“I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can’t imagine eschewing one for the other.”
Meryl Streep, American Actress
“What motivates me is the conviction that our problems are mainly a consequence of a lack of holistic understanding of the man-made system in which we are entwined.”
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Swedish Founder and Director of Local Futures
As I was getting ready to write this article, I asked myself, “what matters most to my readers?” In this case, as a business owner, I thought of my answer to this question and a story to explain it. I recently happened to get a bunch of normal checkups all in a relatively short time. I went to my optometrist, my dentist, my intern for my 6-month check-up, got bloodwork, a mammogram, a colonoscopy, a bone marrow test, and had two cysts removed. While everything major checked out, getting those cysts removed resulted in an allergy to stitches, creating an infection that required a course of oral and topical antibiotics. The least of my concerns appeared and required a holistic response I did not expect.
This leads me to the question of what matters most to you as a business owner? What surprises might be in store for you about what’s working well and what’s not or could become unexpected challenges? More important, are any of these really separate? For those of you who recall Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it seems as if each need on the list supersedes others and while that can be true in a given moment, needs are not always neatly linear, but rather often they are simultaneous. Just like we can’t care for our teeth to the exclusion of our eyes or ears, so too we can’t focus on our financial wellbeing to the exclusion of customer and workforce wellbeing. What effects one affects all.
What is needed for your people to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit?
What inspires their enthusiasm, creativity, innovation, initiative, caring, and loyalty? What ensures competence in their job skills while also in their accountability, self-management, and trusting collaboration with others so they consistently create positive relationships with authority figures, peers, customers, and those they lead? What supports them in jumping in to lead when it makes sense and to follow when that’s best, whether titled as a leader or not? What supports them in developing critical thinking? All of this impacts your bottom line, reputation, growth, and success.
Many business owners and leaders focus on revenues, customers, and growth, while neglecting to assess, test, and improve the satisfaction and social and emotional health of their people, individually and collectively. We all know a bad toothache can unilaterally wreak havoc. So too can emotionally and socially unwell individuals and teams in your business. With a bad tooth, your first wish would not necessarily be to yank it out or ignore it to only focus on where you are healthy. This would be a failure to see the entire system. When owners and leaders fail to do regular checkups needed to identify and relinquish faulty, outdated, and counter-productive practices that weaken the emotional and social health of their entire workforce, everyone is affected, whether each person is consciously aware of the cause and effect of this or not.
The Importance of Putting Them All in the Same Boat
When I first learned applied Adlerian psychology, it was in a parenting model. One concept I learned is that whatever problems are happening in a family, everyone plays a role even though one or more of the members may look bad, look good, or look neutral. This is an illusion. We are ALL part of the problems and we must ALL be part of the solutions too. This focuses us on “what system if changed, would fix this?” which is much more helpful than blaming and separating from one another. Generally, leaders look for high performers and invest time and money in them. This is like focusing on good eyesight but ignoring, or worse, yanking out teeth that ache without seeing the whole or considering how to bring about health.
When I got an infection from my stitches, I had to treat my entire body. I recommend the same to you as a business owner. Put your entire organization (including yourself) in the same boat. Get curious about what underlying faulty, outdated, and counter-productive concepts, terms, tools, and processes are at the cause of your negative effects. Otherwise, you will overlook what weakens the emotional and social health of your workforce and also fail to see and introduce remedies that would help. I have proven remedies that treat your organization as a comprehensive whole, and your people as each deserving of wellbeing, individually and together, which all has incredibly positive consequences for your business!
This article is published in my column The Extraordinary Workplace in St. Louis Small Business Monthly, November, 2025
