When it comes to your staff or colleagues, sniff, don’t bite

Let’s have a D&M. That’s a ‘deep and meaningful’ for anyone who hasn’t ever been pinned into a corner at a party by a gin-sodden wreck who has just been dumped by his partner/lost his job/crashed the car. Or possibly all three.

Fear not, none of the above has happened to me. Well, not right now. They have of course all happened to me at some time but mercifully not all at once and not for some time. I have a wholly different issue to discuss. And I’m completely dry-eyed – for now.

Here it is: I was on the tube last week and my carriage was crammed with a class of school kids. This wasn’t like the class of kids of a few months ago. The ones whose teachers seemed to have omitted the concept of manners from the curriculum and who annoyed me to the point that I actually complained. One of my stress triggers, as you may tell, is rude kids and lazy teachers. The combination is toxic and, as far as I am concerned, the teacher’s fault. There, I’ve said it.

No, this lot was from Wendell Park Primary School, near StamfordBridge in London. I know that because I was so impressed with them that I asked. I mention them for two reasons – firstly, because they were such an exemplary, well mannered, gracious, joyous, multi-cultural bunch of kids and teachers/assistants that they lifted my spirits on a grey weekday morning, and I think that we should comment when we see good things.

And secondly, because seeing them, with all their various ethnicities, colours, accents – all those apparent differences laid out right in front of my eyes – really made me think about the big school that is an office, and the staff that work therein. People build a business, after all. And your people are both more fragile and more influential than you think. The impact of life inside and outside the business can derail even the best practical intentions.

If we could see past the outside of our colleagues, into their hearts and souls, we might – almost certainly would – treat them better. If we wore our differences and our pains on the surface of our skins instead of hidden inside us and behind our masks, we could react compassionately instead of blindly.

We might take into account that Paul was struggling to pay his mortgage this month because he had to pay for care for elderly parents; that Lesley’s husband is suffering from profound depression and she is both worried sick and tired beyond comprehension with holding someone else up; that Richard simply doesn’t know how to hit his targets this month and is scared to tell his Sales Director.

But we don’t know these things. We don’t know the million little worries and issues that our colleagues carry in on their backs every time they come to work. And they don’t know ours.

So, here is an idea, maybe we could pretend that we did?  We could try being a little kinder to our colleagues and the next time we are snapped at and don’t snap back, perhaps we can defuse something that had nothing to do with us anyway.

And sometimes, it’s possible to simply tell people you are not at your best today and ask for some unquestioning forgiveness.

The writer Michael Faber once wrote that: ‘I’d always thought that the world’s evils – war, rape, racial hatred – were caused by lack of intelligence, people behaving like animals.  Now I understood that what’s lacking when people treat each other cruelly is animal recognition.  It’s the awareness of being the same species. Humans need to sniff each other and not bite.  Whoever we are we are each man-shaped parcels of skin and bone, standing face to face on Planet Earth.’