Treat your employees like a number and they’ll return the favor

- It's time for us to get real about what it means to be a boss. If you treat your employees like a number, they'll return the favor. They will treat your company and their job like just a transaction. You know, after I wrote "Leading with Noble Purpose," and "Selling with Noble Purpose," I started to get emails from people all over the world, young and old, saying the same thing. Top performers wrote to me and they poured their hearts out to me, and they said this. "I want our work to have a higher purpose. "I love our customers. "I love what we do here, but all my boss cares about "is the numbers." So I made a decision. Every time I got an email like that, I offered to send their boss a copy of the book, on me, and that's when things started to get really weird. I started to get these emails from their bosses saying, "I care about this business, "I love our customers, but it's my people. "All they care about is their paycheck." And so I started to think, what's going on here? Both sides, the employees and the boss, both think that they're the only one who really cares. What was happening, were the bosses lying? Was it cognitive dissonance? I couldn't figure it out. And then I remembered an incident that happened in my daughter's kindergarten class. I was the parent helper for the day, and the kids were making gifts for their moms for Mother's Day. And so the teacher had asked the kids, "What are your mommies' favorite things to do?" And the kids wrote down and drew pictures of the things that their moms loved best. And so I took their papers and I stapled 'em into these little books and put a ribbon around 'em, and of course I read them. You wouldn't believe it. Kid after kid said the same two things. Their mommies' favorite things to do were cleaning and sleeping. An entire class of five-year-olds believed that their mothers woke up every morning excited about two things, cleaning and sleeping. And so I asked them, "Well, what makes you think "that's your mom's favorite thing to do?" And they all said the same thing. "That's what she talks about all the time." She is always saying, "This place is such a mess. "We have got to clean up around here. "This is a mess!" And if she's not saying that, she's saying, "I am so tired, I have got to get some sleep." So cleaning and sleeping are what she talks about all the time, clearly that's what she cares about the most. The words of the leader matter. The way you talk about your organization tells your team what's most important to you. And so if you talk about money, they're going to assume that's all that matters to you, and that will eventually become all that matters to them. And they'll be more likely to leave for a few more dollars. But if you talk about customers, if you talk about how your products and services help the people you deliver them to, your employees will become more emotionally engaged. Because you see, your words tell your employees what your organization really stands for. Your words create their feelings, and the way your employees feel about your organizations drives their actions. So look at your words and ask yourself, "What assumptions are my employees making about me?"