Love And Happiness Make Better Workers
better workers, effective managers, love and happiness
Dear [Mentat],
There is indeed a strong connection between love and happiness. This person at least, cannot be completely happy without love in his life, and the happiest people most often have a reliable source of love in theirs. Love and happiness indeed make better workers, and a deep understanding of basic human needs makes more effective managers as well.
Since September of 2005 when I first wrote this letter to you, I’ve read Maslow’s hierarchy of needs work directly. I also remember studying it at work in numerous workshop handouts, geared toward making us more effective managers and better workers overall. The bigwigs felt that understanding peoples’ needs would make us more efficient team leaders in that we could better fill the needs of our subordinates if we give them the attention that they’re due. The trick to getting better workers, they said, is to assure that all team members get as close to what they want as practical.
Then, they explained how some workers look to fulfill level three needs (in reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs), some level four, and some level five, while many workers have a unique combination of all three. The bosses said that the most effective managers identify the individual needs of the workers they manage within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs triangle. Armed with this knowledge, they can then better address those needs and thus, keep said workers happy while increasing per-person output. Come to think of it, if the company I worked for had found my dream girl for me and had thus assured that my love and happiness needs at level three were fulfilled, I’d probably still be working there today, singing their praises. I’d be well on my way to a happy middle age and retirement. But unfortunately, after nearly fifteen years of employment there, love and happiness still eluded me and I realized that the traditional make-lots-of-money-and-your-dream-girl-will-come approach to life was not working out for me. After over a decade of working many extra hours, I could no longer get excited about being thought of as one of the better workers there, when loneliness and solitude was all that awaited me each night when I got home.
In the last performance appraisal meeting before I quit, my manager said, “Tom, I just don’t feel any sense of urgency from you to get things done.” She was right of course. It was difficult to continue motivating myself to work extra hard to increase the company’s bottom line, when so much of the more basic me was longing for love and happiness. I left the domain of the better workers there and joined the ranks of the merely mediocre. I could ignore my love and happiness needs no longer.
In addition to that crushing, chronic emptiness and loneliness, lacking promotions and raises further sapped my interest in working there. I stopped caring about that job a year earlier when it became clear that no matter how hard I worked, that promotion I wanted would just not come. Another gaping realization was that the job probably would not bring my dream girl, whether I got the promotion or not. If it had – if I would have found a love relationship to focus on and lift my spirits – then maybe either I wouldn’t have cared about that promotion being withheld, or I might have been better able to secure it. I don’t know. What I do know is (let me qualify this more) that it was foolish for me to work so hard at levels four and five with my level three love and happiness needs almost completely unfulfilled. You have you own, equally valid rules, and perhaps for you, a whole different set of experiences, and thus rationale, applies.
As discussed above, unlike you, I believe just a tiny few of the well-known spiritual leaders to actually have been self-actualized, because high achievement and self-actualization don’t always come together. I agree that mere appearances would show many folks achieving much at level five while wanting for love. But how many of these achievers would you say suffered from the workaholic syndrome? People today use long hours and high-powered career goals and victories, as escapes from the blues of their wanting sides (their love and happiness needs). For this reason, world-class accomplishment could denote a lack of self-actualization, rather than an abundance of it. I found that I could not realize my full potential at work and become fully self-actualized, without the the love and happiness needs at level three being fulfilled first.
In 2000 (Y2K), which was my best year at work, senior directors recognized me as a renowned software systems authority. I have the performance appraisals to prove it. But nowhere near self-actualized was I. In those days, working hard and being rewarded as one of the better workers there effectively shrouded my loneliness. Spending ten to twelve hours a day buried in manuals and code listings was my alcohol if you will. I numbed myself woth lots of work because those extreme challenges though difficult, were still easier to meet than finding a quality lover to love me back and secure love and happiness at level three.
But my objective in all of this was not to benefit the company. I thought much less of the company then, and much more about dodging that cold draft at home, that reminder that though by current standards I was doing well, I still wasn’t doing what I really had to do to secure love and happiness. The point is that what really matters is our motives for doing the greatness, and not so much the good deeds themselves. Motives, though a better measure of the degree of self-actualization than visible accomplishment, can themselves neither be easily nor objectively measured as of yet. But I knew that my true motives were to find love and happiness, and not as much to maintain the level of professionalism and good reputation that the better workers were known for.
I found that you can work all the long hours you like and fill your walls with as many awards and plaques as you can. But none of that will fill the level three need of love and happiness if you don’t already have it. We need that love much more than the hard work we escape into, to be totally happy. Without it, the better workers will sense that our hearts just aren’t into the job, and that can create it’s own problems; problems that we avoid if we can avoid becoming thirsty in love. Love and happiness indeed make for better workers.
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Tags: Love And Happiness, Love Needs