How do I get people to care?
That was the question that weighed heavily on our group and became the central theme during a feedback session I hosted with a group of junior leaders in my organization years ago. It’s a question that has haunted me as a leader ever since.
This session years ago was designed to explore what was working and what was not working in our organization, and what actions we needed to take as a result. During it, one junior leader courageously shared that she was struggling to lead her team to get the results expected of them…and that she knew they were capable of.
I asked her to share more. And she continued, sharing all the things she had tried as a leader to motivate her team – incentives, personal appeals and encouragement, and goal setting. She even admitted to devolving to threats. But she said none of it worked. Her team remained mediocre, uninspired, uncommitted.
So, I asked her what she thought the core issue was. With defeat in her eyes and voice, she responded, “I don’t know. They just don’t care.” As we all sat with the heavy reality of her situation, knowing this problem is not her isolated one alone, she broke the silence and asked the question, “how do I get people to care?”
While honest, this is not one single leader’s problem. This is a challenge all of us face. All leaders are called to get people to care – care about our team, our why, and the impact we have through our business. But how do we get our people to care more? It’s a great question, and one worth exploring. So, let’s dive into a few simple strategies in today’s episode.
Welcome to the 3x5 Leadership podcast where we champion intentional leaders who create significant impacts. In this show, we offer simple, practical strategies to help you live, lead, and learn more intentionally. I’m Josh and I’m so glad that you’ve joined us today.
Now, before we get into today’s episode, I want to first thank some of our new patrons who support 3x5. That includes Shawn from Euharlee, Georgia – Christine from Prospect Heights, Illinois – and Hugh from Clarksville, Tennessee – all who joined our community in the last two weeks. Not only does our community of patrons enjoy weekly, exclusive content from our team, but they are the ones that make everything we produce, like this podcast, possible. So, first, thank you to Shawn, Christine, and Hugh for joining! And, second, if you’re interested in becoming a patron as well, you can learn more and join at patreon.com/3x5leadership. We’ve got the link in the show notes for you to check out.
Ok, so, let’s get into getting people to care more. It’s just another word for things we routinely discuss as leaders – words like ownership, commitment, buy-in, and engagement. And it’s a simple idea, really. When someone cares about something, they are more willing to put in more effort, commit more resources, make it better, and take responsibility for it.
But why don’t people care? Well, caring consumes resources. When we care, we give our time, energy, and effort – all which are finite resources that matter a whole lot to us. We don’t give those resources recklessly. Caring also requires responsibility. When we care about something, we claim stake into it. We become responsible for it in some way, large or small. And responsibility means risk…and consequences. So, it’s often easier to not care – to look at a problem and safely resolve that that’s not our problem, freely going on to live our unburdened lives.
And yet, there’s plenty of research that points to the power of people caring more. Engaged employees are 22% more productive than unengaged ones. They are 21% more profitable. And they are 87% less likely to voluntarily leave their job.
But I also think that even without the supporting research, we can all see the positive impacts on our team and our results of people who care more. When our people care, we can delegate more freely and confidently. We know they are going to own the task and figure it out without requiring much oversight. They operate from a position of internal motivation – willing to take on responsibility, take pride in their work, get results that meet and often exceed expectations, they earn and maintain trust, and they are more self-sufficient.
So, yes, having people that care more on our teams is desirable. But we return to the original question now – how do we get people to care like that? While I don’t see there being one, right way to do this – like I can’t simply give you some 10-step instruction manual on how to get people to care more – I do think there are helpful strategies we can focus on and employ to do so. So, we will walk through 7 manageable strategies to help you encourage others to care more.
But as we navigate these strategies, we do need to remember that nurturing a sense of care and ownership in others takes time and takes consistency. We can’t expect to merely put one of these strategies into action, do it once, and then magically our people will begin to care more. No, it’s going to take time and consistency. It’s like a relationship – well, I mean it is a relationship – which requires trust. That trust is built over time…with consistency, through credibility, and with integrity.
So, let’s get into our 7 strategies, with number one being to care about our people as people first.
Our people are more than just a name and a position in our organization. They have a life, they have worth, they have goals and dreams. They experience challenges, maintain worries, as well as have needs. They seek authentic connection with others. Our people are people who desire to lead a meaningful life, which includes many things beyond their hours at work.
So, as leaders we ought to see and appreciate our people as human beings with worth before anything relating to work. Care for them. Get to know them. See them as a person first – flaws, needs, desires, and all.
A lesson my mom taught me growing up was that no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. In my role as a leader, I use that phrase as a reminder to care about the person first before I ask them to care about our organization or their job. Pour into them before we ask them to pour their time, energy, and trust into our team.
And if we’re feeling kind of at a loss and looking for ways to care, I like to default to a simple model of knowing four basic things about a person – know their family, their birthday, their hobbies, and their professional aspirations. For family, know what they consider to be family. Boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancées, parents, and siblings are all part of family. So, don’t just ask if they have a spouse and kids. Let the other person define what family matters to them. I like to do this by first asking if they are married or have a significant other and then ask where they live – just like a general description of the area. From this approach in the past, I’ve learned when some of my teammates live with a significant other, I’ve learned that one lived with his parents, or others that had roommates. By learning that, though, I gain an appreciation for who they consider to be family so I’m not inappropriately differentiating between married people and not.
Know their birthday and put it on your calendar so you can celebrate it with them, even through just a small acknowledgement. It’s a real simple way to show you know them and care.
Also learn their hobbies, or more specifically, how they like to spend their time away from work. I actually ask that question, “how do you like to spend your time when not at work?” I find that question helps me get more insight over merely asking about their hobbies. When I ask about how they spend their time, I learn what is important to them, even if they are not typical activities like hobbies. Important non-hobbies we can learn about might be a person preparing for law school, volunteering, or spending time with their kids – things not typically found in the hobby category. But knowing about their hobbies or how they like to spend their time out of work helps us to connect on a personal, non-work related way. Personally, I may know nothing about cars, fishing, hunting, or powerlifting, but I do know how to ask someone about those hobbies if it interests them and listen to them talk about it.
Finally, know about their professional aspirations, whether within or beyond the scope of your organization. It’s a great way to connect to and support their dreams. If you know you have a teammate who desires to go to law school, you can engage them on their progress for school applications, studying for and taking the LSAT, and so on. It’s a way to show interest and care – it can also be a way to support them, offering help when you can.
But through these few simple bits of information – family, birthday, hobbies, and professional aspirations – we can make deeper connections with our people and genuinely care for them. And this matters because care given leads to care reciprocated. People tend to be interested in others who are interested in them. By caring for people first and foremost, we earn credibility, trust, and respect, which leads to a reciprocation of care back to us and our team.
A second strategy to cultivate care in others is to give them responsibility for something meaningful. Now, meaningful doesn’t mean big or of great consequence, but something they know matters. And we do it prudently, giving responsibility for something small and manageable first, increasing that responsibility with time, practice, trust, and credibility. We can give them responsibility for a stand-alone task, a routine process the team uses, or even a finite project. But like we discussed in our last episode, which looked at delegation, when we give responsibility – provide our people with the what, the why, and the desired end state of the task, but let them workout the how.
For example, I have a direct report who I placed in charge of running our weekly staff meeting. In giving him responsibility, I provided him the purpose of the meeting, what we aim to get out of it for our boss, and a few parameters of what we need to cover regarding the agenda. Then I let him prepare for the first one. Before that first one, I had him do a rehearsal with me to make sure he felt prepared, and the meeting would run well. And over the first few meeting iterations, I would help him shape the weekly meeting agenda. But now, we are at a point where I don’t have a hand in preparing for or running the meeting at all – he is capable of doing it all on his own. He has my trust. And because of that, I’ve now placed him in charge of another meeting – this time, I’ve had barely any hand in helping him get it up-and-running because of the trust and credibility established.
But I believe people want to own things – to be able to pour energy into making something great, that matters, and that they can be proud of. With responsibility, they contribute to something that impacts others positively. And all this generates internal motivation – their commitment to care more. So, we can help inspire others to care more by giving them responsibility to own things that matter and have impact.
Third, a way to get others to care is to involve them in things like decisions, planning, and problem solving. When people are given the chance to weigh-in, they then often choose to buy-in. When involved, we feel seen, heard, and valued. And when we feel that, we care more.
And we can use simple questions to involve others – questions like “what are your thoughts?”, “what would you do?”, and “how do you see this situation?”. These can start great conversations, which invite others to participate. And when they do, we not only build a more inclusive environment, but also enable more diverse thinking and thus solutions. So, let’s involve our people more.
The fourth strategy to get our people to care more is to bring energy to the team and perspective to their contributions. Energy is contagious. When leaders bring energy to who we are, what we do, and why we do it as an organization, people get curious; they get interested. But when we talk about energy, we are not talking charisma, showiness, or loudness. Leaders can be energetic without creating a circus. We do it first, through a personal belief in and commitment to our team’s mission. We gotta own it. And talk about it. Using any opportunity we can to share that we believe in who we are as an organization, what we do, and why we do it. We share about it with conviction, pride, and ownership. No one ever quit a job because they were overcommunicated to, so don’t be afraid to help others see, know, and appreciate.
And as part of our communication, we bring energy to peoples’ contributions too. Bringing energy really can simply look like connecting peoples’ individual efforts to organizational impact. We talk them through how their actions enable the organization to produce certain results, deliver certain necessities to customers, and ultimately make peoples’ lives better. And those can certainly get people to care more.
Our fifth strategy to encourage others to care more is to show them appreciation. We all want to be value added to others. We all want to do a good job, and for others to acknowledge it and the hard work we put in. So, showing appreciation – also known as gratitude – is a simple, but powerful way to do that. Appreciation doesn’t have to be soft, weak, or emotional. We can do it in just as simple, direct, purposeful ways as we do giving guidance or feedback.
We actually explored easy ways we all can lead with gratitude better in a previous podcast episode, episode #16. In it, we offered five simple ways we can express gratitude better as a leader. They were simple actions like actually saying thank you…such a novel idea I know! But they were doable, meaningful ways we can, so I encourage you to check out that episode as well, which we have linked in the show notes.
Now, strategy six calls us to develop our people…to have a growth plan and process for them. If you just Google “top reasons people leave their jobs,” every list from a reputable source will report that one of the top five reasons includes not getting the job growth and career advancement they are looking for. People want to be poured into at work. We want to learn how to do a better job, how to manage increased responsibilities, and actually get the chance to. We seek mentorship.
So, as leaders, we need to take an active role in developing our people and not leave it as an afterthought or to chance. We need to do more than merely say, “just watch how I lead and manage, and do that.” That’s lazy and unthoughtful.
And building a growth plan doesn’t have to be hard or overwhelming. We have simple tools at our disposal. Tools like being a mentor, using goal setting, giving feedback, engaging in regular one-on-one meetings, and opportunities to give leadership space for others to fill and practice in. So, the tools are there. It’s just about putting them to use in a planned, practical, structured approach. Yes, these will take some time and effort, sure. But the investment will be well worth the return. Our people will not only care more, but will become more capable, more self-sufficient, and act more out of initiative. We’ve referenced a bunch of these available tools in the show notes so you can check those out too.
Ok, the seventh and final strategy to get our people to care more is to just simply be a decent person to work for. There’s a model for organizational cohesion that breaks it up into three components. One of those components is what’s called “social cohesion,” meaning I like you, I like working with you, and enjoy doing so. We can build social cohesion with our team by being a decent boss – really just a decent human being.
So, be approachable. Show interest and energy when you have the opportunity to connect and talk with people. Make them feel welcome, seen, and valued. Don’t let them feel fear or worry about coming to ask you a question or bother you in your office.
Be relatable, be authentic. Show that you’re human too – that you have a life, a family, interests, worries, concerns, and needs. Laugh. Have fun. Get to know others, yes, but let others get to know you too. Don’t take yourself so seriously and don’t take our team’s work too seriously as well. Be slow to anger and judgement. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume positive intent.
All these things together can help us to be a decent person to work for. And when we are, it just makes work easier and more fun. People then spend less energy trying to hide, fake, or lie their way through work each day, and instead use that energy toward their work, all while having a better time, better attitude, and willingness to care more. So, don’t underestimate the power of simply being a good boss and a reasonable, enjoyable person to work with.
There we have it – seven easy strategies to help our people care more at work. And when they care more, our team becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. We are a better team, a stronger team, one capable of more – and one that actually becomes more fun and engaging to be in. I hope these strategies equip and inspire you to lead more intentionally this week, and to connect with your people in a more productive way.
Now, to end, please consider taking a few actions. First, I invite you to give our show a like and a review. It helps build our credibility to encourage others to check the show out.
Second, subscribe to 3x5 via email to get notified of our new insights published every Monday. When you do, you’ll also get our guide on the 10 habits of intentional leaders. And if you already subscribe, invite a friend or colleague to join who you think would benefit. The link to the 3x5 subscription page is in the show notes.
And third, think about becoming a patron of 3x5. Like I shared at the beginning of this episode, not only do you help make this podcast possible, but you’ll enjoy sweet exclusive content like weekly leadership tips. Again, the link to our patreon page is in the show notes.
So, thanks for taking your time to join us. Thanks for your support of 3x5 and, more importantly, thanks for choosing to lead intentionally wherever you serve every day. It matters.
And until next episode, friends, take care and lead well.
