He said that caring wasn’t ‘scalable’. We needed another option. It seems that in many businesses non-scalable solutions aren’t worth pursuing.

Yet, I question that. Success doesn’t happen at the institutional level; it occurs at the individual level. Your people don’t interact with your “company”; they interact with other people within your company and most importantly, with their leaders.

A commonly quoted phrase from employee engagement research says that people don’t leave companies, they leave bosses. But, not every “boss” believes that. In one organization, leaders complained that it was unfair to be held accountable for all of the questions on the employee engagement survey. Their argument was certain things like salary administration (and even salary ranges), benefits, facilities, equipment, and other aspects of the environment were out of their control. They believed that they were being dragged down by decisions that other people were making. We ran some data and found an interesting result:

But there is a more telling story here. It’s not just a simple case of people seeing the glass half full or half empty. The survey questions were divided into three categories: the organization itself (benefits, compensation, personal development opportunities, facility, etc), the manager, and co-workers.

Two out of the three categories address things that are basically consistent across the organization. Everyone has access to the same benefits, resources, infrastructure, etc. On the co-worker side, people didn’t only interact with others in their department, they interacted with other across the organization. And, within each department there were good performers and bad performers, personality differences/conflicts, and a pretty typical set of interpersonal issues. So, if everyone was experiencing the same organization and same co-workers, why did they have different impressions. The answer lies in the one thing that did actually change in the organization – the managers. So perhaps those managers’ concerns were misguided. It wasn’t that the organization was pulling them down. They were pulling the organization down.

The same thing applies to your customers. They don’t interact with your company either. They interact with a sales person, call center operator, service technician, or any one of the many people who support them. And, just as a bad manager can drag down the organization, each individual customer experience adds to or takes away from the customer’s impression of your company.

I disagree with the statement that caring can’t be scalable. Caring must be scalable to all levels of the orgnization. But, I do agree that there isn’t a one-size fits all scalable solution to creating genuine, authentic, and meaningful interactions. It’s the unique nature of those interactions that make them genuine, authentic, and meaningful. You can’t scale interactions. However, you can scale your selection and performance management processes to hire, reward, and promote people who create those types of interactions.

Instead of focusing on scalable solutions, we might want to start focusing on maximizing each individual interaction. To do this, we have to remember that interactions are not about programs and policies. They are about having people who care – whether it be about one another, the customer, or the organization. It’s about being able to address the unique needs, desires, and values of people. It’s about working at a micro scale rather than a macro scale.

In the end, business, and success in business are personal.