“We love our customers.”
“We love our employees.”
“We love the boss.”
“We love your problems.”
It seems that American business loves everyone and everything. Perhaps it is the fact that most of today’s business leaders were born or grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the decade of love. But more likely it is a semantic error, or a marketer’s ploy.
The problem comes from the fact that in English we have only one word for many meanings “love.” In ancient Greece there were five words to describe the various forms of love that we attempt to communicate in business today. Each of these types of “love” have their correlation in English and in American business.
But why is this distinction important?
Love is one of those wellsprings of emotional resilience. If a business truly “loves” its employees those employees can draw strength both from the relationship (relationship resilience) as well as the sense of being “loved” (emotional resilience). Providing this type of workplace support not only enables employees to work longer and stronger in the face of business adversity, but it helps make those employees happier about helping a company that faces adversity.
The problem is that we often use the word “love” when we mean “like”. Love is a choice. Like is a feeling. We have all experienced the situation where we have met somebody that we truly like. They have some quality about them that engages us, connects with us and spurs us to seek their company and their friendship. Similarly we have met individuals who explicably we just do not like. We do not make the active decision to not like them. They simply “turn us off.” These are emotional responses, however in the confusing language that is English we often utilize love as the word to describe that unplanned and controlled response, we even have a phrase “fall in love”.
Love is actually an act of choice. We frequently state that we love somebody “because” of a particular action or personality trait or other attribute. There are even times that we hear a husband or wife state, “I do not like him/her, but I love him/her.” In this circumstance the description is quite correct. The immediate and uncontrolled response that is to say the emotional response is dislike. However for some reason known only to that individual, they choose to love despite the fact that they do not like their partner.
When we say that we love our customers or love our employees it is therefore an active choice. We reach out to them in a way that the Greeks would call philos brotherly love and by so doing make ourselves and our businesses stronger and more resilient.