When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work. As Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher put it as far back as 1790, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.”

When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

And in case you’re wondering, the data reveals that, for most of us, the problem of loveless work lies less in the fact that our job is too constricted and more in the fact that we can’t figure out how to weave. The ADP Research Institute’s global engagement study revealed that only 16–17 percent of workers say they have a chance to play to their strengths every day, whereas their surveys of a representative sample of the US working population reveal that 72 percent of workers say, “I have the freedom to modify my role to fit my strengths better.” In psychology we refer to this as an attitude-behavior consistency problem—we know we can modify our roles to fit ourselves better, but most of us simply don’t.

Twice a year, spend a week in love with your work. Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week. Down the middle of this pad draw a vertical line to make two columns, and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love—before you do something, you actively look forward to it; while you’re doing it, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; after you’ve done it, there’s part of you looking forward to when you can do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loved It” column.

And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse—before you do something, you procrastinate, perhaps handing it off to the new person because it will be “developmental”; while you do it, time drags on and ten minutes feels like a hard-fought hour; and when you’re done with it, you hope you never have to do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loathed It” column.

Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held “dream jobs”—from medical

researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner-city participants who held “unimportant” or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them. Why? What is the missing piece? In this chapter we focus on one important aspect of work that many of us, regardless of what we do for a living, often overlook: the impact that our relationships at work have on our life. Not only because these relationships are important to our well-being, as we’ve discussed, but also because they’re aspects of our work lives that we have some control over, and that have the potential to improve our daily experience immediately. We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think.