Advice: Care
Dave does encourage personal blogs, see Brad’s blog from a few weeks ago.
So, here’s one. Sort of.
Monday morning. So, I’m in the office this morning and I notice Dave is not here yet, so I check the calendar, no, he has nothing on the calendar, so I just expect he’s running late or had something that came up and he’ll be in shortly. A few hours go by, and he arrives and tells a story of his crazy morning, which included seeing a dog lying in the road after being hit by a car. So Dave stopped, got out. The dog was still alive. But he was seriously injured, and his blood was somewhat dried on the road, so he had been laying there for a good 45-60 minutes. Drivers had just been passing him by.
Dave parked his vehicle in the road, put the flashers on, grabbed some towels he had in the car and – best he could – wrapped the dog up and took him to his car. He drove him to a vet and stayed while they inspected the dog, and took xrays (he has the xrays now on his phone). This dog was horribly injured, pelvic bones broken, all legs broken, multiple other injuries. And so this dog had to be put down and taken out of his pain. Dave stayed and paid for the examination, xrays, and procedure. It was about $300.
And that’s it. Over. On to work.
So when Dave got in, he had dog poop on his shirt, some blood. He was a bit of a mess, so he had to explain to us why. What really stuck to Dave was that the dog had been lying there for maybe an hour, plenty of cars had to pass by, and no one stopped. No one did anything. No one cared. And Brad Kaye looked over at me as I walked up and was just hearing this story, and says Steve Hendrix would have stopped.
My wife Rachel, who is the greatest person in the world, told me about a client last week who thanked her for being so organized and making everything so easy for them (Rachel manages corporate events and weddings). It made Rachel feel good to have that feedback, so I told her the real difference between good businesses and bad businesses, is that the employees at good businesses care. They just care, that’s all it is. It doesn’t matter how talented you are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, it doesn’t matter how well educated you are. The difference is whether you care.
And so when Brad Kaye said – Steve Hendrix would have stopped, I thought well, everyone here would stop. It’s because everyone here cares. And it is hard for an organization to care if the care is not part of the culture, and that can only happen if it is top to bottom.
