The dedication I like most in any book I have read is that in the Richard Barrett book 'Liberating the Corporate Soul'; it says simply 'To those who have the courage to bring their whole selves to work'.
It seems to me incredibly powerful and incredibly challenging to be able to bring our whole self to work. We have spent years, perhaps, deliberately learning to do exactly the opposite - don't mix your personal life with business etc etc. There is, of course, wisdom in this view too. It is unhelpful and unproductive to have a work colleague who constantly moans about their lot in life, taking us through the minutiae of their divorce, for exmaple, on a daily basis.. So when is it important to bring our whole self into the workplace?
There was a lovely article in the Sunday Times recently entitled 'Boardrooms need Blackberry Woman'. The theme was, once again, that to get women in senior positions companies have to be more flexible in the way they allow their employees to work. The argument continues that 'Technology has set women free'. I would extend the argument and say that technology has set people free, not just women. many more people now have the the ability, thanks to the internet, email and mobile phones to work how and where and when they like. This brings with it its own challenges.
For example, last week I found myself arranging a phone call about a new piece of work with a client I hadn't yet met. It was really important to me to make the call at a time that worked for him because I wanted to win the contract. My daughter, who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, needed me to be available during the afternoons for two weeks to push antibiotics through her intravenous line and do hospital visits. My challenge was to schedule the call to our mutual convenience without appearing to be inflexible and not wishing to appear constrained in my ability to work, which generally I'm not, before our business relationship had even started. How much information in this case is 'taking my whole self to work'?
The bit of me that I bring to work from the circumstance of having a daughter with a life threatening condition is my resilience, my optimism in the face of difficult situations and my determination to make any project I tackle a success. Those are some of the reasons clients will give for wanting to work with me on their issues without understanding where those traits come from. This is my commitment to taking my whole self to work. I take the traits my whole life experience has given me and transfer them across the many contexts in which I find myself working.
I work with organisations developing their internal coaching capacity. How often do I hear 'I don't know anything about business coaching', only to find that the person with whom I am working spends Saturday afternoons on the rugby touchline watching his son. Asking him to 'bring his whole self to work' brings the richness of this coaching experience into the workplace and is directly transferable to developmental and performance coaching in business.
So, if you only do one thing today, think to yourself 'what else of who I am, could I usefully bring into work?'. Bring more of you and see what happens!
