time isn’t money; relationship is.

A six-year-old boy in Colorado was recently expelled from school and charged with sexual harassment for showing affection for a classmate by kissing her on the cheek. The school had a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment and he had crossed that line, most likely unknowingly.

When the Virginia Tech shootings occurred in 2007, there was a rule on the books banning professors from touching students. After the massacre, one professor appealed to her Dean, saying, “these kids are traumatized and need comforting.” In that instance, the Dean replied, thankfully, with “err on the side of the hug.”

While no one should be touched or kissed if they do not wish to be, in regulating human behavior we have lost, or at the least misplaced, the capacity to be fully human in our workplaces and schools. We have abdicated to our HR departments the responsibility for creating and enforcing rules against showing human compassion and relatedness. The rules of human conduct are no longer things we need to be responsible for respecting—that will be done for us by management.

What this doesn’t allow for is the possibility that work can be a place for more fully human interaction, that employees and students can make wise decisions about how they interact with others, and that we’ve often mistaken human affection for human sexuality.

Yes, decorum is required, unwanted touching is never appropriate, and work should be “professional.” But abdicating our own responsibility for these decisions is not serving us well. It is time to rethink our definition of “professional” to include “fully human.”

How can we respect the boundaries of others in the workplace, and in our schools and other organizations, and still show human kindness and compassion? In my book, Life is a Verb, I identified six practices for living a more mindful, intentional, fulfilling life. “Love more” was one of those. Not romantic love, but love for fellow human beings who are as fully human as we are, who are experiencing joy and pain and loss as we are.

Asking people to leave their humanity and identity at the door is based on the fundamental concept that time and task are money, whereas in truth, relationship is money. People who know and trust each other, who show compassion and empathy for others, work more effectively together. I cannot see my coworkers merely as a “what” (janitors, secretaries, CEOs) if I have an opportunity to see them as a “who.”

Relatedness has gotten a bad rap in the workplace: “If they are all friends, productivity will suffer.” First, that is a misunderstanding of relatedness—it does not mean that everyone is friends; it means that each person acknowledges their shared humanity with every other person in the organization. And in my 25 years of corporate consulting at the highest levels inside companies, relatedness = greater productivity, less waste, and less costly turnover.

So how can we be professional and show compassion, empathy, and relatedness in the workplace? Here are a few things to consider:

1. Acknowledge that everyone in your workplace, regardless of their title and place in the hierarchy, is as fully human as you are, with stories of joy and pain that make up the fabric of their lives and touch them deeply. My TEDx talk, “Grant Specificity to the Other,” illustrates this in the closing exercise in particular. (link to bolded text, “Granting Specificity to the Other”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hVReRJCTHU) We can begin to understand the depth of humanity in every single human we meet. Imagine they, too, have stories of great joy and great pain. 

2. Be aware that to legislate human behavior is to pretend that interactions between humans are not complex, but merely complicated. At work, we face three kinds of problems: 1) Simple problems, ones we can easily solve, like putting more toner in the copier; 2) Complicated problems, like hosting a big meeting—we need spreadsheets and project plans and strategic planning to make that work, but it is doable/fixable; and 3) Complex problems, like managing a team of human beings, or, outside the workplace, like raising a child. No amount of strategic planning will help. Treating human interactions as if they are merely complicated and “fixable” is to ignore the fact that they are not complicated, but complex, and not only that no 200-page strategic plan will help, it will actually hide the fact that interrelatedness between human beings is not “fixable,” but each offers an opportunity for learning. Interactions with other humans are, by their very nature, complex, not complicated. Yet we keep treating them as complicated, which not only obfuscates the fact that they are complex to begin with, but further deepens the problem by pretending we’ve “fixed” it. We can begin to see relationships in the workplace for what they are: complex, not complicated, and not solvable. Instead of “solving,” we must become more agile in increasing the quality of the relationships between people.   

3. All humans orient themselves in different ways based on a number of factors, not the least of which is culture. One such orientation that has a big impact at work is the continuum between people who are task focused and people who are relationship focused. People at the “task” end of that scale believe that their work is most productive when they focus on the task and they may or may not build relationships with people at work to do so. People at the “relationship” end of that scale believe that building relationships at work is the key to getting the task done. Both are efficient in getting the work done, but many task-focused leaders tend to see the relationship-focused workers as slackers, too chatty, not efficient. After working with a large national nonprofit for a day of training, the CEO approached me and said, “I can see from today’s session that I need to be more relationship oriented with my staff, but that’s just not me. It’s really hard for me to walk around and make small talk, but I want to after seeing what has happened today when we interacted as full human beings.” He was high on “task orientation” so I suggested he put “build relationships” on his task list to “validate” it, which is what he did, successfully. We can begin to acknowledge the differences in the workplace that complement each other—no office can thrive with 100% task-oriented or 100% relationship-oriented employees. Both are needed. 

4. A friend of mine owns a big business in Colorado. He called his HR director in to his office one day and said, “We need to create a bad weather policy so folks will know whether to come in with it snows.” The HR director came back a week later with a 16-page document. “I was shocked,” Lloyd said. “What I meant was a one liner that said, “Use your best judgment when the weather is bad.” Lloyd expected his employees to engage with their workplace in a way that served both the employee and the company to the best of their ability. We can assume until proven otherwise that we and others are adults who can and will make the best decisions they can at that moment in time with the information they have. Some will not and they are then self-selecting for attention and sometimes dismissal. Others, most others, will rise to the occasion. 

5. We wear masks a lot at work, and masks are not always bad things. But when a mask hides our humanity at a cost to us and those around us, it’s time to put that mask down and be fully human. 

May we all, in moments of need, err on the side of the hug.