Ep 10: Love with Collin Bunker
92,000 Hours
What if your workplace was not just a place for professional growth but also a space for emotional connection and development? That's what we're exploring in this episode with guest Collin Bunker, a distinguished professional at Presidio, who brings valuable insights on fostering positive relationships at work.
It's not often discussed, but we believe that affection, connection, and companionate love can substantially influence our work outcomes. We share our personal experiences and delve into how positive relationships and knowing your worth can create a more fulfilling work environment. Plus, we also delve into the importance of striking the right balance between personal and professional boundaries.
This episode is a heartfelt exploration of creating a sense of community and valuing others in all aspects of our lives.
Transcript
0:00:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
Did you know that the average human spends 92,000 hours at work during their lifetime? That's more than we spend eating, cleaning, driving, watching TV or even surfing the internet? In fact, work is what we do most. It comes second only to sleeping. Welcome to 92,000 hours, the podcast that believes in the integration of life and work.
I'm your host, Annalisa Holcombe. Before we begin, I wanted to tell you a quick story about why this podcast is so personal to me. I began practicing law at age 26 and learned many valuable lessons, including that I was deeply unhappy at work. Although I was on a path that looked like traditional success, I realized that I needed to quit my job in order to align myself with my passion and purpose. Now I am dedicated to making sure all of our 92,000 hours at work are spent well instead of simply spent. How do we construct a working world that values and accommodates our humanity? How do we construct a life that is not separate from, but fueled by, the purpose we find in our work? In this podcast, we will explore those questions and more. In each episode, I will speak to someone that demonstrates meaning, passion and purpose in their work. Join me in discovering what happens when we bring our whole selves to our work, schools and communities.
Today, I am joined by Collin Bunker. Collin is the director of Solutions Architecture at Presidio, a nationwide enterprise IT integrator. Simply put, Collin is the go-to person for me and so many others on all things IT web application development, database administration and cybersecurity. Most importantly, Collin is a loyal and dedicated employee, mentor and friend. He was recently recognized for 20 years of service and I want to read what his award says, because it tells you everything you need to know about Collin and why I asked him to join me on today's episode.
It reads Collin has a high level of emotional intelligence, which is consistently demonstrated by his leadership style. His colleagues know he cares about them and that he is willing to be an advocate, confidante and friend. When Collin is part of a team, the whole team functions at a higher level. He cares deeply for those he works with, is a good listener and possesses a calming influence on the office. This is why I asked Collin to join me today to talk about a topic we normally don't discuss in work settings Love. Collin and I discuss companionate, love based on warmth, affection and connection, and how that impacts work outcomes. So let's jump in. What is your greatest accomplishment as a human being. What are you most proud about yourself for, in terms of who you are?
0:03:13 - Collin Bunker
My relationships.
0:03:14 - Annalisa Holcombe
So tell me more.
0:03:19 - Collin Bunker
Over the course of my life, I've had to identify what I think a successful life means and what a quality person means, and to me, that is most demonstrated in how you impact the lives of the people closest to you, and so the thing I'm most proud of is my relationship with my spouse, with my kids, my coworkers, with the people I spend the most time with that. I try hard to make sure that my impact on their lives is a positive one.
That my presence in their life is a positive one and one that helps drive a better life for them, and so those relationships that I've developed and I've cultivated and I've invested in to me are the greatest value in my biggest accomplishment.
0:04:03 - Annalisa Holcombe
When you think about riches and success, that's your riches and your success.
0:04:10 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely Without question.
0:04:12 - Annalisa Holcombe
So if I were to ask you, like if you're a person listening to this what? How do you know, when you've cultivated relationships, that you are a positive impact in somebody's life? How do you know? I mean, clearly we can know that based upon what people say about you and this lovely award, but how do you know on a day-to-day basis?
0:04:34 - Collin Bunker
That's a good question. For me it would be. It's most easily determined, I think, for me in the closer of the relationship. But so if my spouse or my children could identify that their life is better now than it was before, or if it is moving in a positive direction, if I have an influence on my ability to help them do that, that would be maybe the evidence of that. That's a good question.
0:05:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
Plus, you probably like with your family, you can get more immediate feedback as well in some ways, like families are usually more comfortable telling people both good and bad.
0:05:19 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and part of the difficulty there is the gauge of what a better life means.
0:05:24 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah.
0:05:24 - Collin Bunker
And to me it's about them identifying that their life is better on their terms, not online.
0:05:30 - Annalisa Holcombe
So our subject matter today is a topic that could be strange to everyone, and I found this quote that said Love is not a word you often hear uttered in office hallways or conference rooms, and yet it has a strong influence on workplace outcomes, and I think that that's really interesting. This researcher her name is Segal Barsad, and she talks about love, and she made it clear that we're talking about companionate love, which is love based on warmth, affection and connection, not romantic passion, and it's not probably going to feel as strong as what romantic passion is. It's probably a little lesser than that. Love is love and you can feel it and we should, and how do we acknowledge it? So for me, I'm interested.
First of all, I want to compliment you on being brave enough to have this conversation, as you and I know, I showed you the list of potential topics and everyone else had shied away. Like love, I'm not going to talk about love, and you were like I'm in, let's do it. So what made you decide that you would do that and then talk about it to me a little Like what do when we first say, like the ideas of love and work, when you first knew you were going to talk about this, like what comes to your mind, like what was that like for you to think, okay, I'm going to go talk about love and work.
0:06:54 - Collin Bunker
It felt natural to me and maybe that's weird. That's awesome, I guess that's weird based on what you've just said, but it seems very natural because love again, not the romantic piece, but the companionate piece is underpins every relationship. It underpins how I see the world and if, based my value stack, what I value in life, people are at the top of that stack and you cannot do that without love. Like love is what drives that, love is what enables that and makes it potent.
0:07:27 - Annalisa Holcombe
How do you, how is that present for you? Like, tell me, what do you mean by it and how do you talk about it? Or do you like, what is it like for you to have that and then put it to work in your life?
0:07:41 - Collin Bunker
It means to me that what I do is not nearly as important as why I do it, and the why I do it is about the people and it's about I go to work every day, not to sell a product or to fix an IT problem, but to better, help better the lives of the people around me. And when I do that and if they do that and if we all do that, we all live better lives aggregately. And the way I do that is I genuinely try, I don't try. I want to care about the people I work with. And wanting to care about the people I work with enables me to spend the time and the effort and the energy to get to know them, to understand their values, to understand what drives them and then help them enable that in their lives and help them succeed at those things.
0:08:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
We talk about all sorts of things in terms of culture but often leaders are not thinking about or maybe some of them are, but we're not talking about it and making it really clear and intentional that it's important to have an emotional culture at your work. I'm interested in you telling me a little bit of stories about what that has meant to you, what it does mean to you. Do you have like personal anecdotes about what that's like? Tell me about emotional culture at work.
0:08:59 - Collin Bunker
Emotional culture at work that to me, it's recognizing when people need, what people need when they need it, understanding them as an individual and understanding their what's impacting them and how they're impacting others, and listening to them and then helping them work through whatever it is that they're experiencing, and seeing them as a whole, seeing them as an individual and not just a cognitive machine. And it goes beyond just well, you're having a hard day, so I'm gonna listen to you and we're gonna spend that time. It goes to recognizing the values that they bring, the strengths that they have, and helping them fit as an individual and see themselves as a part of this, of a greater thing, as opposed to just being a cog in the machine that I push this button or I fix that thing or I do whatever. But I bring value to this place uniquely, because they recognize who I am, what I am, and that that is a value to them and not just a thing to work around.
0:10:04 - Annalisa Holcombe
How have you experienced that, when you felt that way?
0:10:10 - Collin Bunker
I felt that I felt both not that way and that way in a work environment when I first started working and I was slinging computers and installing them and I was I was tracked very meticulously on hours spent on what and no one recognized at the time what I could bring. They saw me for my output and that was it. And that felt very cold, that it feel that there was no feeling to it. And maybe that was the issue. And humans have feeling, we all have feeling, whether we want to admit it or not. We all have feeling and we're feeling most of the time, and there was no place for that and there was no recognition of the value I could bring. And then I changed managers, I changed who I reported to to somebody who recognized what I could bring and they adapted my role and adapted what I was doing to leverage who I was instead of just what I could do.
0:11:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
So they said, they saw you.
0:11:12 - Collin Bunker
They did. They saw who I, they saw the value I could bring. They saw that they saw more than just the output I could produce.
0:11:19 - Annalisa Holcombe
What was that experience like? Did the person like sit down and talk to you about it, like, was it over time? How do you develop that kind of knowledge of your colleagues?
0:11:29 - Collin Bunker
Time Genuinely caring about that individual enough to get to know them and to see beyond the tasks that they do. For me it was. I felt that I wasn't valued, and so I got another job and I put in my resignation. And then that manager came to me and said hey, if you reported to me and we did this different thing, would you stay? And I said yes.
And then I was there for another 18 years because I felt like I was seen and I was able to use who I was to improve other people's lives.
0:12:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
So there was a, I mean so we could talk about this. Underpinning of my knowledge of you is this is a being part of a team that was all about the who each other were Like. Tell me about that. What? How do you? What was that like? How did you? How did it play out in your daily life?
0:12:30 - Collin Bunker
It played out? Yeah, in multiple ways. So it depends on what you mean by. How did it play out? We spent a lot of time together in the trenches, fighting together. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other while we worked.
It wasn't like we were sitting around and just hanging out, but we would spend the time to get to know each other and we would do things that were not always appreciated by people who were task oriented. We would walk, we would take the team and walk to 7-Eleven, get away from the work, get away from the tasks and just converse about who we were and what we were doing and getting to know at a deeper level what drives each other. And when you do that, you start to find ways to fit like a puzzle and to know where each other's boundaries are and who's got what strengths and who's got what weaknesses and what to watch out for and when to step in to help that person, because you know they're gonna struggle there and so you know that that's when I'm gonna step in and help. Or understanding each other allows you to function as a team as opposed to just a machine.
0:13:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
As a result of having that more emotional culture. What did you guys as a team, what was that like in that team? Did you know about each other's personal lives? Did you celebrate? I believe that you have to celebrate successes. You have to be there for each other in terms of like your whole self. Did that exist? Was that part of the emotional culture, or was it different? Because I don't know the answer.
0:14:13 - Collin Bunker
It was, and it differs based on person. There are some people who are very comfortable sharing their personal lives and whom we all knew what was going on in their life. There are other people who don't do that and that's okay. But we also knew what they needed professionally. We knew who they were as a person and how they needed to function in the work environment, what their strengths were, what their weaknesses were, how we could support them, and it wasn't required that you come in and share every detail of your personal life.
It was that we cared about you either way, and to some people, blending the personal and the professionals they need that. They need to be able to talk about this thing that happened to them or what they're doing on the weekend. Some people don't want to do that and that's totally fine. They just integrated a little bit differently. But they even those people came to value the love in the workplace and how, when they were having a bad day, the team rallied around them and they would rally around their teammates and they would be a part of that because they know that they were cared for.
0:15:23 - Annalisa Holcombe
What did that feel like for you? How did you know that you were cared for?
0:15:28 - Collin Bunker
Because when I would have hard times, they would be at my doorstep Do you have a specific example. Sure, when my youngest child was born he came a month early and spent two weeks in the NICU and clearly pretty stressful time and my health declined pretty rapidly during that two weeks to where I went to the doctor and they identified that I had a form of bone cancer.
0:15:53 - Annalisa Holcombe
Oh my gosh.
0:15:54 - Collin Bunker
And so.
0:15:55 - Annalisa Holcombe
I was all at the same time, all at the same time.
0:15:58 - Collin Bunker
So I was at work for almost a month Dealing with my child in the ICU and then working with the doctors to figure out what was wrong with me.
And it came at the start of school, at the absolute worst time possible, and all I got from my workmates were take care of you. What can we do? How can we help? It's a very I played a leadership role and it was a very crucial part of our year, the most crucial part of our year, and I got no sense of blowback or anger or frustration. All I got was you stay home, you take care of you, you be well, and we got this.
0:16:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
That is so like it actually gets to me, because I think, like, in the grand scheme of your life, what an imp like that is a, that's a pinch point, that's like one of the more important times when you had, when you were the most vulnerable and the people that you and however your work, like when we say that we're separating out work and home, if you were to say that you separated those things out, if you didn't have this culture, this, these relationships with these people who care about you as a human being, who care about your newborn son, who care about your health first, it would have been a completely different experience.
0:17:28 - Collin Bunker
Yeah.
0:17:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
But it's also complicated.
0:17:31 - Collin Bunker
Because, especially if you are managing these people, you have to be also be able to have the difficult conversation. You also have to be able to. Usually you don't pull your friend aside and let them know that their behavior needs to change. There may be consequences if their behavior doesn't change.
0:17:49 - Annalisa Holcombe
Tell me about that, when you feel like you're both friends and leaders, like, how do you, how have you managed that?
0:17:55 - Collin Bunker
So friends is an interesting word. Yeah, most of my coworkers I don't put in the same category as exactly friend. I care about them. I care about them the way I would a friend. But you also have to they have to understand the reality of the workspace and that we are all striving for the same common goal.
And I guess, if I put it in real terms, it isn't that different than a friend, because now that I've learned these realities, I would be more brutal with a friend when necessary, that the hard conversation is more important the closer you are to a person.
0:18:35 - Annalisa Holcombe
And it's actually a way to show love is to tell them, is to have that conversation, yeah.
0:18:41 - Collin Bunker
I think that we don't have hard conversations, not because we don't want to hurt other people's feelings, but because we don't want to be the bad person. We don't want to. It's more sheltering our own ego and our own sense of safety and our own sense of not wanting to hurt other people's feelings, Like it's more about us than it is about them. And if you really care about somebody, you're going to go have that horrible conversation because, they're headed for a dark place.
And if you really care about them, you're going to have that hard conversation early and often, because you don't want them to get to a place to where the relationship is fully broken and because that's usually when someone has to be let go or someone has to be moved on. And so if you really do care about somebody, you're having a hard conversation, you're having it early, you're having it often because that's the only way to preserve the relationship.
0:19:46 - Annalisa Holcombe
If this conversation has caught your attention and you want to join in on conversations like this, check out our website at ConnectionCollaborative.com. Welcome back. You're listening to 92,000 Hours and today we're chatting with Collin Bunker. Tell me about what you think. One of the things that I'm interested in is the idea I've talked about this a lot recently is the idea about love and our discussions that we have about loving what you do and I've had some complicated discussions about that with people on this podcast actually about using, like, what kind of pressure that puts on people or not on people and I'm interested in your thoughts about that. Like the word love and loving what you do. It's a thing that we talk about in our society generally and we're not afraid about. We don't talk about loving who you work with, but we do talk about loving what you're doing at work. That's simpler, yeah, so tell me what does that mean? That's simpler.
0:21:09 - Collin Bunker
Loving people usually means giving something up.
0:21:13 - Annalisa Holcombe
What do you mean I?
0:21:14 - Collin Bunker
can't take everything and love other people at the same time. I can't take what I want and care about the person I'm taking it from at the same time. Wow, love is typically a give, not a take, and so that's amazing.
0:21:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's super important, what you just said.
0:21:35 - Collin Bunker
It is, and loving what you do very often is about taking what you want is often what people mean by that, but it doesn't have to be. But very often people say, oh, I love what I do and I'm going out and doing it, and that's very true, and sometimes people are wicked successful on their scales for that, but what they've ultimately done is taken from other people. Wow.
They've taken what they wanted and they love that. They love that they have now what they want. But for me that's not what I want. That that's not what drives me, that's not what I do, actually has nothing to do with right now. Our company sells product and sell services and I do enjoy that, like that part of the job I do enjoy. I'm good with technology. I'm good with that piece that I don't want to portray, that that's not valuable and important. It is.
But what I do is I care about people and that's ultimately what I do. I don't want to sell somebody a thing that they don't need or isn't going to benefit them or isn't going to help them achieve their outcomes. I want to. I want to care for that person and the way we do that right now is we sell them a product, we sell them a service, we do those technology oriented motions, but at least for me, I do it because I want to care about that person. I want that person to live a better life and the means by which I have right now is that.
But what I do will always be care about people. In my mind it's got a lot to do with the industrialization of our society that we went from the root of us as a species requiring tribes. We evolved to require membership in a tribe. That collaboration as a group is what took us beyond that of apes and other similar animals that us survive. We are genetically engineered to require community and we industrialize that society and we have dehumanized a lot of our roles and turned people into basically cogs in a machine and that dehumanizes it and it's easier to lead a machine than it is to lead people.
It takes investment, effort and emotion and, honestly, sorrow a lot of times to invest in people and know people and work with people.
It's a lot easier to treat them like a cog and when one's broken you throw it away and you put another one in and it keeps running and you just replace them like a machine. And that's the way our society has evolved and it's getting more amplified in the internet age, where our brain chemistry required that we be a part of a community. There's chemical reward that happens in our brain when we are part of a community, when we interact with other humans, and some of that can be simulated through the internet. But it's in a very transitory, impermanent way and we are disconnecting from each other and disconnecting from community in a lot of ways and it's damaging and it's scary and we need to reestablish those types of behaviors in our lives. I believe I think that work is not sad. We spend a lot of our time at work. It's really where we spend the bulk of our life, and I don't want to live my life outside of community. I want to live my life in a community.
0:25:00 - Annalisa Holcombe
So wonderful to hear you say that. I love how important it is to create that community where we are.
0:25:10 - Collin Bunker
Everywhere.
0:25:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah, so this is really important because you brought up sorrow and one of the questions I wanted to ask you. I've been reading a lot. I met this other researcher named Monica Warline. She's really great and she talks about compassion at work that we have, how important it is that we have compassion and she juxtaposes that with in order to have compassion, you have to acknowledge suffering and that we have to actually acknowledge that suffering occurs at work.
0:25:44 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely.
0:25:46 - Annalisa Holcombe
And that we may have even been the cause of it the workplace itself, our relationships with other people, et cetera. I'm interested in how have you seen or witnessed compassion at work?
0:25:59 - Collin Bunker
I've seen it when I've had struggles and people are there for me and sometimes my struggles bleed onto them. If I'm having difficulty outside of the workplace, that bleeds in. It does for all of us, whether we want to admit it or not. When we are struggling as an individual, it bleeds in and the people I worked with when I recently went through a struggle with one of my children, they were there for me and in what ways?
0:26:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
How did they show their compassion?
0:26:32 - Collin Bunker
A, they would listen to me. They would recognize that something they could see in me based on our relationship and how long we've worked together. They could look at me and know something was off and they would ask and they would spend the time to listen.
0:26:47 - Annalisa Holcombe
Actually listen, Like be present.
0:26:50 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, absolutely, and it went beyond that. My oldest child identified as transgendered three years ago and, as a parent, there's a lot of concerns that are wrapped up in that. There's a lot of wanting to understand what's going on with your child. There's a lot of emotion involved.
0:27:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
And uncertainty about it, and uncertainty, all sorts of things Like there's lots of different emotion involved in that. And you bring it to work. You can't help it, yeah.
0:27:19 - Collin Bunker
You try not to, but you are one person Right and so it's going to be with you no matter where you are, and especially a large thing, and a large thing about somebody you deeply care about. And my coworkers not only showed acceptance and love towards me and my child, but they would go out of their way to help me make a difference for my child.
0:27:41 - Annalisa Holcombe
Awesome. What did they do?
0:27:43 - Collin Bunker
Show up to the pride parade To support not just the pride festival and the LGBTQ community, but my child specifically.
0:27:54 - Annalisa Holcombe
And made your child feel welcome.
0:27:57 - Collin Bunker
More than welcome, made them feel accepted for who they were Awesome, which is a deeper, more important thing.
0:28:04 - Annalisa Holcombe
I'm really interested in that, Because it also in some ways, like from a macro perspective, that experience not only helped your child, but probably also helped them to understand acceptance and how their act of acceptance also creates a bigger sense of what that looks like for them too.
0:28:22 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely, it's a cascading effect.
0:28:25 - Annalisa Holcombe
I had a I read an article that was about emotional culture at work and how it is contagious, right Like that, if it's great or not, we feel it and we catch it and that often. So I'm interested in that Like have you seen it? How does that work for us? And I'm interested in hearing you talk about that as how important the leaders understanding of their own leadership in terms of emotional culture and how that is contagious with them works. Does that make sense? I don't even know what I'm really asking.
0:29:11 - Collin Bunker
So you have a couple of interesting words there. Leader is an interesting word, yeah, a manager, a leader are different things, clearly different things, and if you are charged with supervising a group of people, you are, by definition, a manager, in my opinion, and not a leader and a manager is not necessarily.
0:29:32 - Annalisa Holcombe
You could be yes, Well anybody can be a leader.
0:29:36 - Collin Bunker
Leadership is the thing that anybody can do at any level in the organization. Being a supervising over people in no way connotates whether you're a leader or not, but by being their supervisor, your emotional energy has a direct impact on the people you supervise, whether you want it to or not. And that's a moment when a manager needs to be a leader. They need to set a tone because they don't have a choice as to whether or not their emotional energy impacts. It impacts them because our emotional energy impacts everybody we come in contact with.
But a manager slash supervisor. They have an outsized impact on the people that report to them and it's of even greater importance that they and it's not about being inauthentic, it's not about never having a hard day, it's not about never making a mistake, but it is about trying to project positive energy that I'm uncomfortable with that positive emotion and positive caring around people that you work with. You set a tone when you manage people and the tone that that manager and that amplifies as it goes up an organizational chart, whatever they project, will be provided.
0:30:50 - Annalisa Holcombe
Like that, that emotional culture, like it's who we are. Yeah.
0:30:53 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and the value set of the manager gets cascaded and people will either buy in or buy out.
0:31:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
And I wonder if that's like we always hear that saying of you don't quit a job, you quit a boss.
0:31:06 - Collin Bunker
Oh, that's, totally true.
0:31:08 - Annalisa Holcombe
And I wonder how much of that actually ends up coming from this particular discussion, like how much of that is not the particular job that the boss gives you, but it's the culture that they've created, like the way that you emotionally feel but may not even have the language to talk about at work.
0:31:27 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and I think it's also important to recognize that it isn't a binary. There isn't good and bad. There's authentic and inauthentic, but there isn't good and bad.
0:31:39 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's interesting. Tell me more about that.
0:31:41 - Collin Bunker
So we all are who we are. We all actually we all have real value stacks, whether we're in touch with it and understand it or not. We do, and not everybody has people at the top of their value stack. Now people listen to Brene Brown and they go oh, I should be vulnerable, I should be this.
0:32:02 - Annalisa Holcombe
But you don't.
0:32:02 - Collin Bunker
But if they don't actually value it, they just think they should. They go around and they talk about that and they say they're this but they're not. It actually is bad and it creates people know they're not being authentic and it undermines trust, which is an absolute requirement to build a positive relationship. And so people leaders need to be really in touch with who they actually are, not what they think they should be.
0:32:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right, whatever the current leadership literature says you're supposed to look like right now.
0:32:37 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, because people are gonna see what you actually value and how you act. You may think you should be vulnerable, but if you don't value vulnerability and you're not practicing that thing right now, people see that and they feel that and that undermines, like I said, that trust. If they came out and said you know what? What I value is outcomes and what I value is this other thing, that's fine. Be that person and the people who value that will flock around you and will be around you and you can have a community of people who value other things. It's not where I wanna be. I wanna be in a community and a culture that values people. That's what I value, and it's not that other values are wrong. It's just not where I wanna be and it's not what will make my life better. And the worst thing a leader can do is not be authentic with who and what they are.
0:33:25 - Annalisa Holcombe
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is you know I probably sound like I'm really excited and interested in all this, in the idea of emotional culture and the idea of love at work, companion at love.
But of course there can be shadow sides to some of this stuff and one of the things I've been reading a lot about this because I read these studies that say that calling something that can come from this is saying like we're a family here, and I read some studies that say that calling work a family can actually be detrimental because it can put employees in difficult spots. Like employees might do more than they should. They might feel pressured to do the extra mile that they're not that they might be taken advantage of by their company, but they're trying to do it to be part of the family, because we feel a responsibility for our family but the so-called family may not be as ultimately as responsible for us as is reciprocal. I'm interested in because I'm reading that and I'm feeling conflicted in lots of ways. I'm interested in your thoughts about that.
0:34:33 - Collin Bunker
That. I think that's a difficult conversation because most of us have a fraught relationship with family. Yeah.
Family is a tribe and a community. My parents and my siblings were not a tribe that I chose. It's a tribe I was assigned. Now my spouse and my children to some degree are a tribe I chose, but I didn't choose who my kids were per se Like. They are who they are, and family is a different construct. But I do want to reflect personally the type of relationship and community I try to build within my family at work.
I think that I actually feel bad for people who maybe have such a relationship with their family. They wouldn't want to replicate that type of relationship at work. Yes, I have a different relationship with my spouse, like clearly, like there's a romantic love there. There's a different thing going on there, but the underpinning of that relationship is the same as any other relationship. It's amplified, but it's the same concept and I recently worked at a place where the concept of calling your work community a family was demonized and was said to be a bad thing, and I think that was problematic and we had created what I felt like was a positive community.
And yes, there were times when we worked late and we worked late because we cared about other people, but I actually see the opposite as being more true, where people don't feel like they're a part of a community or part of a quote unquote family at work and they feel scared. They work late not because they love people or because they love what they do, but because they're afraid of getting fired. That's usually more often the case. Or they work in horrible conditions. Why? Because they don't feel like they have a future or they don't know where they could fit in outside of this awful condition. And we create a better environment, we create a better culture when we do treat people like we treat the people we care about the most.
0:36:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
I agree with you. I totally agree with you. That's why I'm feeling so conflicted when I read it. I think it's so hard, but it, underneath it all, there's the riches. Right Like I know that, I felt at a place where I have felt really known and seen that I've worried that maybe I may be working harder than I'm getting monetarily compensated for, and yet I felt so good about the ultimate part of the meaning of my work that it, like that, was my value, more than the dollars, and I felt like I was getting that value.
0:37:15 - Collin Bunker
Yes, the concept around am I getting my? Am I being paid what I'm worth Is a very fraught and difficult conversation. Living in America as a white, straight cis male, I am incredibly privileged and 98% of the world does not have access to the income that I have access to, and most of them work probably as easily, as hard as I do every day, probably harder, and so am I being compensated for what I'm worth? That's a difficult concept and I think that if you're going to value your output on the dollar, then you can make a tremendous amount of money in the United States and you should go do that Like that. If that's what you value and that's what you wanna do, go do that. But it's a very different thing when you add in caring for people and wanting to live a whole life.
0:38:13 - Annalisa Holcombe
I can't help myself because I feel like we're talking about work organizations, but it's just in my nature to wanna talk about all the other organizations that we're involved in, and I'm thinking a lot about our society right now and I feel like there are some talk. We do talk a little bit in our society about the need to love each other and to be compassionate, but there may be inauthenticity there as well, and I'm just really struggling with that whole concept, this concept of love and compassion on this broader scale, and how I see how we're dealing with it, how that affects us organizationally, how it affects us familially. I just feel like there's a big, like a broader concept happening. I don't know how to articulate it, but I'm wondering if there's something that resonates there with you as well.
0:39:12 - Collin Bunker
I totally agree. We are very much as a society not seeing each other, and when we don't see each other we project ourselves harder, and it's everybody projecting not always their best sides as hard as they can to try to be seen, and most people I think a great deal of people right now are not members of strong communities. Our communities are breaking down, our communities are falling apart and people are looking to the internet to find answers and often when that happens, they end up in fringe communities that perpetuate not the best of ideals and you get groupthink and you don't end up having your ideas challenged and then when people do come together, they're just hammering on each other. They're not seeing each other or trying to see each other.
0:40:06 - Annalisa Holcombe
How are you, as a parent, working on that in your like in a place that you can do you know like, or creating your own emotional culture in your household?
0:40:18 - Collin Bunker
That's hard. There's nothing more important to me than being a parent and helping your kids be prepared for the world and preparing them in a way that they will succeed and help other people succeed, but not get wrecked along the way. I would love to say I have all the answers and I certainly don't. What I try to do is primarily lead by example for them, that when they see that I spend hours just in conversation with them, listening to them, hearing them, making sure that I understand their views, even if I have a different view and as a parent, sometimes my view has to be the one that we do, but it doesn't mean their view is bad or that their view is wrong or that they're invalid and making sure that they hear and feel that, that they know that they're heard and felt that somebody cares what they think and feel.
0:41:20 - Annalisa Holcombe
I think that resonates for all of us, like not just in our home and with our children, but at work, in our organizations, in our religious organizations, in our political organizations. People want to know that they're valued.
0:41:35 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, I think, as one of the traps we all fall into is we want, we have an idea of what an ideal life is we all do and we have a tendency to project that onto other people and to want our best life for them. But that isn't the way life works. We all have our own view of what a best life is, and it's every one of our jobs to enable the other person's best life, to enable them to live their best life, not ours. And it's when we start to project our best lives onto other people that we get into real conflict. If I'm empowering your best life and you're empowering mine, then we aren't going to live the same life and they're going to look very different, but we can both live long, happy, successful, fruitful lives. It's when I project mine onto you and say, well, you know what the best life is, lived this way, so that's how you should live. That's a me not seeing you, me not understanding you, and it's me being narcissistic.
My goal, especially with my children, is to understand what they feel would be their best life.
Now, as a parent, I have some outsized role in helping them shape that, probably, but that translates to every relationship in my life, that it's not about me projecting my best life onto them, but me genuinely understanding who they are, what drives them and what will produce the best outcomes for them, and then enabling and empowering.
I can't give it to them, but hopefully I can enable it and empower it for them. I can knock down barriers or I can be a cheerleader on the sideline or I can cry with them when they need to cry, but I don't. I think where we break our children or we break each other in society again is when we have decided what would be best for someone else and we project that onto them, and we need to not do that. We need to hear what they feel would be best for them and then enable it and empower it. And maybe where that gets complicated is where what's best for them overlaps with what's best for you, and that's when life happens, that's when we negotiate, that's when we both make sacrifices, but that only happens when we see each other.
0:44:00 - Annalisa Holcombe
I love that you just taught me the how of how I'm gonna like how to work on this. Well done, it's really it's amazing. I want to ask you a couple last questions. One is, as you know, I'm really passionate about the role of mentors or coaches in our lives. Have you had any particular mentor that was important to you and, if so, what lessons did they impart?
0:44:25 - Collin Bunker
I've had many, some in small ways, some in small, incredibly impactful ways, and some in my former boss, rob Raller, it was a big impact on me. He genuinely cared for people. His love for the individual and wanting to see them and care for them and sacrifice for them had a deep impact on me. I had a friend in high school who has a huge personality and was very impactful on me and teaching me around the value of human connection, the value of having community and being a part of something. My spouse is a huge impact on me. She is a genuine and authentic human being and she has impacted upon me the importance and value of always being authentic and who you are, and that when we hide who we are, you make it impossible for the other person to see you, which makes the love even harder.
It makes it impossible. You can't care for a person if you can't see them, and the more you hide yourself from them, the more they are not actually even able to care for you. And if you've disabled that, how can community and tribalism and all these other things that we need actually occur if we can't see each other?
0:46:06 - Annalisa Holcombe
My sincere thanks to Collin for his willingness to speak about love and work. You can connect with Collin on LinkedIn, as always. Thank you for listening to 92,000 Hours. This episode concludes our first season. As some of you may know, we recorded this season before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, so much of our day-to-day lives have changed.
In season two, we will be discussing work and life integration during such an unprecedented time. We will be exploring what it means to be a frontline worker or to be a full-time employee and a full-time teacher to your children. We will be talking about big emotions like grief, fear and loneliness. How do we move forward when we don't know what lies ahead? How do we authentically connect in a time of such physical and emotional disconnection? We will attempt to answer these questions and more. Join us at the start of the new year for season two of 92,000 Hours and, if you enjoyed this season, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate your support. 92,000 Hours is made possible by Connection Collaborative. This episode was produced and edited by Brianna Steggell. Lexie Banks is our marketing director and I'm your host, Annalisa Holcomb.
0:00:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
Did you know that the average human spends 92,000 hours at work during their lifetime? That's more than we spend eating, cleaning, driving, watching TV or even surfing the internet? In fact, work is what we do most. It comes second only to sleeping. Welcome to 92,000 hours, the podcast that believes in the integration of life and work.
I'm your host, Annalisa Holcombe. Before we begin, I wanted to tell you a quick story about why this podcast is so personal to me. I began practicing law at age 26 and learned many valuable lessons, including that I was deeply unhappy at work. Although I was on a path that looked like traditional success, I realized that I needed to quit my job in order to align myself with my passion and purpose. Now I am dedicated to making sure all of our 92,000 hours at work are spent well instead of simply spent. How do we construct a working world that values and accommodates our humanity? How do we construct a life that is not separate from, but fueled by, the purpose we find in our work? In this podcast, we will explore those questions and more. In each episode, I will speak to someone that demonstrates meaning, passion and purpose in their work. Join me in discovering what happens when we bring our whole selves to our work, schools and communities.
Today, I am joined by Collin Bunker. Collin is the director of Solutions Architecture at Presidio, a nationwide enterprise IT integrator. Simply put, Collin is the go-to person for me and so many others on all things IT web application development, database administration and cybersecurity. Most importantly, Collin is a loyal and dedicated employee, mentor and friend. He was recently recognized for 20 years of service and I want to read what his award says, because it tells you everything you need to know about Collin and why I asked him to join me on today's episode.
It reads Collin has a high level of emotional intelligence, which is consistently demonstrated by his leadership style. His colleagues know he cares about them and that he is willing to be an advocate, confidante and friend. When Collin is part of a team, the whole team functions at a higher level. He cares deeply for those he works with, is a good listener and possesses a calming influence on the office. This is why I asked Collin to join me today to talk about a topic we normally don't discuss in work settings Love. Collin and I discuss companionate, love based on warmth, affection and connection, and how that impacts work outcomes. So let's jump in. What is your greatest accomplishment as a human being. What are you most proud about yourself for, in terms of who you are?
0:03:13 - Collin Bunker
My relationships.
0:03:14 - Annalisa Holcombe
So tell me more.
0:03:19 - Collin Bunker
Over the course of my life, I've had to identify what I think a successful life means and what a quality person means, and to me, that is most demonstrated in how you impact the lives of the people closest to you, and so the thing I'm most proud of is my relationship with my spouse, with my kids, my coworkers, with the people I spend the most time with that. I try hard to make sure that my impact on their lives is a positive one.
That my presence in their life is a positive one and one that helps drive a better life for them, and so those relationships that I've developed and I've cultivated and I've invested in to me are the greatest value in my biggest accomplishment.
0:04:03 - Annalisa Holcombe
When you think about riches and success, that's your riches and your success.
0:04:10 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely Without question.
0:04:12 - Annalisa Holcombe
So if I were to ask you, like if you're a person listening to this what? How do you know, when you've cultivated relationships, that you are a positive impact in somebody's life? How do you know? I mean, clearly we can know that based upon what people say about you and this lovely award, but how do you know on a day-to-day basis?
0:04:34 - Collin Bunker
That's a good question. For me it would be. It's most easily determined, I think, for me in the closer of the relationship. But so if my spouse or my children could identify that their life is better now than it was before, or if it is moving in a positive direction, if I have an influence on my ability to help them do that, that would be maybe the evidence of that. That's a good question.
0:05:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
Plus, you probably like with your family, you can get more immediate feedback as well in some ways, like families are usually more comfortable telling people both good and bad.
0:05:19 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and part of the difficulty there is the gauge of what a better life means.
0:05:24 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah.
0:05:24 - Collin Bunker
And to me it's about them identifying that their life is better on their terms, not online.
0:05:30 - Annalisa Holcombe
So our subject matter today is a topic that could be strange to everyone, and I found this quote that said Love is not a word you often hear uttered in office hallways or conference rooms, and yet it has a strong influence on workplace outcomes, and I think that that's really interesting. This researcher her name is Segal Barsad, and she talks about love, and she made it clear that we're talking about companionate love, which is love based on warmth, affection and connection, not romantic passion, and it's not probably going to feel as strong as what romantic passion is. It's probably a little lesser than that. Love is love and you can feel it and we should, and how do we acknowledge it? So for me, I'm interested.
First of all, I want to compliment you on being brave enough to have this conversation, as you and I know, I showed you the list of potential topics and everyone else had shied away. Like love, I'm not going to talk about love, and you were like I'm in, let's do it. So what made you decide that you would do that and then talk about it to me a little Like what do when we first say, like the ideas of love and work, when you first knew you were going to talk about this, like what comes to your mind, like what was that like for you to think, okay, I'm going to go talk about love and work.
0:06:54 - Collin Bunker
It felt natural to me and maybe that's weird. That's awesome, I guess that's weird based on what you've just said, but it seems very natural because love again, not the romantic piece, but the companionate piece is underpins every relationship. It underpins how I see the world and if, based my value stack, what I value in life, people are at the top of that stack and you cannot do that without love. Like love is what drives that, love is what enables that and makes it potent.
0:07:27 - Annalisa Holcombe
How do you, how is that present for you? Like, tell me, what do you mean by it and how do you talk about it? Or do you like, what is it like for you to have that and then put it to work in your life?
0:07:41 - Collin Bunker
It means to me that what I do is not nearly as important as why I do it, and the why I do it is about the people and it's about I go to work every day, not to sell a product or to fix an IT problem, but to better, help better the lives of the people around me. And when I do that and if they do that and if we all do that, we all live better lives aggregately. And the way I do that is I genuinely try, I don't try. I want to care about the people I work with. And wanting to care about the people I work with enables me to spend the time and the effort and the energy to get to know them, to understand their values, to understand what drives them and then help them enable that in their lives and help them succeed at those things.
0:08:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
We talk about all sorts of things in terms of culture but often leaders are not thinking about or maybe some of them are, but we're not talking about it and making it really clear and intentional that it's important to have an emotional culture at your work. I'm interested in you telling me a little bit of stories about what that has meant to you, what it does mean to you. Do you have like personal anecdotes about what that's like? Tell me about emotional culture at work.
0:08:59 - Collin Bunker
Emotional culture at work that to me, it's recognizing when people need, what people need when they need it, understanding them as an individual and understanding their what's impacting them and how they're impacting others, and listening to them and then helping them work through whatever it is that they're experiencing, and seeing them as a whole, seeing them as an individual and not just a cognitive machine. And it goes beyond just well, you're having a hard day, so I'm gonna listen to you and we're gonna spend that time. It goes to recognizing the values that they bring, the strengths that they have, and helping them fit as an individual and see themselves as a part of this, of a greater thing, as opposed to just being a cog in the machine that I push this button or I fix that thing or I do whatever. But I bring value to this place uniquely, because they recognize who I am, what I am, and that that is a value to them and not just a thing to work around.
0:10:04 - Annalisa Holcombe
How have you experienced that, when you felt that way?
0:10:10 - Collin Bunker
I felt that I felt both not that way and that way in a work environment when I first started working and I was slinging computers and installing them and I was I was tracked very meticulously on hours spent on what and no one recognized at the time what I could bring. They saw me for my output and that was it. And that felt very cold, that it feel that there was no feeling to it. And maybe that was the issue. And humans have feeling, we all have feeling, whether we want to admit it or not. We all have feeling and we're feeling most of the time, and there was no place for that and there was no recognition of the value I could bring. And then I changed managers, I changed who I reported to to somebody who recognized what I could bring and they adapted my role and adapted what I was doing to leverage who I was instead of just what I could do.
0:11:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
So they said, they saw you.
0:11:12 - Collin Bunker
They did. They saw who I, they saw the value I could bring. They saw that they saw more than just the output I could produce.
0:11:19 - Annalisa Holcombe
What was that experience like? Did the person like sit down and talk to you about it, like, was it over time? How do you develop that kind of knowledge of your colleagues?
0:11:29 - Collin Bunker
Time Genuinely caring about that individual enough to get to know them and to see beyond the tasks that they do. For me it was. I felt that I wasn't valued, and so I got another job and I put in my resignation. And then that manager came to me and said hey, if you reported to me and we did this different thing, would you stay? And I said yes.
And then I was there for another 18 years because I felt like I was seen and I was able to use who I was to improve other people's lives.
0:12:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
So there was a, I mean so we could talk about this. Underpinning of my knowledge of you is this is a being part of a team that was all about the who each other were Like. Tell me about that. What? How do you? What was that like? How did you? How did it play out in your daily life?
0:12:30 - Collin Bunker
It played out? Yeah, in multiple ways. So it depends on what you mean by. How did it play out? We spent a lot of time together in the trenches, fighting together. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other while we worked.
It wasn't like we were sitting around and just hanging out, but we would spend the time to get to know each other and we would do things that were not always appreciated by people who were task oriented. We would walk, we would take the team and walk to 7-Eleven, get away from the work, get away from the tasks and just converse about who we were and what we were doing and getting to know at a deeper level what drives each other. And when you do that, you start to find ways to fit like a puzzle and to know where each other's boundaries are and who's got what strengths and who's got what weaknesses and what to watch out for and when to step in to help that person, because you know they're gonna struggle there and so you know that that's when I'm gonna step in and help. Or understanding each other allows you to function as a team as opposed to just a machine.
0:13:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
As a result of having that more emotional culture. What did you guys as a team, what was that like in that team? Did you know about each other's personal lives? Did you celebrate? I believe that you have to celebrate successes. You have to be there for each other in terms of like your whole self. Did that exist? Was that part of the emotional culture, or was it different? Because I don't know the answer.
0:14:13 - Collin Bunker
It was, and it differs based on person. There are some people who are very comfortable sharing their personal lives and whom we all knew what was going on in their life. There are other people who don't do that and that's okay. But we also knew what they needed professionally. We knew who they were as a person and how they needed to function in the work environment, what their strengths were, what their weaknesses were, how we could support them, and it wasn't required that you come in and share every detail of your personal life.
It was that we cared about you either way, and to some people, blending the personal and the professionals they need that. They need to be able to talk about this thing that happened to them or what they're doing on the weekend. Some people don't want to do that and that's totally fine. They just integrated a little bit differently. But they even those people came to value the love in the workplace and how, when they were having a bad day, the team rallied around them and they would rally around their teammates and they would be a part of that because they know that they were cared for.
0:15:23 - Annalisa Holcombe
What did that feel like for you? How did you know that you were cared for?
0:15:28 - Collin Bunker
Because when I would have hard times, they would be at my doorstep Do you have a specific example. Sure, when my youngest child was born he came a month early and spent two weeks in the NICU and clearly pretty stressful time and my health declined pretty rapidly during that two weeks to where I went to the doctor and they identified that I had a form of bone cancer.
0:15:53 - Annalisa Holcombe
Oh my gosh.
0:15:54 - Collin Bunker
And so.
0:15:55 - Annalisa Holcombe
I was all at the same time, all at the same time.
0:15:58 - Collin Bunker
So I was at work for almost a month Dealing with my child in the ICU and then working with the doctors to figure out what was wrong with me.
And it came at the start of school, at the absolute worst time possible, and all I got from my workmates were take care of you. What can we do? How can we help? It's a very I played a leadership role and it was a very crucial part of our year, the most crucial part of our year, and I got no sense of blowback or anger or frustration. All I got was you stay home, you take care of you, you be well, and we got this.
0:16:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
That is so like it actually gets to me, because I think, like, in the grand scheme of your life, what an imp like that is a, that's a pinch point, that's like one of the more important times when you had, when you were the most vulnerable and the people that you and however your work, like when we say that we're separating out work and home, if you were to say that you separated those things out, if you didn't have this culture, this, these relationships with these people who care about you as a human being, who care about your newborn son, who care about your health first, it would have been a completely different experience.
0:17:28 - Collin Bunker
Yeah.
0:17:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
But it's also complicated.
0:17:31 - Collin Bunker
Because, especially if you are managing these people, you have to be also be able to have the difficult conversation. You also have to be able to. Usually you don't pull your friend aside and let them know that their behavior needs to change. There may be consequences if their behavior doesn't change.
0:17:49 - Annalisa Holcombe
Tell me about that, when you feel like you're both friends and leaders, like, how do you, how have you managed that?
0:17:55 - Collin Bunker
So friends is an interesting word. Yeah, most of my coworkers I don't put in the same category as exactly friend. I care about them. I care about them the way I would a friend. But you also have to they have to understand the reality of the workspace and that we are all striving for the same common goal.
And I guess, if I put it in real terms, it isn't that different than a friend, because now that I've learned these realities, I would be more brutal with a friend when necessary, that the hard conversation is more important the closer you are to a person.
0:18:35 - Annalisa Holcombe
And it's actually a way to show love is to tell them, is to have that conversation, yeah.
0:18:41 - Collin Bunker
I think that we don't have hard conversations, not because we don't want to hurt other people's feelings, but because we don't want to be the bad person. We don't want to. It's more sheltering our own ego and our own sense of safety and our own sense of not wanting to hurt other people's feelings, Like it's more about us than it is about them. And if you really care about somebody, you're going to go have that horrible conversation because, they're headed for a dark place.
And if you really care about them, you're going to have that hard conversation early and often, because you don't want them to get to a place to where the relationship is fully broken and because that's usually when someone has to be let go or someone has to be moved on. And so if you really do care about somebody, you're having a hard conversation, you're having it early, you're having it often because that's the only way to preserve the relationship.
0:19:46 - Annalisa Holcombe
If this conversation has caught your attention and you want to join in on conversations like this, check out our website at ConnectionCollaborative.com. Welcome back. You're listening to 92,000 Hours and today we're chatting with Collin Bunker. Tell me about what you think. One of the things that I'm interested in is the idea I've talked about this a lot recently is the idea about love and our discussions that we have about loving what you do and I've had some complicated discussions about that with people on this podcast actually about using, like, what kind of pressure that puts on people or not on people and I'm interested in your thoughts about that. Like the word love and loving what you do. It's a thing that we talk about in our society generally and we're not afraid about. We don't talk about loving who you work with, but we do talk about loving what you're doing at work. That's simpler, yeah, so tell me what does that mean? That's simpler.
0:21:09 - Collin Bunker
Loving people usually means giving something up.
0:21:13 - Annalisa Holcombe
What do you mean I?
0:21:14 - Collin Bunker
can't take everything and love other people at the same time. I can't take what I want and care about the person I'm taking it from at the same time. Wow, love is typically a give, not a take, and so that's amazing.
0:21:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's super important, what you just said.
0:21:35 - Collin Bunker
It is, and loving what you do very often is about taking what you want is often what people mean by that, but it doesn't have to be. But very often people say, oh, I love what I do and I'm going out and doing it, and that's very true, and sometimes people are wicked successful on their scales for that, but what they've ultimately done is taken from other people. Wow.
They've taken what they wanted and they love that. They love that they have now what they want. But for me that's not what I want. That that's not what drives me, that's not what I do, actually has nothing to do with right now. Our company sells product and sell services and I do enjoy that, like that part of the job I do enjoy. I'm good with technology. I'm good with that piece that I don't want to portray, that that's not valuable and important. It is.
But what I do is I care about people and that's ultimately what I do. I don't want to sell somebody a thing that they don't need or isn't going to benefit them or isn't going to help them achieve their outcomes. I want to. I want to care for that person and the way we do that right now is we sell them a product, we sell them a service, we do those technology oriented motions, but at least for me, I do it because I want to care about that person. I want that person to live a better life and the means by which I have right now is that.
But what I do will always be care about people. In my mind it's got a lot to do with the industrialization of our society that we went from the root of us as a species requiring tribes. We evolved to require membership in a tribe. That collaboration as a group is what took us beyond that of apes and other similar animals that us survive. We are genetically engineered to require community and we industrialize that society and we have dehumanized a lot of our roles and turned people into basically cogs in a machine and that dehumanizes it and it's easier to lead a machine than it is to lead people.
It takes investment, effort and emotion and, honestly, sorrow a lot of times to invest in people and know people and work with people.
It's a lot easier to treat them like a cog and when one's broken you throw it away and you put another one in and it keeps running and you just replace them like a machine. And that's the way our society has evolved and it's getting more amplified in the internet age, where our brain chemistry required that we be a part of a community. There's chemical reward that happens in our brain when we are part of a community, when we interact with other humans, and some of that can be simulated through the internet. But it's in a very transitory, impermanent way and we are disconnecting from each other and disconnecting from community in a lot of ways and it's damaging and it's scary and we need to reestablish those types of behaviors in our lives. I believe I think that work is not sad. We spend a lot of our time at work. It's really where we spend the bulk of our life, and I don't want to live my life outside of community. I want to live my life in a community.
0:25:00 - Annalisa Holcombe
So wonderful to hear you say that. I love how important it is to create that community where we are.
0:25:10 - Collin Bunker
Everywhere.
0:25:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah, so this is really important because you brought up sorrow and one of the questions I wanted to ask you. I've been reading a lot. I met this other researcher named Monica Warline. She's really great and she talks about compassion at work that we have, how important it is that we have compassion and she juxtaposes that with in order to have compassion, you have to acknowledge suffering and that we have to actually acknowledge that suffering occurs at work.
0:25:44 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely.
0:25:46 - Annalisa Holcombe
And that we may have even been the cause of it the workplace itself, our relationships with other people, et cetera. I'm interested in how have you seen or witnessed compassion at work?
0:25:59 - Collin Bunker
I've seen it when I've had struggles and people are there for me and sometimes my struggles bleed onto them. If I'm having difficulty outside of the workplace, that bleeds in. It does for all of us, whether we want to admit it or not. When we are struggling as an individual, it bleeds in and the people I worked with when I recently went through a struggle with one of my children, they were there for me and in what ways?
0:26:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
How did they show their compassion?
0:26:32 - Collin Bunker
A, they would listen to me. They would recognize that something they could see in me based on our relationship and how long we've worked together. They could look at me and know something was off and they would ask and they would spend the time to listen.
0:26:47 - Annalisa Holcombe
Actually listen, Like be present.
0:26:50 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, absolutely, and it went beyond that. My oldest child identified as transgendered three years ago and, as a parent, there's a lot of concerns that are wrapped up in that. There's a lot of wanting to understand what's going on with your child. There's a lot of emotion involved.
0:27:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
And uncertainty about it, and uncertainty, all sorts of things Like there's lots of different emotion involved in that. And you bring it to work. You can't help it, yeah.
0:27:19 - Collin Bunker
You try not to, but you are one person Right and so it's going to be with you no matter where you are, and especially a large thing, and a large thing about somebody you deeply care about. And my coworkers not only showed acceptance and love towards me and my child, but they would go out of their way to help me make a difference for my child.
0:27:41 - Annalisa Holcombe
Awesome. What did they do?
0:27:43 - Collin Bunker
Show up to the pride parade To support not just the pride festival and the LGBTQ community, but my child specifically.
0:27:54 - Annalisa Holcombe
And made your child feel welcome.
0:27:57 - Collin Bunker
More than welcome, made them feel accepted for who they were Awesome, which is a deeper, more important thing.
0:28:04 - Annalisa Holcombe
I'm really interested in that, Because it also in some ways, like from a macro perspective, that experience not only helped your child, but probably also helped them to understand acceptance and how their act of acceptance also creates a bigger sense of what that looks like for them too.
0:28:22 - Collin Bunker
Absolutely, it's a cascading effect.
0:28:25 - Annalisa Holcombe
I had a I read an article that was about emotional culture at work and how it is contagious, right Like that, if it's great or not, we feel it and we catch it and that often. So I'm interested in that Like have you seen it? How does that work for us? And I'm interested in hearing you talk about that as how important the leaders understanding of their own leadership in terms of emotional culture and how that is contagious with them works. Does that make sense? I don't even know what I'm really asking.
0:29:11 - Collin Bunker
So you have a couple of interesting words there. Leader is an interesting word, yeah, a manager, a leader are different things, clearly different things, and if you are charged with supervising a group of people, you are, by definition, a manager, in my opinion, and not a leader and a manager is not necessarily.
0:29:32 - Annalisa Holcombe
You could be yes, Well anybody can be a leader.
0:29:36 - Collin Bunker
Leadership is the thing that anybody can do at any level in the organization. Being a supervising over people in no way connotates whether you're a leader or not, but by being their supervisor, your emotional energy has a direct impact on the people you supervise, whether you want it to or not. And that's a moment when a manager needs to be a leader. They need to set a tone because they don't have a choice as to whether or not their emotional energy impacts. It impacts them because our emotional energy impacts everybody we come in contact with.
But a manager slash supervisor. They have an outsized impact on the people that report to them and it's of even greater importance that they and it's not about being inauthentic, it's not about never having a hard day, it's not about never making a mistake, but it is about trying to project positive energy that I'm uncomfortable with that positive emotion and positive caring around people that you work with. You set a tone when you manage people and the tone that that manager and that amplifies as it goes up an organizational chart, whatever they project, will be provided.
0:30:50 - Annalisa Holcombe
Like that, that emotional culture, like it's who we are. Yeah.
0:30:53 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and the value set of the manager gets cascaded and people will either buy in or buy out.
0:31:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
And I wonder if that's like we always hear that saying of you don't quit a job, you quit a boss.
0:31:06 - Collin Bunker
Oh, that's, totally true.
0:31:08 - Annalisa Holcombe
And I wonder how much of that actually ends up coming from this particular discussion, like how much of that is not the particular job that the boss gives you, but it's the culture that they've created, like the way that you emotionally feel but may not even have the language to talk about at work.
0:31:27 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, and I think it's also important to recognize that it isn't a binary. There isn't good and bad. There's authentic and inauthentic, but there isn't good and bad.
0:31:39 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's interesting. Tell me more about that.
0:31:41 - Collin Bunker
So we all are who we are. We all actually we all have real value stacks, whether we're in touch with it and understand it or not. We do, and not everybody has people at the top of their value stack. Now people listen to Brene Brown and they go oh, I should be vulnerable, I should be this.
0:32:02 - Annalisa Holcombe
But you don't.
0:32:02 - Collin Bunker
But if they don't actually value it, they just think they should. They go around and they talk about that and they say they're this but they're not. It actually is bad and it creates people know they're not being authentic and it undermines trust, which is an absolute requirement to build a positive relationship. And so people leaders need to be really in touch with who they actually are, not what they think they should be.
0:32:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right, whatever the current leadership literature says you're supposed to look like right now.
0:32:37 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, because people are gonna see what you actually value and how you act. You may think you should be vulnerable, but if you don't value vulnerability and you're not practicing that thing right now, people see that and they feel that and that undermines, like I said, that trust. If they came out and said you know what? What I value is outcomes and what I value is this other thing, that's fine. Be that person and the people who value that will flock around you and will be around you and you can have a community of people who value other things. It's not where I wanna be. I wanna be in a community and a culture that values people. That's what I value, and it's not that other values are wrong. It's just not where I wanna be and it's not what will make my life better. And the worst thing a leader can do is not be authentic with who and what they are.
0:33:25 - Annalisa Holcombe
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is you know I probably sound like I'm really excited and interested in all this, in the idea of emotional culture and the idea of love at work, companion at love.
But of course there can be shadow sides to some of this stuff and one of the things I've been reading a lot about this because I read these studies that say that calling something that can come from this is saying like we're a family here, and I read some studies that say that calling work a family can actually be detrimental because it can put employees in difficult spots. Like employees might do more than they should. They might feel pressured to do the extra mile that they're not that they might be taken advantage of by their company, but they're trying to do it to be part of the family, because we feel a responsibility for our family but the so-called family may not be as ultimately as responsible for us as is reciprocal. I'm interested in because I'm reading that and I'm feeling conflicted in lots of ways. I'm interested in your thoughts about that.
0:34:33 - Collin Bunker
That. I think that's a difficult conversation because most of us have a fraught relationship with family. Yeah.
Family is a tribe and a community. My parents and my siblings were not a tribe that I chose. It's a tribe I was assigned. Now my spouse and my children to some degree are a tribe I chose, but I didn't choose who my kids were per se Like. They are who they are, and family is a different construct. But I do want to reflect personally the type of relationship and community I try to build within my family at work.
I think that I actually feel bad for people who maybe have such a relationship with their family. They wouldn't want to replicate that type of relationship at work. Yes, I have a different relationship with my spouse, like clearly, like there's a romantic love there. There's a different thing going on there, but the underpinning of that relationship is the same as any other relationship. It's amplified, but it's the same concept and I recently worked at a place where the concept of calling your work community a family was demonized and was said to be a bad thing, and I think that was problematic and we had created what I felt like was a positive community.
And yes, there were times when we worked late and we worked late because we cared about other people, but I actually see the opposite as being more true, where people don't feel like they're a part of a community or part of a quote unquote family at work and they feel scared. They work late not because they love people or because they love what they do, but because they're afraid of getting fired. That's usually more often the case. Or they work in horrible conditions. Why? Because they don't feel like they have a future or they don't know where they could fit in outside of this awful condition. And we create a better environment, we create a better culture when we do treat people like we treat the people we care about the most.
0:36:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
I agree with you. I totally agree with you. That's why I'm feeling so conflicted when I read it. I think it's so hard, but it, underneath it all, there's the riches. Right Like I know that, I felt at a place where I have felt really known and seen that I've worried that maybe I may be working harder than I'm getting monetarily compensated for, and yet I felt so good about the ultimate part of the meaning of my work that it, like that, was my value, more than the dollars, and I felt like I was getting that value.
0:37:15 - Collin Bunker
Yes, the concept around am I getting my? Am I being paid what I'm worth Is a very fraught and difficult conversation. Living in America as a white, straight cis male, I am incredibly privileged and 98% of the world does not have access to the income that I have access to, and most of them work probably as easily, as hard as I do every day, probably harder, and so am I being compensated for what I'm worth? That's a difficult concept and I think that if you're going to value your output on the dollar, then you can make a tremendous amount of money in the United States and you should go do that Like that. If that's what you value and that's what you wanna do, go do that. But it's a very different thing when you add in caring for people and wanting to live a whole life.
0:38:13 - Annalisa Holcombe
I can't help myself because I feel like we're talking about work organizations, but it's just in my nature to wanna talk about all the other organizations that we're involved in, and I'm thinking a lot about our society right now and I feel like there are some talk. We do talk a little bit in our society about the need to love each other and to be compassionate, but there may be inauthenticity there as well, and I'm just really struggling with that whole concept, this concept of love and compassion on this broader scale, and how I see how we're dealing with it, how that affects us organizationally, how it affects us familially. I just feel like there's a big, like a broader concept happening. I don't know how to articulate it, but I'm wondering if there's something that resonates there with you as well.
0:39:12 - Collin Bunker
I totally agree. We are very much as a society not seeing each other, and when we don't see each other we project ourselves harder, and it's everybody projecting not always their best sides as hard as they can to try to be seen, and most people I think a great deal of people right now are not members of strong communities. Our communities are breaking down, our communities are falling apart and people are looking to the internet to find answers and often when that happens, they end up in fringe communities that perpetuate not the best of ideals and you get groupthink and you don't end up having your ideas challenged and then when people do come together, they're just hammering on each other. They're not seeing each other or trying to see each other.
0:40:06 - Annalisa Holcombe
How are you, as a parent, working on that in your like in a place that you can do you know like, or creating your own emotional culture in your household?
0:40:18 - Collin Bunker
That's hard. There's nothing more important to me than being a parent and helping your kids be prepared for the world and preparing them in a way that they will succeed and help other people succeed, but not get wrecked along the way. I would love to say I have all the answers and I certainly don't. What I try to do is primarily lead by example for them, that when they see that I spend hours just in conversation with them, listening to them, hearing them, making sure that I understand their views, even if I have a different view and as a parent, sometimes my view has to be the one that we do, but it doesn't mean their view is bad or that their view is wrong or that they're invalid and making sure that they hear and feel that, that they know that they're heard and felt that somebody cares what they think and feel.
0:41:20 - Annalisa Holcombe
I think that resonates for all of us, like not just in our home and with our children, but at work, in our organizations, in our religious organizations, in our political organizations. People want to know that they're valued.
0:41:35 - Collin Bunker
Yeah, I think, as one of the traps we all fall into is we want, we have an idea of what an ideal life is we all do and we have a tendency to project that onto other people and to want our best life for them. But that isn't the way life works. We all have our own view of what a best life is, and it's every one of our jobs to enable the other person's best life, to enable them to live their best life, not ours. And it's when we start to project our best lives onto other people that we get into real conflict. If I'm empowering your best life and you're empowering mine, then we aren't going to live the same life and they're going to look very different, but we can both live long, happy, successful, fruitful lives. It's when I project mine onto you and say, well, you know what the best life is, lived this way, so that's how you should live. That's a me not seeing you, me not understanding you, and it's me being narcissistic.
My goal, especially with my children, is to understand what they feel would be their best life.
Now, as a parent, I have some outsized role in helping them shape that, probably, but that translates to every relationship in my life, that it's not about me projecting my best life onto them, but me genuinely understanding who they are, what drives them and what will produce the best outcomes for them, and then enabling and empowering.
I can't give it to them, but hopefully I can enable it and empower it for them. I can knock down barriers or I can be a cheerleader on the sideline or I can cry with them when they need to cry, but I don't. I think where we break our children or we break each other in society again is when we have decided what would be best for someone else and we project that onto them, and we need to not do that. We need to hear what they feel would be best for them and then enable it and empower it. And maybe where that gets complicated is where what's best for them overlaps with what's best for you, and that's when life happens, that's when we negotiate, that's when we both make sacrifices, but that only happens when we see each other.
0:44:00 - Annalisa Holcombe
I love that you just taught me the how of how I'm gonna like how to work on this. Well done, it's really it's amazing. I want to ask you a couple last questions. One is, as you know, I'm really passionate about the role of mentors or coaches in our lives. Have you had any particular mentor that was important to you and, if so, what lessons did they impart?
0:44:25 - Collin Bunker
I've had many, some in small ways, some in small, incredibly impactful ways, and some in my former boss, rob Raller, it was a big impact on me. He genuinely cared for people. His love for the individual and wanting to see them and care for them and sacrifice for them had a deep impact on me. I had a friend in high school who has a huge personality and was very impactful on me and teaching me around the value of human connection, the value of having community and being a part of something. My spouse is a huge impact on me. She is a genuine and authentic human being and she has impacted upon me the importance and value of always being authentic and who you are, and that when we hide who we are, you make it impossible for the other person to see you, which makes the love even harder.
It makes it impossible. You can't care for a person if you can't see them, and the more you hide yourself from them, the more they are not actually even able to care for you. And if you've disabled that, how can community and tribalism and all these other things that we need actually occur if we can't see each other?
0:46:06 - Annalisa Holcombe
My sincere thanks to Collin for his willingness to speak about love and work. You can connect with Collin on LinkedIn, as always. Thank you for listening to 92,000 Hours. This episode concludes our first season. As some of you may know, we recorded this season before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, so much of our day-to-day lives have changed.
In season two, we will be discussing work and life integration during such an unprecedented time. We will be exploring what it means to be a frontline worker or to be a full-time employee and a full-time teacher to your children. We will be talking about big emotions like grief, fear and loneliness. How do we move forward when we don't know what lies ahead? How do we authentically connect in a time of such physical and emotional disconnection? We will attempt to answer these questions and more. Join us at the start of the new year for season two of 92,000 Hours and, if you enjoyed this season, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate your support. 92,000 Hours is made possible by Connection Collaborative. This episode was produced and edited by Brianna Steggell. Lexie Banks is our marketing director and I'm your host, Annalisa Holcomb.