How to treat the people who work with you

The people who work with you are not a cost to be squeezed, and they are not a problem to be managed. They are the work. Your product, your hours, your reputation with the people you serve — all of it passes through their hands. How you treat them is the culture. You do not need to write it down for it to be true.

Be clear. People cannot meet a standard you have not explained. It is easy to assume that what is obvious to you is obvious to everyone, especially if you have been doing the job for a long time. It is not. Ambiguity is not kindness. It is a way of setting someone up to fail, and then being disappointed when they do. Tell people what good looks like. Tell them what happens when something goes wrong. Write down the essential steps for the jobs that keep the place running. Then check that the explanation made sense, not only that you delivered it.

The first days matter more than we admit. A new person is learning the work and also the room: who to ask, what good actually looks like, and whether it is safe to say they do not understand. A careful first week saves months of quiet confusion later.

Be fair. The same rules, and the same respect, should apply whether someone is new or has been with you for years, and whether they are in the room or out of it. Teams notice favorites, even when the favorites are never named. They also notice who gets the benefit of the doubt and who does not. Fairness means the process is even, the chances are real, and no one has to guess where they stand.

Do not talk about people who are not in the room in a way you would not repeat if they walked in. It is a small discipline, and it builds trust faster than most speeches about culture.

Pay on time, every time. If you can pay a little better, do. Money is not the only thing people stay for, but late or confused pay poisons everything else you might be doing right. A paycheck is a promise. Treat it with the same care you would want applied to a promise made to you.

Give credit in public and correction in private. Never use one person as an example to scare the rest of the room. Shame is a poor teacher. It makes people careful about being seen, not careful about the work. When you have to correct someone, be specific, be prompt, and leave them a way to do it better the next time. When someone saves a difficult stretch of the day, say so, and say why. “Good job” is thin. “The way you handled that rush kept us from falling behind” is something a person can stand on.

Teach. If only you know how to do the essential jobs, you have not built a team. You have built a dependency, and it will show the first time you are away. Show a second person the important work before you need a substitute. It is slower at first. It is the only way a small operation becomes steady.

Listen before you decide whose fault a problem is. Many failures are system failures: a confusing process, a missing tool, a rush that was going to break somebody’s work no matter how hard they tried. Look at the system first. If you start with blame, people will spend their energy protecting themselves. If you start with curiosity, you might actually fix the thing.

Protect people’s time. Reasonable hours and time off are not rewards you hand out for extraordinary effort. They are how people last. A tired team can get through a hard week. A tired team asked to live that way will get you a year or two, and then you will be hiring again, and wondering why.

You set the tone under stress. That is the part you cannot delegate. If you snap, you have taught everyone that snapping is allowed. If you stay steady, you have given them a way to stay steady too. I have not always gotten this right. The days I regret most are not the ones where the work was hard. They are the ones where the work was hard and I made the people around me carry my temperature as well as their own.

When someone is not a fit, be honest and decent about it, and do not drag it out. Keeping a person in a role that is not working is not a favor. It uses up their time and the team’s. The kind version of a hard ending is one that is clear, prompt, and respectful of everything they did well.

All of this is ordinary. That is the point. People do not need a perfect person in charge. They need a fair one, a clear one, and one who remembers, on the busy days, that the people next to them are the work.

One thing to try this week

Ask one person who works with you, “What is one thing I could do that would make your work clearer or easier?” Listen all the way through, without defending yourself. Then act on one thing they said, and tell them you did.

Useful reading

• Hire and manage employees. U.S. Small Business Administration. Practical guidance on hiring, paying, and managing the people who work with you.
• High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It. Harvard Business Review. A clear introduction to why people need to feel safe telling the truth at work, and how to build that habit.
• Radical Candor. The official book page. A useful framework for caring about people and still being direct with them.
• The Feedback Fallacy. Harvard Business Review. A useful challenge to how most of us give feedback, and a better way to help people improve.
• Counseling and local assistance. U.S. Small Business Administration. A starting point for free mentoring and counseling for people who are starting or running a small operation.