Act unfriendly or disagreeable toward others

The first person you meet as you step out of your front door. The next human. In fact, and not without some wit, Kierkegaard argues that neighbour-love is a blessed release from the burden of having to find someone to befriend. It does not require you to admire other human beings, or like them. Neither does loving your neighbour depend in any way on being able to love yourself. Like full employment or world peace, however, employee engagement is also elusive and misunderstood. I have spent years thinking about it and discussing it with professionals. Yet I too have had a checkered history with the concept. Why is engagement so hard to instill in some people, so easy in others? My puzzlement came to a head when I was invited to speak about coaching at a meeting of human resources executives. The presenters before me, chief HR officers from three leading corporations, were demonstrating why employee engagement is a major variable in the success of an organization. The next described the key drivers of engagement, which included laudable ambitions such as: Delivering fair pay and benefits. Providing the right tools and resources. Creating a learning environment that encouraged open communication. Apparently, he was a force of nature in the highbrow world of Anglo-Catholicism. He was Harvard trained, scripturally learned, and razor sharp. Stories about his powerful doctrinal convictions abounded. And everyone--from lordly bishops to the lowliest curates--knew that one only crossed doctrinal swords with John Purnell at one's peril. (Doctrinal swords?

Well, there were apparently heated doctrinal battles between so-called high Episcopalians or Anglo-Catholics, and low Episcopalians--battles that I did not, at that time, understand at all. Purnell was a High Churchman and an Anglo-Catholic of considerable renown. ) Father Purnell later told me that one Low Church priest who had tangled with him over doctrine--and inevitably lost--had sputtered back in frustration, Purnell, you are - you are - well - you're just too big, you're too black [referring to his traditional black garb], and you're too Catholic. John Ritchie Purnell preached without notes, holding the wooden lectern with both hands and leaning toward the congregation. Kids are expensive. Life is expensive. The cell phone bill, the car payments, the property taxes, they're one thing. But then, what about the travel soccer team at $2,000 per season, or the price tag for a year of music lessons, or the summer science program? This stuff isn't taken care of by skipping Starbucks or never eating out. The sociologist Annette Lareau coined the term concerted cultivation to describe the middle- and upper-middle-class approach to childrearing. Through enrolling their children in a roster of athletic and cultural activities outside the home, parents commit to childrearing strategies that favor the individual development of each child, sometimes at the expense of family time and group needs. This approach makes for a hectic family life, contributing to the well-known time famine that sociologists have long decried. But it also makes for a bind about money and values. If parents decide to opt out of concerted cultivation, they worry about disadvantaging their children and disconnecting from the larger childrearing culture. Rather it depends on renouncing yourself. (Neither should neighbour-love be thought of as a higher form of friendship. Neighbour-love abhors the idea that individuals can be united in a single self on the basis that they are the same, or indeed different. They love each other simply because they are equal before God who loves all equally and unconditionally. There is no continuity between the two;

neither unconditionality can be reconciled to particularity, nor selflessness to selfishness. ) If someone protests that this does not sound like love at all, since it is passionless, Kierkegaard says they are mistaken too. And finally if someone else thinks that such a position is extreme to the point of ridiculousness and only causes offence, not least against theobvious' value of friendship, Kierkegaard retorts that what might be a stumbling block to some is the heart of the blessedness of Christianity to others. If you want to overcome the tragic disappointments of friendship then make that leap of faith! True to his name, Mr Kierkegaard does his best to bury friendship. Providing variety and challenge in work assignments. Developing leaders who delegated well, nurtured their direct reports, provided recognition and timely feedback, and built interpersonal relationships. It all made sense. Who could argue that committed employees willing to go the extra mile for their companies wouldn't be more productive than disengaged employees who don't care? Who would take the position that underpaying people and denying them the right tools to do their job was a great way to increase engagement? Then the HR chiefs noted that engagement was near an all-time low! (Gallup research in 2011 showed almost no improvement - with 71 percent of Americans saying that they are disengaged or actively disengaged in their work. ) They didn't have an explanation for this disconnect and the poor return on investment. This was news to me at the time. It didn't add up that after all the corporate investment in training, engagement wasn't improving. His sermons were impeccably organized, which was a mystery to me since they seemed to be completely spontaneous. I later discovered that they were not spontaneous at all. During the week, he drove around Boston in his old Toyota wagon, rehearsing his sermon, and preaching to the traffic on the Southeast Expressway. What I soon discovered was that this too-big, too-Catholic man had the tenderest of hearts. His sermons were saturated with New Testament love and grace: We're okay just as we are.

We're loved--no matter what shits we are in daily life. We're accepted. Forgiven. Embraced by God's love. We're already perfect. If they opt in, they risk feeling stressed and strapped. We know from research that money and time stress can directly feed into subjective feelings of marital dissatisfaction. So, despite the proud moments at the piano recital and the Little League championships, all this concerted cultivation can come at an emotional cost. Money stresses parents because it funds the cherished goal of giving children the best possible start in life. Their conflicts about money inflame their own childhood wounds and incite anxiety about community belonging. Parental disagreements about money can instigate remarkably corrosive rifts. A breadwinner husband controllingly reviews all purchases, while his wife finds his behavior tyrannical and feels it creates a negative emotional environment. An extravagant parent inculcates materialistic values in the children, and the frugal parent, despairing of getting any traction, becomes alienated from the spouse and worried about her children's character formation. A middle-class couple, distressed by the gap between what they want to give their children and their financial constraints, find themselves fighting with each other. They worry it's leading them toward the even more expensive outcome of divorce. But what does one philosopher's rant, let alone another theologian's loss of faith 1500 years ago, matter to us in the so-called secular world today? It matters because Kierkegaard's stance is not the only product of the long shadow that Augustine's tragedy cast across friendship. Much secular thought is similarly wary of friendship too - and sometimes as out-rightly antagonistic. Indeed, far from dissipating over the intervening years, the shadow could be argued to have intensified because when cut loose of the Christianity that gave birth to it, a framework that at least places great value on love of certain kinds, the antipathy can take on a life of its own. Perhaps someone can look after the happiness of their friend without worrying about their own happiness, because their friend will be doing exactly the same for them?

In other words, friendship is presented as a pact in which individuals apparently put their selfish motives to one side because they secretly know that their self-interests will be foremost in the mind of their friend, and vice versa. This, Kant says, is the ideal in friendship; a self-love that issuperseded by a generous reciprocity of love'. The dubious moral worth of friendship is compounded by the fact that this so-calledgenerous reciprocity of love' only takes place in the ideal case. In practice, Kant believes, no one can look after their own happiness better than they can themselves, and should someone surrender their happiness entirely to another in the hope of complete reciprocity, the friendship would inevitably fail. But it shouldn't have been a shock. I saw supporting evidence nearly every time I took my seat on a plane. On a typical three-hour flight, some flight attendants are positive, motivated, upbeat, and enthusiastic. They are models of employee engagement. Other attendants are negative, demotivated, downbeat, and miserable. They are actively disengaged. Why the difference? The environment for both attendants is identical - same plane, same customers, same pay, same hours, even the same training - and yet they are demonstrating massively divergent levels of engagement. I started conducting my own private engagement tests at airline counters and club lounges. Whenever I was asked to show my American Airlines frequent flyer card, which at 11 million miles makes me one of the airline's more loyal customers, I noted the employee's response. (Scripture said it: In our true nature we are adorned like any lily of the field. ) Purnell talked often about his own need for grace, for forgiveness, for comfort, for guidance, for God. It was extremely affecting--this big, bold, smart man talking with such disarming humility. In my family--in my Presbyterian church of origin--we did not even imagine hanging our hearts out like that. Surely it was against some unwritten code of church etiquette and restraint?