The Effect of Insufficient Personal Love in Work Teams
The insufficiency of personal love degrades (and often ends) the performance of work teams. Many visionaries have great value on their beloved projects, and less value on the people who help to manifest them. For example, in a biodynamic farming community, the farmers are likely to be more committed to biodynamics than to one another.
Similarly, today's visionaries enthusiastically propose thousands of projects, and seek help with implementation. Wonderful! But most of the time, when you volunteer for a project, you yourself are valued LESS than the ideas behind it. That bodes poorly for its success. Just ask the project heads, "How much commitment are you getting from your people?" In the vast majority of cases, the honest answer will be, "Not enough." So the project starves.
You see, the result of low commitment to people is low commitment from people. If you realize you're disposable, your participation in a project will almost certainly be tentative. If we want strong commitment to our projects, we've got to invest in the people primarily. And that means personally.
Feed the soil
The soil of all projects is the people who implement them. Smart farmers say, "Feed the soil. Make that your first priority, because the soil will feed the plants, the plants will create the fruit, and you can eat the fruit." A dumb farmer is one who counts his fruit, but doesn't invest enough in his soil.
In the human realm, feed the soil means, commit to people, invest in people, instead of focusing primarily on the fruit, the creative outworking, the product. People are the soil of all projects. To the extent that we love and value the individual personally, the fruit will take care of itself. Why? Because strong, healthy people care, and create, and share. Naturally.
The alternative just doesn't work -- just like conventional agriculture doesn't work. Agribusiness starves the soil. To offset that, it resorts to artificial fertilizers. The same happens with people in projects. Frequently, project leaders hype this or that great idea for saving the world -- trying to stir up some energy, some excitement. But hype, like chemical fertilizer, like caffeine, is non-nutritive. It is opposite to the love, nurturance, trust, commitment, and loyalty that make people truly strong and healthy. To the extent that they're not fed real soul-food, the people behind ideas and projects lose interest and wander off. Projects collapse.
Bottom line? People need personal love to thrive.