LEADERSHIP
create a culture or an environment that people love working in. If I don’t love working here, it’s much more difficult for me to create the products and services that my customers are going to love.
“When people really connect their hearts with their work, that’s when we do incredible things.”
… If I don’t love what we’re doing
here and love the people that I’m doing it with and the folks that we’re doing it for, then I’m just faking it. People have a pretty good BS meter. They know when we’re faking it. This isn’t about pretending, and it’s not about printing buttons and banners and saying that we love our customers. We’ve been doing that for decades. Every dry cleaner in the world has paper on their hangers that says, “We heart our customers.” That’s easy. What I’m talking about in the book is that it’s not a nice-to-have. It directly affects our results, otherwise known as the bottom line. There are three categories of
people: people who think that love has no place in business; people who think it’s a nice-to-have but not a must-have; and then the third category, which obviously I am a member of, is that love is the thing that enhances every other thing that we do to make our business successful.
Knowledge@Wharton: Your group is probably historically the lowest percentage of the three, but is it growing?
Farber: I do believe that it is picking up steam, but I’m not so sure that it’s the minority. I know that sounds a little counterintuitive because we’ve been conditioned to believe [love has] no place at work. But what I’ve found in my work, and the conclusion I’ve come to, is that I’m
48
DOMmagazine.com | nov 2019
really not trying to convince anybody of anything…. What I found is that most people already know this. The instinct is there. The impulse is there. But they’ve thought that maybe that was wrong somehow, that they shouldn’t act on it or explore it or try to put it into practice because you’re not supposed to do that in business.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do you believe this needs to be a core principle for leaders these days?
Farber: Yes. In these ultra-chaotic, polarized times that we live in, and in these days where we’re spending more and more of our lives at work, I think we have an opportunity not just to change our own individual businesses, but to change things [in general]. Just about everybody goes to work somewhere, and if we can change the expectation and the experience of what it means to go to work into an opportunity to bring ourselves fully to that work, to do great work with people that we enjoy being with, we essentially change everything. …In the meantime, the way that
we can prove that this is a better way to do things is by getting better results through doing it. It sounds like an odd phrase, but it’s “operationalizing love.” I want to be really clear about this. I’m not talking about love as a sentiment, but it’s really love as a practice and a discipline. The question we have to answer in our business is what does that look like here?
Knowledge@Wharton: How is this concept translated in the digital age, where data and technology can sometimes be more important than people?
Farber: I think that concern comes from the idea that those are mutually exclusive — that numbers and technology are in one category and love is in another category. I’m suggesting they are not because
human beings are creating those numbers. Artificial intelligence and the implications of that aside, we are a collection of human beings getting together in a work environment to create stuff, right? We use data and technology to give us more intelligence about our marketplace and an opportunity to find the right customers and connect with them. Once that connection gets made, we have an opportunity to create a relationship, to create an experience.
Knowledge@Wharton: Managers can bring forth a lot of this, but what about the employees? What about human resources?
Farber: This is a really critical point: Leadership fundamentally has nothing to do with your position or title, and what we are talking about here is leadership. It’s our ability to influence people around us to change things for the better.
I’ll be polite about this. I’ve met lots of people in my work over the years who sit very prominently on their company’s organizational chart. They have very lofty and impressive- sounding titles. They have thousands of people that report to them, yet they still have a bit of work to do as far as their leadership goes. But the other side of that equation, which is what you’re alluding to here, is I can’t tell you how many people I have met that are not in positions of authority. They’re nobody’s boss. They’re nobody’s supervisor. They’re members of the team. They’re on the frontline. They’re doing the work, no position or title, but they’re great leaders by virtue of who they are, what they do, how they approach their work, how they live, how they connect with people and their ability to influence people to change things for the better.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
