Who Cares?

A highly valued employee chooses to leave your organization.Your latest and greatest product or service underperforms. Your teams are failing to communicate well, causing delays and inefficiencies. You’ve done things the same way for so long, you’re not sure where to begin to make meaningful changes. You feel stuck and unable to grow, and have no idea how to adapt to evolving circumstances. What do you do?

As with many things in life, the answer is both simple and complex, but it starts with a question: Who Cares?

Before I explain, let me tell you what I don’t mean by that. I don’t mean “who cares” in a derisive sense, as in “I don’t give a flying fishmonger.” Nor do I mean it in the dismissive sense, as in “It’s just a game, who cares?”

What I’m actually talking about is something much deeper—as in, “Who is it that cares about this thing and why?” I’m suggesting an interrogative questioning of your employees’ needs and concerns, one that gets you to the real meat and potatoes of what you’re dealing with.

First, you’ve got to ask: “Who are the people that care about what I’m doing?”

And then: “Why do they care about it?” And: “How might they benefit or be harmed by what I’m doing or maybe not doing?”

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” - Plato

I once watched a very valuable coworker leave our company, not because she had a better offer, but because she just couldn’t stand to stay. I was devastated. At the time, I wasn’t in a position to make decisions that would affect the culture of the company but I it started me thinking about how things could’ve been different.

So who, in this situation, cared? I did, obviously, because she was an amazing asset and we lost her. But most importantly, she did. Here’s what I’m saying: She didn’t leave because she didn’t care. She left because she DID.

She cared about her work, but she wasn’t getting the support or direction she needed. She cared about growth and development, but was being left to her own devices. She cared about connection, but was becoming increasingly isolated. She cared about order, but was lost in the chaos.

What were her bosses doing? Not enough, as it turned out. Checking items off their daily lists and ticking all the boxes. But not paying enough attention to the people, not spending enough time asking: “Who cares, and what do they care about and why?”

When you don’t pay attention, and when you don’t care about what your employees care about, you won’t see that something is wrong until it’s too late.

Digging into these issues is what led me to develop a very different approach to leadership and mentoring—one that sees individuals as the life blood of a company, able to contribute in meaningful and essential ways to its health. Because, in the end, what you want is an organization that is thriving, not sitting on a life-support machine. Because even though it’s breathing, but it’s not getting up and going anywhere.

Asking “who cares?” works because it’s about people and people are at the heart of everything that you do. People power your organization, build your products, provide services, and plan, execute, and oversee all of your organization’s activities.

All of this doesn’t just apply to the people inside your organization, it works for the people outside it as well. It’s people who buy your products, hire your services, and participate in your activities. Everything that you do is about, and involves, people. Having a proper understanding of them and their problems, experiences, and driving forces is the key to success in any endeavor.

The question is so essential as a starting point to understanding people’s motivations, it’s where I begin with all of my brand and messaging strategy work because it allows me to construct carefully structured, highly targeted messaging concepts.

When combined with “jobs to be done” theory to build technology products, I’m better able to design those products around the needs of the people who will use them, rather than around the whims of the people building them.

There’s really no better place to start than to ask the question “who cares?” But you must interrogate the answer, considering not just who cares, but why they care and how they stand to benefit or suffer from what you’re doing or not doing. Above all, you need to steer clear of making a judgement about how people should be, trying instead to understand them as they are.