“Have you tried giving a shit?” – Me
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
I’ve been a pretty good manager. The Midwesterner in me inwardly screams at having typed that, even as outwardly he will continue to stoically soldier on. Luckily, I can point to some outward confirmations of such, like annual reviews and statements from bosses and awards and other things, to ease the psychic pain of having said that I was good at something. “It’s not me, it’s these other fools that said it about me.”
As such, I’ve been asked to train and mentor others in managing people, both existing managers and those who are on a managerial track. I’ve spoken at conferences on the subject, and at staff meetings. These folks often ask if there’s any sort of key to being a good manager, or some method I use that others can learn from.
In all honesty, I think it boils down to one main thing, that everything else seems to stem from: “Try giving a shit.”
Truly give a shit. You have to care about other people more than you care about yourself, or your own success, or metrics, or any other way of measuring your own accomplishments. If you can manage that, to actually care and not just try to look like you care, people don’t just see that, they feel it, and they respond to it.
Alright, that’s it, lesson over! Now get out there and manage!
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Ok, fine, I’ll elaborate a little more.
Most businesses (and for our purposes, all the businesses I’ll be talking about) have, at the other end of their operating space, a customer. It might be a retail user of the product, it might be a corporate representative using a SaaS implementation. It doesn’t really make that much of a difference, in the grand scheme of things. It boils down to your person on one end and their person on the other.
There’s a long-standing adage in business that is, in my opinion, often misunderstood. That saying is “The customer is always right.” This doesn’t mean that the customer is always correct. What it means, in my view at least, is that the customer always has a sincerely held belief, that they come in with. Whether that’s what they think they’re looking for or what their problem is, it is vital to meet them with that piece in mind. That they sincerely believe they are correct.
Relating to someone else’s viewpoint is the essence of empathy. I’ll point to the Brené Brown classic for a deeper dive on empathy and how it is distinct from sympathy:
What is important to understand is that you’re not acknowledging right nor wrong, you’re acknowledging how the person on the other side of the conversation feels and relating to their feeling this way. You’re demonstrating that you really, truly care about them, and that your ultimate goal is to improve that state of being via your intervention or capacity or capability or otherwise.
They way I often describe this to front-line customer service people is to explain that whenever someone calls in for help, they have two problems. The first is the one they tell us about: that their phone stopped working, or that they can’t access their account, or so on. The second problem is often either alluded to or completely unstated, but is the actual issue that drove someone, even knowing how they generally feel about calling customer service, to decide to spend what could be hours of their life on the phone.
That problem is that they’ve lost trust in the institution behind that product or service. It caused them emotional or, in even more tragic circumstances, physical pain. Their trust has been violated and they feel angry or upset or aggrieved.
Just about everyone has a story about a time they’ve had a problem and had to contact some Customer Service team for help, and had a terrible experience. If you listen to enough of these stories (and if you hope to get better at coaching people to be better at customer service, bad customer service stories are very enlightening, so I highly encourage you to listen to a LOT of them, if you can), there’s a piece that ties every one of them together. It might be stated, or implied, or grumbled about, but what you’ll hear, in one form or another, is “They didn’t care.”
If you think back to your own customer service horror stories, I’d bet a considerable sum that the reason it was terrible, and not just a forgettably poor experience, comes down to feeling like someone didn’t care, did everything they could to get you off the phone or handed off to someone else, and refused to hear to you, if they even bothered to listen you.
So, two problems: the technical problem and the emotional problem. The way to fix the emotional problem, which is nearly impossible to solve in isolation, is to marry it to the technical problem. The essence of it is: You have a problem. I care about you, and so I care about the problem you’re having. Let’s work together to solve the technical problem, and by doing so, work to restore the emotional problem we’ve now tied to it.
Now, I’m clearly simplifying here, and the real work goes into teaching people how to respond constructively and empathetically, and to not just sound like they care, but truly care about other people. However, whenever I’ve taught this theory to front-line advisors, they’ve instantly improved in their interpersonal efforts with customers. We’ve done nothing at all to improve the quality of their issue recognition, isolation, or instructive ability, and yet their overall customer satisfaction increases.
All because they’ve learned how to care, and to show the people they’re working with that they truly give a shit.
“Cool,” you, my imagined reader, might be saying, “that’s how to teach customer service people about fixing customer satisfaction issues. But you said you were going to tell me how to be better at managing people.”
Except I did. This all translates. As a manager, you serve your people. They are your customers, and you work for them. And the work you’re looking to do together is to improve their performance (their technical problem) by connecting with them as people first. Connect with what drives them, what their goals are, not your goals for them or the goals the company has set. Hear them and listen to them.
In short, give a shit about them as people, not as collections of statistics or lines in some scoreboard. Care more. Care conspicuously.
Employees, just like customers, all have stories about bad bosses. They come in many flavors, many anecdotes and stories. But just as before, I can tell you the common factor all those experiences have in common. “They didn’t care about me.”
If your people know you care, that you’re there for them as people and are working for their benefit, they develop trust with you. Trust that you have their best interests, not just the company’s, at heart. And when they trust you, they’ll walk through walls with you. As long as they know they’re doing so alongside you.
(The topic of Trust being the core value that’s broken in most relationships isn’t my novel insight. Patrick Lencioni points to it as the core disfunction of relationships, especially power relationships, in his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
I’m not a big business book guy, but this is one I feel comfortable recommending. Also, if you use my link to buy it, I might be able to get a fancy cup of coffee.)
Demonstrate that you care, that you have empathy for them, and with them, and that the goal in improving their capacity to do their jobs is to improve their overall lived experience. That you’re invested in them as people. That you care.
Give a shit, and they will too.