The art of managing with love, according to Erich Fromm

Claudio Pardo Molina, Rolando Betancourt

• Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781071589762
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

BOOK DESCRIPTION
This book delivers practical advice to manage people and teams into a business. Managers constantly have to deal with emotions- love and even fear, of the teams they lead, without necessarily having any academic training to respond to these challenges.
In light of such argument, I wrote this book with a series of recommendations to take decisions based on the book"The Art of Loving, "by the renowned philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm, born in 1900 in Germany.

CHAPTER 1 – THE ART OF MANAGING WITH LOVE

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IS MANAGING WITH LOVE AN ART? To answer this question, I will have to break it in 2 parts to (1) analyze whether management is an art, and (2) based on the answer of that analysis, I will deepen into the sensitive subject of managing with love.

Is managing people an art? If the answer is positive, it needs proof, formal education, and discipline. Or maybe the thought is that managing people only needs a technique- a graduate degree in business management and a masters. Another idea is that managing people is an innate, inherited capability acquired almost by chance. In this book, I will develop the idea that it is an art, and with no intention of taking worth from the need to formally learn a technique, or that there may be natural-born leaders, those are examples that may not be generalized – they are exceptions.

So the good –or bad, news is that if someone is selected for, or enjoys managing people, they must clearly understand that their task will be to learn while doing. In other words, if you think that making a career in business management with a university education will be the key to your success, my answer is, it will not. A higher education is only a necessary condition. However, it will not be enough to succeed in accomplishing your organizational goals. It is a pity to see that most people think that having a degree and graduating in a masters in business management, is the key to manage people. That is the kind of people that think that management is a technique and not an art, and they take the idea of managing with love as something ridiculous.

It is unbelievable that managing with love is something quite ignored, given the fact that so many neuroscientists constantly publish their findings that the 2 most important emotions that move humans are fear and love. People are desperate to be loved. Some people do drugs or alcohol to relieve the tension of not feeling loved. Others take antidepressants to deal with a lonely life. Yet others spend most of their salary on pets, treating them almost like children of their own, maybe because those will be their only companions to put their trust in.

If we stop to analyze the music that our coworkers listen to, or the movies they watch either alone or with others, they are exactly of the type that deal with love in all its forms and shapes. From romantic love to fraternal love to brotherly love. However, telling a manager that they must include love to their coworkers in their strategic planning, would make the most innovative board of directors laugh hard.

That is why I think it is so hypocritical, or at least it is a bad misjudgment, to seek improvement in the work environment focusing on the variables of a questionnaire, instead of trying to improve the feelings behind a good or bad work environment, and the feeling of being cherished in the organization. I believe that this may be created by the very use of the term work “environment” associated with nature, instead of talking about work “emotion,” which will make sense because it is exactly what we are studying- the emotions of the people who work with us.

But the reason behind this mistake comes from the idea that even from their time in the university, people assume that they want to be managed by a boss. That is the reason why we are taught how to manage aiming the incentives and punishments towards others- our coworkers. And honestly, they teach us how to make people want us, instead of teaching us the great power of sincerely loving the people we lead. In order to deepen this idea, I insist on the fact that when we talk with other supervisors, we tend to exchange experiences that had this effect on our coworkers, seeming almost impossible to speak with another supervisor about the conception of our own capability to love our coworkers, to be worthy and legitimize our leadership, so that they will follow us to the organizational goals for which we were hired in the first place.

In honor of today’s gender struggles, I will separate these styles of managing WITHOUT love. One of them is used by males, oriented to symbols signaling the material, the academic, or the experience that legitimizes their position as leaders before their coworkers. With this type of symbols, the new manager will meet his work team in his office, which will be the most luxurious one, of course, with all the academic paper rolls hanging on the walls, and he will tell them about his work achievements and his more than enough experience to validate his hiring to be their leader.

On the other side of the street, but under the same premise of management WITHOUT love, are the ladies. First of all, it is quite notorious that almost all the chief positions in today’s mainstream business are filled by men. But what gets my attention is that the few women that do lead large organizations, are usually quite good looking. Or at the very least, they fit the standards of beauty that the group they lead will consider valid. And in the case that they are not as good looking as the standard of their own societies, they dress with the best outfits and drive the most expensive cars as a sign of power over the crowd.

Another way to legitimize managing WITHOUT love, and this is something used by both men and women, is their attitude: fine manners, educated and interesting opinions, and even an almost harmless behavior that will legitimize their capability to manage people. At the end of the day, for most managers, leading people is not about love, but about being popular and liked by their coworkers, and the people.

A second idea that supports the mistake of managing WITHOUT love, is the belief that managing a business is something rational, and therefore it has nothing to do with the irrationality of emotions. That said, there must be no waste of time learning about emotions like love, because time is money and it must not be wasted in nearly-esoteric things. In this train of thought, a manager’s main problem will be to select or attract professionals who will want to follow him, instead of thinking about the mirror option- the thought of growing professionally so that his coworkers will want to follow him. How much unlinking would they avoid if they knew about this secret power of bonding with their coworkers!

In the book "The Art of Loving," Erich Fromm explains this problem based on the roots of our Western society. He goes back to the Victorian age, in which love comes second after pre-arranged marriages. However, today the rule is the romantic love, the idea that loving a partner will supersede the marriage contract.

My hypothesis is that managers want to be loved by their coworkers through popularity and attraction; however, in today’s organizations, we come together through a legal agreement that looks rather like an arranged marriage from the Victorian age, than today’s romantic marriages of the XXI century. Redundantly, we tend to lead a group of people that we did not choose, so our effort should be focused in loving our coworkers, so we earn their love back and they will follow us in the business’ objectives for which we were hired in the first place. But I do not want any managers reading these lines, thinking that I am forcing on them all the responsibility of managing with love. All human relationships require consent and willingness, meaning that the coworkers also must stop expecting a manager prince charming, or dreaming with the return of the ideal boss that they may have had 10 years ago.

Today, it is so important to lead on a mercantile, yet ineffective basis, that almost all the executives out there wish to work in any business recognized by the public, thinking that being linked to a popular brand is the only key to lead people. I think that this is partially true because I also see many people willing to accept a lower income just to proudly say that they work at the famous business X. Managers and employees today, immersed in a society of consumers, are easily confused with the idea of love and a mutually favorable exchange.

The average employee aspires to be selected to work at an “attractive” business. And when I say attractive, I mean the attractiveness of the values that are socially accepted and whatever is hip at the moment. In the past, being a geek was hip and everyone wanted to work at Apple or Google. Today, being eco-friendly is hip and many want to work at Greenpeace. As the media changes the opinion of the mass about mainstream values, when the hip personality gets rough, the business brand everyone wants to work at will look a lot like it.

Today, feminism is hip, so it is likely that young professionals will prioritize businesses of this sort and the trend will be to manage with such values. It is almost like leadership is determined by values attractive at a given moment, that are hip. In this context, managing WITHOUT love may be achieved in the work force, if we offer values on demand within the same work force.

A third mistake in managing WITHOUT love, is assuming that emotions like love are things for psychologists, and they have nothing to do with business management. If you think like this, you will find quite strange the fact that managers are recommended to read Erich Fromm’s book, “The Ar...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• BOOK DESCRIPTION
• TO MANAGE WITH LOVE
• CHAPTER 1 – THE ART OF MANAGING WITH LOVE
• CHAPTER 2 – THE THEORY OF MANAGLOVING IN THE XXI CENTURY
• CHAPTER 2.1 – MANAGLOVING WITH INTEGRITY
• CHAPTER 2.2 – MANAGLOVING INTO PRACTICE
• CHAPTER 2.3 – MANAGLOVING IS GIVING, NOT RECEIVING
• CHAPTER 2.4 – MANAGLOVING ACTIVELY
• CHAPTER 3 – THE THEORY OF MANAGLOVING COWORKERS
• CHAPTER 4 – THEORY OF OBJECTS TO MANAGLOVE
• CHAPTER 4.1 – THEORY OF MANAGLOVING FRATERNALLY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR