Make Relating as a Human Being Your Highest Priority

by Ross West

At work as elsewhere, people sometimes forget that they and their coworkers are first of all not job titles, boxes on the corporate organization chart, rungs on the corporate ladder, or even achievers of goals for themselves and the company. Rather, they are first of all human beings. In fact, that’s the best they, and any of us, will ever be.

A management group had gone away for a meeting at a retreat setting more than a hundred miles away from the company’s headquarters. The location was somewhat inaccessible. A new executive who had been on the job for only a few days was present. Just as the meeting began, the new person received a message from his wife. She had become quite ill, so ill that she was unable to care for their children. Since the family was new to the area as well as to the company, she knew no one who could help. Could he come home?

How would the other members of the management team respond? Would they accept the very human need of the new executive? Would they feel that he was not dependable, that he was not as committed as they thought he was when they hired him, that he did not put the needs of the company first, and that they had made a wrong choice? After all, the new guy obviously was concerned about his wife and family and felt the need to do something to help them in spite of his new job’s demands.

The group responded magnificently. One fellow executive called his wife to see whether she could go to the new employee’s home and assist his family. She did. Another gave the new executive the name and phone number of the family doctor. A third loaned him a car to make the trip back home. A fourth marked the map to help him find his way.

Is it any accident that the company gets high marks from its customers for the service the company provides? Customer satisfaction begins with the quality of human relationships inside the company.

If you work with and for people who relate in this manner to fellow employees who are in need, you are fortunate. If you relate in this manner to fellow employees who are in need, your fellow employees are fortunate. Furthermore, they likely see you as a person truly living out faith at work.

It’s too easy, though, for decision makers, or even fellow employees, to treat the people with whom they work as only employees with skills rather than as human beings with a full life beyond the application of skills on the job. This sort of behavior downgrades people, of course. It occurs when people forget they are human beings first of all, and not employees or managers.

Even people of faith can surrender to the business culture that suggests people are important only for what they can do for the company, not for who they are. Responding to the challenge to live faith at work calls for relating as a human being to one’s fellow human beings at work. No amount of religious talk can substitute for this way of behaving and relating.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells how his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel used to say that when he was young, he admired clever people; but now that he had become old, he admired kind people. Wisdom leads to valuing kindness at work, too. Clever people are needed in the world of work, no doubt, but they are more helpful if they are also kind, relating to their coworkers as human beings, not merely as walking job titles and sets of skills.

From Go to Work and Take Your Faith Too!, by Ross West, pp. 90-91