Important: if you get off here, there is a Mike’s Pastry and also a college. The bakery is more fun. Get the Florentine Cannoli.
Quite a bit ago in my career, back when I was an individual engineer spending more than my fair share of time “on the keyboard,” my manager offered me a tip that I thought was pointless at the time. He forwarded me an email from Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day distribution. The tip that day was unmemorable – all I remember about it is that it didn’t seem relevant to our organization, and certainly not to my day-to-day job. What I do remember is that he tossed a note on the top that said: “You should subscribe to this.”
Now remember; I was an individual contributor; I didn’t manage anyone. Subscribing was easy – and so I did it, but I didn’t think I was going be in a leadership role (certainly not anytime soon.) Ultimately, the joke was on me as I was promoted to be a team lead about a month later. I guess the lesson here is that if you’re more perceptive than I am, you might be able to read between the lines and get some insight from the things your boss says or does that I apparently miss.
Regardless, I started getting these short newsletters once day (along with an advertisement for some product from HBR – nothing is truly free) that were easy to read and seemed like a decent way to try to learn something new every morning (they’re generally delivered around 4 am, so they’re high in my inbox each morning when I get up.) Sometimes they’re really useful and I’ve often centered my staff meetings around a topic that is called out in one of the tips. I think in all cases the tips they give are summarizations or partial ideas from articles published in Harvard Business Review, which is an outstanding publication and delivers fantastic business, management, leadership, service, professional, and organizational insights and advice from some of the brightest and most influential minds in the world. Often, articles are written by Harvard Business School professors.
I will grant you that these are blasted out to who-knows-how-many subscribers around the globe in a near-infinite array of industries. As a result, sometimes they aren’t super relevant to my role or my employer – but I read them anyway, because knowledge (like power tools) is virtually always a good thing to have even if you don’t know exactly where or how to use it right now.
To extrapolate on that, I’ll refer your back to an earlier post about the importance of technical learning and I’ll add that learning anything at any time can be useful in ways you don’t expect. One of the best systems engineers I know was a Criminal Justice major in college, and actually used his knowledge of law enforcement to build an awesome EUC environment for first responders. I think continuous learning is so important that I specifically try to find curious people who love to learn to work on my team – I think it’s a differentiator for anyone in any career and at any level. If you learn, you grow. If you grow, you excel. If you excel, you get ahead. The corollary to all of that is that if you don’t learn, you have a tendency to stay “stuck” in one place or role.
Back to the newsletter: Despite how valuable these are and how much I’ve gotten out of them over the last decade a recent edition made me stop and scratch my head. It was titled “Learn to Pronounce Your Colleagues’ Names Correctly.” I was skeptical after just seeing the title but figured I’d expend the 30 seconds to read the tip and see where it took me. It was adapted from a longer article available on HBR’s website. It effectively boils down to this:
Step 1: Ask the person how to pronounce their name
Step 2: Say it like they do
That’s it. Which if you have any interest at all in a person, you should want to do this naturally and not because HBR told you to do so. And that’s what bugs me about this article – it’s trying to get people to act like we are at least minimally interested in those around us – which you should be because they’re people you work with and not randos on the street.
We’re 500 words in, and we’ve reached our topic today: why you should give a hoot about the people you work with and treat them like the people they are and not the nameless units of labor that your company policy might sometimes lead you to believe that they are. Knowing how to say someone’s name (and caring enough to ask if you don’t know) seems like the absolute lowest bar we could set for ourselves when it comes to developing a relationship with someone. Not doing so would demonstrate a complete lack of interest or concern for the people around you – and people who have that slant should absolutely never be in leadership, which is why I’m disappointed that this article needed to be written.
It seems to me that if you’re going to work with someone, you’re going to spend as much or more of your waking hours with that person than you probably would if you were married to them. I know I see the people I work with more than I see my wife Monday through Friday. If you’re going to be around someone that much – don’t you want to have a good relationship with them? Life is much too short to spend that much time with someone we don’t like to be around. I can do that by going to Walmart on a Saturday around lunch – I don’t need to do it on my own time. The only way I know to build a strong relationship is to show interest in other people, learn what they care about, and find common ground that you can use as a starting point.
Do you know how hard it is to find a picture that shows two professionals and conveys relationship building? Just look at the puppy and be happy, okay?
I’m a big believer that you should not have a “work” persona and a “home” persona. I think you should just be who you are. And I hope that people that know me from a professional setting, volunteer setting, and in my home with my family would at least say that I have a consistent personality. I hope that part of that consistent personality is that I legitimately care about the people I interact with. When it comes to professional development or opportunities, I try really hard to put people in positions that they can get a lot out of and grow so that they can continue to develop their careers.
If you are a manager, you absolutely need to get to know the people on your team. Know what they care about, know what motivates them. Know what sports teams they root for and where they call “home.” If you do that, you can build stronger relationships with them where you see each other not as cogs in a machine trying to achieve organizational goals, but instead as people who are part of a team. When you do that, you humanize the workplace and make it a better office to spend 8 to 10 hours a day in. It’s a way to care for and about your team. The added benefit for you as a manager is that this is not only the right thing to do, but it returns dividends for you in that your team will become more invested in you and more likely to follow your lead and direction as they won’t want to let you down – we all try harder to please people we have a genuine relationship with than people we don’t.
And while it may be easy to write about why you should care and be invested if you are a manager or in a leadership role, I think this is just as important if you are in an individual contributor role. Even one – perhaps especially one – where you don’t have many day-to-day-interactions with others in the office and even if you have no management aspirations. It seems simple, but if you show interest in others and consistently show that you care about others, they will be much more willing to help you in spite of any constraints they are dealing with like budget or calendar pressure. That’s only natural; we want to help those that we like and have relationships with.
I’m reminded of a time years ago when I was responsible for running multiple app migrations to a new infrastructure, and we were running into some connectivity issues. Others on my team had struggled to get the appropriate attention from the network SME team. I had been friendly with one of the sharper network engineers on the team and despite my total indifference about motorcycles, asked him about his and how his restoration job was going because he loved talking about it. I stopped by his office and asked him what he thought of our issues and had total resolution within a few hours because he wanted to help me. For years, he and I were able to make so much happen so quickly because we had each others’ backs. Ultimately, we were both promoted to management because we “could get things done.” But even if you don’t want to go to management think about how much better your working life would be if you built up that mutual trust and investment in each other.
One of my favorite management philosophies is known as “MBWA,” or Management By Walking Around. While there are huge benefits to just being out among your team, be it on the manufacturing floor, the datacenter, or in a cube farm, one of the things this lets you do is have lots of impromptu “visits” where you can build relationships. Just stopping by to ask people how their weekend was or how their kid’s birthday party went has earned me a lot of relational capital, but you shouldn’t do it because you get all of that capital. You should do it because you actually care. People can spot a fraud a million miles away, and if you’re only trying to butter someone up because you want them to come in on Saturday at 3 am to upgrade some production-impacting equipment they will know before you even open your mouth.
With that in mind, here’s the most important reason I know to take an active interest in and build relationships with the people in your office: because they are people. They are people with lives, dreams, challenges, and feelings.
Above all else regardless of where you are or what role you are in, you should endeavor to be good to those around you.
Pictured: Too much. No one is asking you to do this with your team.
Okay, on to you:
When was the last time someone in management made it clear they cared about you? How about the last time they made it clear they didn’t?
Are you pretending to care about people you work with or do you actually care?
Who in your office can you build a better relationship with today?