The power of personal experience

Thank you very much to Beth Wallace at A Bigger Voice for this support of Humans At Work.

Beth’s post reminds me once again of the power of personal experience. Data is important; sometimes statistics matter; but humans learn our deepest lessons through our own experience. What happens to us matters — it affects us not just in that moment, but potentially in all our moments to come. And so it also matters how we “happen” to other people.

Human relationships are all about behavior. People can’t read our minds, and when our behavior is at odds with our stated intentions, it’s the behavior that they remember. It is our behavior that shows our love, heals another’s pain, cheers someone on to success. And every human interaction, even the briefest exchange at the cash register or the coffee shop, is a relationship.

Managing each other is one of the most important relationships we have as adults. We all have stories like Beth’s (in fact, there’s a part of the Humans At Work forum reserved for such stories, good and bad — I’ll be posting some of mine there, and I hope you will too). We all know how much difference a bad manager makes in our day, our year, our lives. It’s my hope that one day we will all, every single one of us, know through personal experience the difference that a good manager can make.