The Power of Healthy Relationships at Work
Research shows that leaders who prioritize relationships with their employees and lead from a place of positivity and kindness simply do better, and company culture has a bigger influence on employee well-being than salary and benefits. When it comes to cultivating happiness at work, it comes down to fostering positive relationships at work. Citing research from the field of social psychology, the authors outline five core principles that make all relationships, personal or professional, thrive: 1) transparency and authenticity, 2) inspiration, 3) emotional intelligence, 4) self-care, and 5) values.close
Kushal Choksi was a successful Wall Street quant who had just entered the doors of the second twin tower on 9/11 when it got hit. As Choksi describes in his best-selling book, On a Wing and a Prayer, his brush with death was a wakeup call. Having mainly focused on wealth acquisition before 9/11, he began to question his approach to work.
Choksi’s new perspective translated into an entirely different relationship with his employees. Whereas historically his leadership style had been primarily transactional, he began seeing employees as individuals, each with their own unique set of strengths and needs. He began to lead with compassion, kindness, and authenticity instead of only focusing on efficiency. And in doing all this, he felt more present and whole as a person than ever before. He eventually left his corporate career to start his own ventures, and his businesses skyrocketed. A serial entrepreneur with multiple successful endeavors, Choksi sold his first venture, Hubbl, a content discovery platform, for $15 million. His latest venture, Elements Truffles, an artisanal chocolate company, is a successful pro-social enterprise that donates 25% of its profits to childhood education in India.
Choksi’s story is inspiring, but not at all surprising when considered in the context of what the research says about how effective leaders motivate people.
Data from the field of social psychology demonstrates that leaders who prioritize relationships with their employees and lead from a place of positivity and kindness simply do better. The most effective leaders of all (as measured by their success rates and the success of their organizations) are values-driven, transparent, compassionate, humane, and recognize employees as unique individuals. As a result, their employees perform better, too: They are more engaged, less likely to turn over, more loyal, and more productive. Companies that are run by these types of leaders enjoy higher client satisfaction, a better bottom line, and boosted shareholder returns.
The fact that employees perform better when they feel respected and cared for makes sense when you consider that company culture has a much bigger influence on employee well-being than salary and benefits, as a Glassdoor study reveals. A research study by Julia K. Boehm and Sonja Lyubomirsky considering evidence from three types of studies — longitudinal, cross-sectional, and experimental — showed that happiness is in turn predictive of workplace success. And when you dig deeper to explore what “happiness” at work means for employees, it comes down to positive relationships.
Research confirms that our desire to feel seen, heard, and recognized is fundamentally human. As a species, we’ve evolved to place enormous value on our relative roles and relationships to other group members. Not feeling valued for your contributions or sensing that your value isn’t acknowledged by others in your group activates the stress response and feels like a threat. Being rejected by your clan would put you at risk of being ostracized, which, in the wild, was akin to death. And that’s probably why rejection activates similar regions in the brain as physical pain. It hurts.
Our sense of connection to others doesn’t just impact our mental health though. In a much more concrete sense, it directly influences motivation. Research on self-determination theory, for example, demonstrates that in addition to having a sense of autonomy and freedom, motivation at work is largely impacted by our feelings of connection to others. We feel inspired when we’re reminded that we’re not alone in our endeavors and that our experiences are not ours alone to struggle through. One of the things that makes burnout particularly detrimental is its inherent link to loneliness.
All of this means that helping employees feel motivated and engaged requires more than just restructuring the nature and design of their jobs. Time off, meditation, and on-site daycare and fitness gyms can absolutely alleviate stress. But those things frame unhappiness as an individual condition when, in reality, it’s a relational problem in need of relational solutions.
Source HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW (searched by Lola Bellot)
