129. Every Company is A People Company
...some just suck at it
It’s one of my pet peeves.
When I’m conducting a job interview and ask the candidate to tell me about themselves, I cringe when they respond with some variation on “I’m a people person.”
What I hear is something akin to “I’m awesome at breathing air, both inhaling and exhaling”.
I assume they mean that they communicate well with other people, a talent they’d share with most, if not all, of the human population. I mean, I understand “man’s man” and “ladies man”. I even get “animal lover”. But “people person”?!
We are all people people. If you talk or communicate with other humans, you are a people person. Sure, not everybody communicates the same way - no single person is understood and loved by everyone. But that doesn’t make any of us less of a “people person” than another. We are all different in who we are and how we communicate.
Fortunately, there are some common threads that weave through the essence of human communication.
We want to be heard
We want to be respected
We want to be valued
For once, in an interview, when I ask the candidate about their communication style, I’d like to hear something along those lines: “I strive towards communicating with people in a way that makes them feel heard, respected and valued.”
You know what, I’d also like? I’d like to have all companies act that way too.
A People Company
I was on a Zoom meeting recently with a company leader and they referred to their company as “a people company”.
At first I thought he was trying to differentiate the organization from, say, a zoo. But I soon realized that he used the term “a people company” to mean “a company that cares about its people.”
The thing is, they don’t. The leader just thought they did. However, leaders are often disengaged from what really happens at a company - but, I’ll be talking more about that in the next issue.
Going back to the three elements of communication that I mentioned above - feeling heard, respected and valued - oftentimes leaders will believe an “open door policy” is the same as caring about employees and letting them be heard. But, as we’ve discussed before, open door policies are a sham, solely designed to make the leader feel like they are being available without having to actually be available.
Being a People Company is about action, not talk. It’s about asking for opinions, not waiting for somebody to walk through a proverbial open door.
I worked at a company once where employees would submit their expense reports only to have the payment be put in the regular accounts payable queue, to be paid in 30 days.
Thirty days for a company to pay back an employee who had used their own money to benefit the organization is not a way to show employees that they are respected. (In my company we paid back immediately, sometimes the same day)
A company is nothing without its employees.
Being a people company means treating every person in the organization with the importance, respect and value they deserve.
A people company is responsive to it’s employees
A people company doesn’t mess up or delay paychecks.
A people company doesn’t delay bonuses, commissions or reimbursements
A people company doesn’t ignore complaints.
A people company puts their intentions in writing and lives up to them.
A people company doesn’t wait to learn about issues, they try to foresee them
A people company cares about improving culture every single day
Is your company a people company?