Heart Reading … Day 63

How much do you love your coworkers?

Over the course of my life I have held 20 jobs (which is fewer than that of one of my kids!) Here’s the breakdown: 3-waitressing, 3-fast food, 2-retail, 1-manufacturing, 1-multi-level-marketing, 3-banking, 4-other corporate, 1-non profit, and 2-cooperative.

I have seen incredible degrees of competitiveness — to the point where one coworker illegally opened accounts in his branch to steal clients from me in order to win a television and trips to Disney World (and regular accolades from upper management and photos in the newspaper…). I have seen wide ranges of competence — including witnessing a senior Vice President of a bank tell a regional staff audience of hundreds that some new fangled product is going to be “slicker than snot on a doorknob.”

Having confidence in your coworkers and management is something we would all like to have; it is not critical to our success per se but it pays dividends in terms of our personal health and, something most companies obsess about, productivity.

When you get down into the roots of why things are the way they are, when you pay attention to inequities and things that just don’t make no damn sense, over a long enough period of time you start weaving together all sorts of frayed edges to our collective social fabric. I have done this for a while and have come to realize that not only is tax law deeply complicit with [no] respect to climate change and social welfare, the basis of corporate law is designed to be extractive — greedy at the core.

The promise of corporations to be efficient and effective at bringing products and services to market may have merit but only in so far as the level of destruction in its wake is not accounted for. There are organizations fighting this good corporate accountability fight — just like there are organizations fighting the good representative democracy fight.

But things have been heating up — physically, emotionally, economically, systemically — for so long that we must be much more creative than to anticipate better outcomes from the same paradigms. Cooperatives are all about representative governance and I am happy to be a co-worker owner of a cooperative. I spent a few years pursuing this professional path, doing my best to make sure that I invested my time and talent where it would be most appreciated.

My heart is so happy to say that the returns on this investment have been off the charts. Today, after a regular 90-minute weekly meeting with eight of us, the love we all had for each other was so palpable that many if not all of us were making the heart symbol with our hands as we prepared to log off our call. I was literally choked up with joy and gratitude. Can you imagine having meetings like this in your workplace?

I wish everyone this much confidence in their colleagues and this much joy and gratitude — this much heart-felt community — in your workplace.