Should you care?

TL;DR: Caring is a necessary condition for survival; not all organizations prioritize that.

Two conversations

While initially sound, my work relationship with Person #1 had been failing in a way that caused us both much discomfort. As we were reflecting on it he said “you care too much”; “one should not care about their work”. I think for him it was a code for, “I’ve twice your years in the industry, know your place”. He left that job a few months later, and I left about a year after that. Person #1 and I are no longer in touch.

I got to know Person #2, a few years older than Person #1, as a potential employer; when it came to discussing joint values, he pointed me at Stephen Zweig’s The Impatience of the Heart, a book I had previously not been acquainted with, and asked me to read the first paragraph:

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PITY One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

In my words: not only should I most definitely care, but it is a moral necessity to effect that care, even if it becomes a burden.

Person 2 had me at that. I decided to join him.

Why care? Why not?

These days entire organizations need to justify their existence. Given an existential challenge, a collective of people that care might have a fighting chance; much less so the indifferent one. Everybody agrees that people who reach a certain status within an organization are expected to care about it. However, the real catch is the complement - who else is expected to care?

A lot of Important People spread around mantras to the tune of “caring is in our culture”, “we encourage everybody to care”, etc. Few things are then more heart-breaking than discovering that that what a lot of these really care about is optics – and indeed brag only because that makes them look better. (Here I should remark that optics on their own are a legitimate aspect of a workplace culture; it is the obsession with optics over major outcomes that’s a flag to me.)

In particular, a typical corporate middle manager would much rather have an employee shut up about troubling observations and lingering doubts rather than step in to help. This is especially the case if there’s even a slight chance that the issue or its resolution entails the prospect of the manager looking bad – considering the fact that nobody is perfect, the latter fact creates a cozy cocoon of silence around such managers, which serves their own interests much better than those of the organization.

A second type of inhibition around caring is centered on people. While most organizations pay lip service to putting people above all, the pragmatic reality is that same organizations routinely set up practices and policies that substantially contradict employees’ long-term well being. Here, an obvious example would be the well-known pattern of otherwise uninfluential stakeholders to deliberately introducing stress as an artificial way of projecting importance.

Effecting caring

While discouraging caring about what folks do is a trait of any non-trivial management structure, it is not always pervasive to the same extent.

Person #1’s expectation of an employee’s utter cynicism, makes perfect sense when optics reign and nothing we choose matters.

Person #2’s opposite expectation makes perfect sense assuming there’s no fate but what we make.

I was lucky enough to be able to choose - and I know how privileged I am at that. I am grateful for that privilege and can only hope that it becomes a worthwhile choice for more people out there, which I think could lead up to a better, more meaningful, world for more people out there.

Beyond the choice whether to care - the choice between optics and outcomes, there’s a world of choices of how to do that. My own approach is consistently investing my time into the success of other people. For other people it could mean keeping the factory running, that agreed upon process is abided to, or that comms are running properly. Talking about caring is cheap; putting your time and prestige and indeed heart where your mouth is – if you can afford to pull it off, that’s in my eyes the one moral choice that matters.