Take Care of Your Team, and They’ll Take Care of You
My daughter is big into skiing. We spend winter weekends trekking up to Waterville, NH so she can compete.
At the end of this past season, she and I were talking about why she loves skiing so much.
“I love to ski,” she told me. “I love Waterville. But what I really love is having a team. As long as I can be part of a team of people I’m friends with, I don’t care where I ski.”
And I knew it was true.
Because at the time, my daughter had a broken leg. She hadn’t been on a pair of skis in months. But every weekend, we still made the trip to Waterville so she could cheer on her teammates.
She loves her team. And they love her back.
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Whether you feel positively or negatively about someone, they already know it.
In business, you have to care about your team. Regardless of how they act, how much money they make you, or even if they’re the right fit for your organization.
You need to care about those people because they’re your people—not because you’re trying to get something out of them.
That’s not to say you won’t move people around or even out of the company. Don’t confuse caring with the ability to make difficult decisions. You won’t serve your team or your business by being too nice. But those changes should never affect how you feel about your team members as human beings.
I came up as an entrepreneur in the student painting world. And I still remember the first manager’s manual I received. At the bottom of every single page was a phrase: “Take good care of your painters, and they’ll take good care of you.”
I never forgot it.
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Bottom line: if you don’t care about your people, it’s hard to be successful. Not impossible, but exceedingly difficult.
And even if you can succeed, I guarantee you won’t have much fun doing it.
I can’t make you care. But I’ll tell you that if you don’t care about your team, you should probably not be an entrepreneur. Caring is just part of the job.
Who knows - maybe my daughter will switch to a different team at some point. Maybe she will compete for years to come. Or maybe she’ll tell me tomorrow that she never wants to ski again.
What matters most is that I’m proud of everything she accomplishes up on the mountain. But if she takes one thing with her as she grows up, I hope it’s the ability to genuinely love being part of a team.
