Page 123 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

he said. “What is so hard for me is that if I had been on
that plane, I would have no one to call.” It is hard to imag-
ine abundance or meaning in life without people to share it
with. Friendship helps not only our leisure time teem with
abundance but our work teams as well.
While much of the joy in daily life comes from shar-
ing it with others, the challenges of getting along have
not diminished with all of our technology for connecting.
In fact, the anonymity of e-mails, Tweets, Web-based bul-
letin boards, and blogs often intensifies the challenge as
it removes the personal touch so central to meaningful
relationships. Globalization and equal hiring initiatives
mean more and more of us work with people of different
cultures, backgrounds, orientations, races, and life stages.
Increasingly complex work necessitates coordinating efforts
among people of diverse professional training to bring prod-
ucts to fruition or provide the range of services expected.
Getting along with people who differ from us in either overt
or subtle ways requires skill, patience, self-awareness, curios-
ity, and empathy. And getting along with others is catching.
When one person is happy, others share the joy, and vice
versa. Students with more depressed roommates become
more depressed, and students with more optimistic teachers
become more positive. 1
And yet we seem to have less and less opportunity to
develop the very relational skills we need. Spending our days
in front of screens and hooked into earphones reduces face-
to-face contact and visual cues for reading one another, so
we get less practice in real-time talking and listening. What
we see on those screens increasingly involves gamesmanship,
overt hostility, partisanship, backstabbing, and cutthroat
competition, with few role models for healthy relating.

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