#52 - Are You Happily Married?
Hello,
Are you happily married? I'm asking not only about your personal life. I mean your work too. Think twice. Work has all the ingredients of a marriage. Commitment? Check. Written or unspoken vows? Check. The intent to make it work, to be happy and thrive? Check. All this time that you spend working? Check. And, finally, the risk of divorce when things don't go well? Check again!
This week, as I continued exploring and thinking about engagement and employee experience, it suddenly struck me that things that make us happy or unhappy in a marriage are surprisingly similar to those that make us happy or unhappy at work. So how can we thrive in love and at work? Why do we stay committed? How to keep desire and passion in long-term relationship? How to reframe commitment between employer and employee? How to find what you love to do? How to make the real life of dual-career couple better? What is the third marriage we should not neglect? - 6 books helped me connect the dots and I heartily recommend putting all of them on your summer to-read list.
We'll start with a few statements that can reliable predict where you will stay or you will go - at work. They also expose the lie that people care about which company they work for: in reality, local experiences with our colleagues and our managers matter much more than company experiences. Book: "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World"
Second, we will look at how committed couples try to integrate all the paradoxes of love life: security and excitement, continuity and passion, grounding and adventure, commitment and freedom. Is it possible to want what we already have? Book: "Mating in Captivity: How to Keep Desire and Passion Alive in Long-Term Relationships?"
Third, we move back to the world of work to discover that most conversations on the commitment between employer and employee are outdated and dishonest. We need to reframe the outdated relationship and the "marriage contract". This book shows you how. "The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age"
Fourth, we try to answer the question "Should you love everything you do?" Loving everything you do is wishful thinking, but you can find love in what you do. This book shows how: "Love + Work"
Fifth, we look at the place where work and love intertwine the most intensely - dual-career couples. One book shows how the relationships in dual-career couples really are and how to make them better. Book: "Couples That Work: How to Thrive in Love and at Work"
Finally, we get to the marriage we have forgotten: our marriage to Self. I stumbled on the idea in one of the most poetic books on love and work: "The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationships."
And as usual, a nice playlist awaits you at the end.
Let's start with a few statements that can validly predict whether you stay or you go - at work...
People Don't Care Which Company They Work For
Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World is one of the most provocative and enlightening books written about the world of work. And the first lie Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall expose is that people care which company they work for. Lie. They don't. What matters then? The authors identified eight precisely worded statements that reliably predict sustained team performance; statements that measure the aspects that drive performance, voluntary turnover, and customer satisfaction.
"1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
3. I my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
5. My teammates have my back.
6. I know I will be recognised for excellent work.
7. I have great confidence in my company's future.
8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow."
The above questions are not rating anyone, they rate only personal feelings and experiences. Questions 1,3,5,7 are about "We" experiences: what do we share, as a team or as a company? Questions 2,4,6,8 are about "Me" experiences: What is unique and valuable about me? Do I feel challenged to grow? We need things from both We and Me categories to thrive at work. We want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, something meaningful; and at the same time, we want to be seen, understood, and challenged.
So what does the research tell us?
"Local experiences - how we interact with our immediate colleagues - are significantly more important than company ones. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you'll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won't be there for long. While people might CARE which company they JOIN, they DON'T care which company they work for. The truth is, once there, people CARE which TEAM THEY'RE ON."
Let's look at the 8 questions above again. It really strikes me how the 8 statements could be applied to our marriage in the most traditional sense. We want to be with a person who shares our values, sees the best in us and challenges us to grow.
Our expectations from work are just as high as our expectations from marriage. Actually, they're all times high. Be it our marriage or our work, we want it all: security and excitement, continuity and passion, grounding and adventure. Before we can see how to square the circle in our work life, how do people address these impossible contradictions in couples?
Is It Possible To Want What We Already Have?
In Mating in Captivity: How to Keep Desire and Passion Alive in Long-Term Relationships, Esther Perel looks at sex in committed couples and the paradoxes that define it. She proposes a few ideas how to maintain desire in long-standing relationships. When I read the abstracts below I cannot help but saying that it applies just as much to the world of work as it applies to the lives of couples.
"We all share a fundamental need for security, which propels us toward committed relationships in the first place; but we have an equally strong need for adventure and excitement. Modern romance promises that it's possible to meet these two distinct sets of needs in one place. Still, I'm not convinced. Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?
What makes sustaining desire over time so difficult is that it requires reconciling two opposing forces: freedom and commitment. We find the same polarities in every system: stability and change, passion and reason, personal interest and collective well-being, action and reflection (to name but a few). These tensions exist in individuals, in couples, and in large organisations. They express dynamics that are part of the very nature of reality. These polarities are sets of interdependent opposites that belong to the same whole: you can't choose one over the other, the system needs both to survive.
Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while recognising his persistent mystery; creating security while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole."
So, if we want people to stay committed and thrive, we need to create a culture able to integrate the paradoxes of stability and adventure. But how to do it when most conversations on the commitment between the employer and employee are fundamentally outdated and dishonest? One book proposes how to reframe the outdated employer-employee relationship to fit the networked age.
The Alliance: Your New Marriage Contract with Work
In their insightful book, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh, and Reid Hoffman introduce the new, realistic loyalty pact between employer and employee - a pact based on how they can add value to each other.
The employer-employee relationship is based on a dishonest conversation. The fuzziness destroys trust - the company is asking employees to commit to itself without committing to them in return. Many of the employees respond by hiding their bets, and jumping ship whenever a new opportunity presents itself, regardless of how much they profess their loyalty during the recruiting process or annual reviews.
The old model of employment was a good fit for an era of stability. The implicit deal was that we provide lifelong employment in exchange for loyal service.
The traditional model of lifetime employment, so well-suited to periods of relative stability, is too rigid for today's networked age.
The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows the companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.
Think of employment as an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players. This employment alliance provides the framework managers and employees need for the trust and investment to build powerful businesses and careers.
In an alliance, employer and employee develop a relationship based on how they can add value to each other. Employers need to tell their employees, "Help make our company more valuable. and we'll make you more valuable." Employees need to tell their bosses, "Help me grow and flourish, and I'll help the company grow and flourish."
Employees invest in the company's success; the company invests in the employees' market value. By building a mutually beneficial alliance rather than simply exchanging money for time, employer and employee can invest in the relationship and take the risks necessary to pursue bigger payoffs."
Just as a loveless marriage can make you unhappy, no love in the work you do will make you feel miserable. Should you love everything you do? Absolutely not, in most cases, this is a wishful thinking. But your working day should include at least periods of work that you love doing.
There is Always Love in Excellence
In "Love and Work: How To Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life" Marcus Buckingham helps you break away from conformity, uncover the truth about your unique loves and choose the roles in which you'll excel.
"Steve Jobs said in his famous Standford Commencement address, "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." (...) To do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. We know this because when we survey a group of people who are highly successful, resilient, and engaged and a contrast group of people who are less so, the two best questions that separate them are these:
Do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day?
Were you excited to go to work every day last week?
Those people who are thriving answer "strongly agree" to both of these. Every single day they report that they get to do something that plays to the best of themselves, something that gets them excited. Not all day. not everything. Just some things - but every day. They don't necessarily "do all they love". Instead, they find the love in what they do. Every day.
Trust in your loves. Trust that what you lean into, what makes you happy, what makes you feel in control, what brings you joy - trust that all these little signs are worth taking seriously, because each one, despite what anyone may tell you, is utterly unique to you.
When you see someone do something with excellence, there is always love in it - loveless excellence is an oxymoron."
And how to thrive in love and work for dual-career couples? How to manage all the trade-offs that dual-career couples have? How to reconcile another set of paradoxes and tensions? yes, you guessed it right, there is a great book on this, too.
Couples that Work
"Couples That Work: How to Thrive in Love and At Work" by Jennifer Petriglieri is "a portrait of what dual-career couples' lives really are, and a guide on how to make them better."
"While the challenges dual-career couples face are fairly well-known, there is a surprising lack of guidance available on how to deal with them. Most career advice is targeted at individuals, treating major career decisions as if we're flying solo - without partners, children, siblings, friends, or aging parents to consider.
Moreover, most advice for couples focuses on their personal relationships, not on the way it intersects with their professional dreams (...) I believe most current advice failed couples because it targets surface-level, practical issues, rather than underlying forces that create those issues.
My aim in this book is to move beyond practicalities and provide a greater understanding of psychological and social forces dual-career couples face. I also show how thinking and talking about these forces can help couples be more successful and fulfilled in their life and work."
The book identifies 3 key transitions for a dual-career couple. Each transition comes with its own struggles, and each can either break the couple or strengthen the bond.
The first transition happens when the honeymoon period is over: it's the time to take our first real decisions as a couple and, inevitably, to deal with first conflicts. The key question of this first transition is 'How do we make it work?'
The second transition is a classical, existential mid-life crisis. Whenever one of the partners starts questioning his/her path - What do I really want? - the other may feel insecure. It is the time when the old ways we used to support each other have to shift. Quite counterintuitively, instead of trying to hold our partner close, it is the time where we need to be a "secure base", but lovingly push our partner outside of his/her comfort zone to go and explore new possibilities, to take risks
The third major transition comes when the career game is largely over and kids are grown up. It is a transition where we have to reinvent both our working identities and our identity as a couple. The question is "Who are we now?"
Through dozens of interviews for this book, one specific habit pattern came out very clearly with the strongest couples: having regular and deep conversations about the three fundamental things:
(1) What really matters to us: our values, principles, decision criteria, the yardsticks by which we measure success.
(2) What are the lines we are willing to cross: the constraints and boundaries that we define for ourselves - geography, travel time, time dedicated to work…
(3) What are the things that scare us: there may be so many unspoken fears - fears of being left behind, infidelity, fear of having kids, fear of bad health, etc… When we specifically address those deep fears, we may find out that they are completely unfounded. Or we may see clearly how to manage our boundaries. In any case, a fear brought out into the daylight suddenly becomes less scary.
Talking about the two marriages, we have forgotten about the most important one - Marriage to Self. I stumbled on this idea in the one of the most poetic books on love and work.
The Three Marriages
In "The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationships", author and poet David Whyte walks us through various stages of the three marriages most important in our lives: of Work, Self, and Other.
"There is this first marriage, the one we usually mean, to another; that second marriage, which can so often seem like a burden, to a work or a vocation; and that third and most likely hidden marriage to a core conversation inside ourselves. We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and, as I wish to illustrate, they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously.
Why put them together? To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.
This book looks at the dynamics common to all three marriages: first, the recognition of what an individual wants, then a pursuit, then the hope to circumvent the difficult but necessary disappointment. and ultimately, in the face of that disappointment, the full recommitment to the vows we have made in each of the three ares, spoken or unspoken.
Each of the marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable. We should give up the attempt to balance one marriage against another. As we discover, through the lives and biographies I follow in this book, how each one of the three marriages, how each one of the three marriages is nonnegotiable at its core, we can start to realign our understanding and our efforts away from trading and bartering parts of ourselves as if they were scalable commodities and more toward finding a central conversation that can hold all these three marriages together."
This Week's Playlist
Until - originally from Sting, this valse is about the first encounter with the one you love and how you these moments last forever. "One day, you'll meet a stranger, and all the noises silenced in the room, you'll feel that you're close to some mystery. In the moonlight where everything shatters you'll feel as if you've known her all your life - the world's greatest lesson in history..."
If I Didn't Have Your Love, by Leonard Cohen. Someone said, love itself is meaningless, but it gives meaning to everything else. "If the sun would lose its light and we lived an endless night and there was nothing left that you could feel, that's how it would be, what my life would seem to me if I didn't have you love to make it real.”
No Freedom, by Dido. 'No Love Without Freedom. No Freedom Without Love." Simple and beautiful as that.
Desmancha-Prazeres, by EU.CLIDES. I first saw people dancing to a sensual kizomba at a place where you would less expect it - in a park in Auckland, New Zealand. A couple brought their music box and forgot about everyone and everything else, losing themselves to dance. A beautiful Saturday morning date!
El Sol Sueño, by Gidon Kremer, homage to Astor Piazzola. No other dance better expresses the whole spectrum of romantic feelings than tango. Get carried away with this Sunny Dream!