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What of romantic love in the workplace? You are demanding, your expectations are the highest of the high. Sometimes at work you will be called upon to bring it. And when you do, you better bring it from a place of love, from wanting to help people, because tough love without the love is either clinical or brutal. No workplace wants that. It happens quite a lot, doesn’t it. Depending on which research survey you reference, 22 to 27 percent of us met our partner through work and more than half of us would consider dating someone at work. Obviously, not so tacky that she didn’t relent, and wind up falling in love with him. She and Barack Obama will soon celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Bill Gates met Melinda French while she was a manager at Microsoft. Work is where Eva Mendes met her partner, Ryan Reynolds his, Natalie Portman hers. Work can be a place where each of you gets to see the other’s full fabric, all those beautiful threads. It’s not surprising. 
Meeting Your Match
It is actually a lovely, human thing, which I doubt we could stop no matter how hard we tried. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be thoughtful about how we navigate romantic relationships in the workplace. Not having two partners in a reporting relationship seems quite sensible. Some organizations require both parties to sign a relationship agreement to reduce liability should the relationship break down. No matter your organization’s policies, remember that love is about seeing and being seen, and wanting the other person to be bigger. At its core it is, of course, deeply respectful. When, upon being rebuffed, her boss cut her out of all subsequent decisions and shunned her at work, this was the opposite of respect. Whatever word you want to use, whatever the specifics of their experience, it was not loving. It was the opposite of love. More love in the workplace means more respect, more team members seeing the whole other person, more elevating of each other no matter what they look like, how they think, or whom they love. Love is not like oxygen. You can never have too much of it. Don't Let Me Down
Your organization’s culture comes from the top. Your organization’s culture comes from the teams. If you want to learn about the love in your workplace, then don’t look to what your organization says about itself online. Don’t read about its culture. Well, you can, but don’t expect to learn anything real about whether your organization takes your own personal loves seriously. This is because, despite what you may hear from your senior executives, your organization’s culture doesn’t come from the top. What comes from the top is the organization’s talent brand. They use the word culture, but really they are just trying to be as attractive as possible to the best talent out there. This is no bad thing. However, the reality of what it’s like to work in the organization is always and only a function of your fellow team members and your team leader. The data on this is unequivocal. If you try to find any data showing that a particular organization has created an experience for employees that is uniform across the organization and quantitatively different from other organizations’, you will struggle to find any at all. Write Me A Letter
Instead, as we described in Nine Lies About Work, what the data shows is that measures of what it is like to work in any organization vary the most inside the organization, among all the different teams. So, to know if your organization is indeed deeply interested in the uniqueness of your loves, begin your job interview process by asking to speak to your team leader. Ask them what their span of control is, how frequently they meet with each team member individually, and then, if you can, find the right moment to ask them to describe a couple of individual team members. Ask what motivates each team member, how each learns, what kind of praise or recognition each one prefers. All you are listening for here is vivid detail. Obviously, you won’t know if the team leader is accurate in what they’re describing, but assessing accuracy isn’t the point. And then, if you can, try to arrange a brief conversation with other team members. Again, whatever they share, believe what you’re hearing. And if it sounds like the span of control is too large, or that the leader doesn’t check in much, doesn’t know them well, then you might still take the job. But if you do, know that you’ll have to make your contribution to the team without the benefit of the manager’s attention. Which is possible, but only for a brief stint. The organization’s most valuable asset is its people. The organization’s most valuable asset is its trust. We asked people if they trusted their teammates, their team leader, and their senior leaders. Those who strongly agreed that they trusted two of these three groups were three times more likely to be fully engaged and highly resilient. Trust is just everything. Without trust you can’t usher love into your organization. If you are a team leader, you too must be a bringer of trust into your team. These are the sorts of actions that, little by little, build trust on your team and bring love in. And if you are a senior leader, what can you do to establish such a level of trust that a true Love + Work organization emerges? But what of the broader organization? What can you do to usher love in? They reduce each person to a fabricated number and prevent the organization from seeing the whole person. Others’ feedback reveals them and obscures you. Their feedback is blind to what you love. All employee opinion surveys, if they happen, should be launched by the team leader and the results given back to the team and the team leader first. Below are the characteristics of what Love and Work organizations do.