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We are talking about today forced fun, forced smiles and the forced “love and passion for your work.” If you don’t love your job, you just can’t be happy. And we also need to force the fun at work too.  We all want to thrive…but do we need to love our jobs?  Conventional wisdom says “yes” and I think most of us in leadership think that too. But we don’t even know what we mean when we say, “we love our job or want others to love their job.”

Guess what? The answer is no, we don’t need people to love their jobs.  I don’t need to love inputting data into a spreadsheet to do great at my work and be a very solid contributor to a team.

There are two things that are needed though. Autonomy and caring. The work of Dr. Shane Lopez (who sadly passed away in 2016), leads us to this as well as the work of Dan Pink, we find that people don’t necessarily need to love their particular form of work. And interestingly, he discovered that only 1 in 10 bosses were good bosses. I think I see a theme here. But listen to the show and tell us what you think.