Work IS Personal

People in large organizations often talk and think in terms of departments, groups, trends, surveys, averages and demographics. We bunch people together as interchangeable units, and refer to them as head count, bandwidth, resources. We speak of the customer, the client, the student, the employee as if they can be represented by some typical abstraction. We structure everything to deal with groups, with averages, with typicals, and lose site of the fact that all business is personal. All transactions and interactions and relationships are literally between individuals.

What does this mean? What can we possibly do differently? We have a thousand employees; we can't possibly be expected to know them all personally!

That's true. In your personal life, you may have a small core of five really close friends, a wider circle of fifty casual contacts, and 150 acquaintances. In your work place, as the group gets larger than about 200 people, it gets very hard to know everybody and it starts to feel impersonal.

So what can you do?

You can be personally interested in twenty people, or thirty people, and know who they are, what they're interested in, what their kids are involved with, what they do on the weekends. You can personally care about their success, their fears, their hopes - about them as a person. And they can, in turn, be personally interested in another twenty people, or thirty people, and so on.

These personal relationships and personal interest are the glue that holds an organization together. We think that our org chart represents the structure of our company, but this is largely an illusion. It is the individual relationships, it is trust and caring, that truly allow things to get done. Steven Covey says that "Trust is the highest form of personal motivation" and trust is always a personal decision.

What do you, as a unique individual, think about that?