Editor’s Note: The second in a series that proposes considering “love” as a management principle. See the first installment: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
By David Jarrard and Ken Graboys
3-minute read
Christopher Nolan’s masterwork film “The Odyssey” is a summer blockbuster.
As audiences have over the millennia, today’s theatergoers are marveling at shipwrecks, Cyclopes, Sirens, enchanted beings and the fateful Trojan horse.
But while we come for the adventure, we actually stay for the love. Everything the epic puts us through is in service to the moment when Odysseus and Penelope are finally reunited.
Odysseus’ gripping 10-year journey is not, in the end, a story about war and wandering. It’s a story about the power of love. Its power to galvanize and motivate men to overcome even the most unimaginable of obstacles.
On his long way home to Ithaca, Odysseus encounters temptation, glory, violence, loss and distraction. A “man of twists and turns,” he suffers from the whims of the gods and men, and from his own arrogance. Yet every detour only sharpens one of Homer’s central truths: When one is lost, when all seems lost, love has the power to be the steadfast north star that guides us, strengthens us and brings us home.
And home in The Odyssey, and in life, is not merely a place on a map. It is the fulfillment of purpose. For Odysseus that is to be a husband, a father and a king. For each of us… well that’s our own personal odyssey.
If you’re in healthcare, you’re on an odyssey
In many ways, the past decade has been eerily like Odysseus’ years of travails. The whipsawing regulatory changes, the pandemic, worsening financial conditions, growing workforce constraints… You, as a healthcare leader, are a modern-day Odysseus.
Your clinicians, nurses, therapists, technicians and administrators return to the same ship every morning buffeted by the world around them. And through the tumult, they count on you to know the way.
But there are so many issues, challenges, opportunities, agendas, personalities, requirements – and the velocity at which they are coming is only increasing. So, what is the north star that galvanizes and powers the organization, you and your people forward?
Well, as proffered by the more modern and arguably less-acclaimed poet Huey Lewis, “That’s the Power of Love.”
More than builders
We usually describe leadership in the language of building. We build strategy. We build culture. We build market share.
But perhaps in these times, we must be more than builders. We must also be beacons… beacons of the love that animates the purpose of our organization and everyone in it.
At our best, we as leaders are continually fostering a shared sense of purpose grounded in love for the work we do, who we do it for and who we do it with. This is why any of us show up. Why we sacrifice. Why we put the interest of the greater good above our own.
It turns out Homer and Huey Lewis are not the only ones suggesting love is what powers us through an odyssey.
Love, measured
Management professors Sigal Barsade and Olivia (Mandy) O’Neill studied a similar question and published their findings in the Harvard Business Review a decade ago. Their piece is mischievously entitled “Employees Who Feel Love Perform Better.”
In research that started in healthcare and then expanded to multiple industries, they found that organizations characterized by what they called a culture of “companionate love” – shared purpose, warmth, compassion, affection and caring – experienced stronger teamwork, higher employee satisfaction, lower burnout and absenteeism and better patient outcomes.
Please note this was not a study about sentiment or romance or of words without deeds or intentions without actions.
They studied what happens when people experience an organization as a place where they feel a shared caring for the enterprise, the work and each other. Where big and small things are done and honored.
In other words, they studied what happens when an organization has love as one of its central strategic and operational tenets.
We sharply measure engagement, productivity, quality, satisfaction and financial performance. And we should. It’s all important. Those things matter.
But like Odysseus – who while living idyllically with Calypso never forgets the love that ultimately brings him home – we must remember not to become so focused on these metrics that we forget the yardsticks are not ends in themselves.
We are all in healthcare for love.
Otherwise, we’re truly wanderers who have lost our way.
Ken Graboys is the co-founder and CEO of Chartis and David Jarrard is chairman of the Jarrard Executive Committee. As colleagues (Jarrard is a business unit of Chartis), they are also healthcare thought leadership partners who connect history, the arts and healthcare to offer a unique take each month on the challenges we face and the opportunities before us.
Image Credit: Shannon Threadgill
