May 2005

Innovation Tips

...ideas for thriving on collaborative genius

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Heart

 

Cultivating the heart of an organization requires more than doing a good job with performance appraisals, job descriptions, rewards, policy manuals, or rules. A heartfelt commitment to work transcends the rational mechanisms created to motivate and manage. As the 17^th Century mathematician and philosopher Pascal reminds us: the heart has reasons that reason does not know.

 

Groups that gel and produce extraordinary accomplishments would find insulting the standard mechanisms used to monitor and motivate people. Those who commit themselves--heart, mind and soul--to the work of great groups do so to feel fully alive, not to get high marks from their supervisor.

 

"Every heart longs to be part of something big and sacred," urged Mathew Fox in The Reinvention of Work. When the heart is aroused, the whole mind comes too, not just the fraction of thinking required to do a job.

 

People who do what brings them joy discover a special passion that transcends the mundane and seemingly senseless work of daily toil. They tap a passion that runs deep to their core. The paleontologist who so effectively merged science with religion, Teilhard de Chardin, understood joy in very personal terms; he said of joy that it is the "infallible sign of the presence of God."

 

Who among us knows for certain what heart or joy really is? But we know enough to recognize that we want to feel fully alive; we want to feel the lightning of pure joy running through our veins. When we can follow our own bliss, as Joseph Campbell charged, we discover a passionate heart that we fervently want to sustain.

 

That heart can be sustained in organizations where people are valued individually and engaged in bringing their full and heartfelt contribution to the organization. This is the transcendent task of leadership--to enable people to bring their fullest commitment to the work; to discover and sustain what brings them joy.

 

"Organizations can keep searching for new ties that bind us to them -- new incentives, rewards, punishments," wrote Margaret Wheatley, the organizational development consultant and author who looks to natural living systems for guidance about organizational management. "But organizations could accomplish so much more if they relied on the passion evoked when we connect to others, purpose to purpose. So many of us want to be more. So many of us hunger to discover who we might become together."

 

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