Emotional Labour is the New Mindset
If emotional labour is important, we’ve got some work to do to with our teams
If emotional labour is important, we’ve got some work to do to with our teams
A few years ago, I read The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin. He coined the idea of emotional labour. As someone that ran a theatre company for 10 years I understand this well. In theatre, everyone is paid an impossibly low salary. All you have is emotion, purpose, belief… without emotional labour, there is no theatre because no one would be motivated to make it.
Startups experience a similar force. It is unlikely that the team can get paid a salary that is equal to their contribution so emotional labour is a required force, without which there is no startup.
In an established company, we are not forced to contemplate emotional labour because we can just pay people what they are worth.
But this is a problem.
In modern times, companies need a new edge to stay relevant. They need to be faster, more creative, more authentic, more diverse… just… more… and tomorrow it will be even more than today.
Emotional labour scales better than cash. If people do what they do for reasons beyond cash, they will do… more.
Right now I am ‘between jobs’ and yet I find myself busier than ever. Even with no Pollenizer to lead I seem to be doing some of what I always did. So, it appears, I never did those things for the money. I did them because something else drove me to do so.
Ask any entrepreneur what drives them. The answer will be something to do with impact and is unlikely to be something to do with money.
I read, Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year — With Swollen Appendices 20 years ago and this idea has always stuck with me:
“Call people unemployed and give them $15,00 a year and the’ll be miserable. Call them artists and give them $5,000 and they’ll be overjoyed (and might even produce something)” Brian Eno.
The frame around the work is important.
Last year at Pollenizer, we supported Paul Jackson and Nancy Richter in their important research into Open Innovation and Corporate Accelerators. They extracted from interviews some striking differences between how corporates and startups think. I find myself using this table a lot so I have extracted the insights into a series of slides. Differences like this stop innovation happening and is what led us to create our Innovation profile Tool.