when we talk about politics, about demographics and policy, employing in its place a term like ‘tolerance.’ But tolerance is meager. Tolerance means I will make space for you beside me on some kind of imaginary national bus, then slide back over so you don’t get too much of what I never stopped thinking is mine …
Tolerance requires no cognitive shift. . . . But Love is a radical shift. Love tells me that your needs must be as important to me as mine are; that I can only truly honor and protect myself by honoring and protecting you …
[Love] assures me that giving you what you need is a way of ministering to myself, to the Us that you and I together make … [I]n order to embrace Love, I must move past fear, past a fixation on my own claim to power or authority.
Bringing Love & Joy to Work
I believe we do our best work when we love our work, the results of our work, and the people with whom we work. We can look forward to the work we do to create more radically respectful workplaces with joy.
We can laugh at our own biases when they are disrupted, rather than getting defensive. We can relish the new clarity of our thinking when our prejudices are challenged.
We can enjoy kinder, gentler relationships when we learn to stop bullying and start caring for one another. This doesn’t have to be a food fight. It can be a delicious smorgasbord.
As I told The Telegraph for the article “The Taylor Swift guide to shaking off criticism,” you’re human, and your humanity is an asset, not a liability. Extend yourself some grace.
Let’s Get Together
I’m excited to share that I’ll be a guest speaker in the upcoming course, Communication Essentials for Work and Life, starting September 24!
Led by Matt Abrahams, Stanford GSB lecturer and host of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, this course will cover key communication skills like feedback, storytelling, interpersonal communication, reputation management, and nonverbal presence.
I’m thrilled to be part of it and can’t wait to share my insights! Sign up below.
Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I’ll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect, available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor® and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.
