Good Things Happen When We Put People First

Can you succeed in business and life when you put people first? Yes. Yes you can.

This episode outlines what it means to be helpful at home and at work, how taking an experimental approach to our work is a positive thing, and successful examples from life and business of the good things that happen when we put people first.

What is The Be Helpful Experiment?

I’ve got this theory to prove that good things do happen when we put people first. That we can be successful in business and in life when we take the time to be kind and understand the people around us. Whether that’s family, friends, co-workers, our boss.

When we sit and listen to their needs and help them and support them, we become somebody that, people want to work with, people want to be friends with, we want to be friends with them. We’re happy when we come home at the end of the day, and our family is happy to see us.

So, how do we get to this point of being somebody that others can rely on?

That’s the driving force behind my idea that good things happen when we put people first, and the experiment is all about the different ways we can do that. the ways we behave in the office, how we ask our co-workers to do things for us.

For example, if we’re a team leader or a project manager, how do we ask people, or influence them? Maybe we’re doing change initiatives and we have people who are champions, but we also have people who are resistant to those changes. How can we influence them in a positive and an ethical manner, to come on board, to get excited for what we’re doing?

How can we how can we be a better, family member? A better husband, brother, sister, mother, wife? How can we be a better friend?

Be Helpful

The dictionary definition for helpful is, “somebody who is useful.”

I have a couple of contexts to add to that. The first one is me, I am useful. The second one, is being helpful as a company or team leader when we understand what people need to be successful and providing the right solution.

As a leader, friend, husband, son, I want to be somebody that others can rely on. People can come to me and say, “Hey, Paul! Can you do this for me?” Not, not for some ego trip, but simply because I’m helping them to achieve what they need to.

There’s a huge amount of satisfaction, when we’re helping others and we see them smile, solve their problem, and generally make their day better.

It’s that that idea of karma. What you put in you, you get out. If we put in goodness and kindness, that’s what we’re going to get back. If we are angry and we put in fear and panic and stress, that’s what we’re going to get back.

We can think about putting people first as about karma, and from a business and leadership perspective we have Servant Leadership. Where we support our teammates and our colleagues. We’re there to help them achieve their goals and their objectives, and to get the results they’ve been tasked with.

When we do that we’re helping ourselves. As out team mates are achieving their results, in turn, we’re achieving ours. So you see, it’s a very symbiotic relationship.

The business perspective of being helpful is understanding what people need to be successful and then providing that right solution. As we go through we’ll be looking at how we can understand our team and clients, and how to provide that right solution.

When we do that, people keep coming back for more. We get repeat business. In many ways, when we put people first an advantage is that we stand above our peers because we’re able to deliver on the projects that others can’t and we’re the reason that our customers and team are engaged.

The idea of repeat business is fundamental for me. Over the years I’ve worked for a large number of different companies, but there are two that stand out. They had a lot of potential with wonderful products and talented teams, but they were so wrapped up in just selling they didn’t really care about their client relationships. Almost all of their business was new, there very little recurring.

Ultimately, both companies failed and that’s really sad for the people that were working there.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learnt from managing teams and seeing other people manage, is that it’s about building those relationships. It’s all about that trust.

As we’re building that trust, people will open up and it makes it easier for us to understand what they need to be successful. It also makes it easier for us to be able to provide the right solution for them, so they can be successful.

Experiments Are Good

An experiment for me is, you just go out and try stuff. You see what sticks. And if it works, great, you do more of it. And if you’re doing something that doesn’t work so well, you stop doing it. You tweak and you move on.

A quote from Buckminster Fuller neatly defines the idea of an experiment:

“Every time man makes a new experiment, he always learns more.”

We’re learning. We’re making informed decisions. We have an expectation as to what’s going to happen. Which complements my positive approach.

I try to be as easy going as I can be. The glass is always half-full. It’s never half-empty because there’s always something in it.

An experiment feels like we’re setting ourselves up for success, because we’ve thought about what we’re going to do, we’ve thought about our variables, we’ve got a theory, we’ve got a method. We know what we want to achieve out of it.

I’m not a big one, honestly, for the whole, “Feel the fear and do it anyway!” or “Step outside your comfort zone!” or the Fail Fast approach. And I get it that it works for certain people. Good for them, right! I mean we’re all individuals and I think that’s what makes the world go round, that’s what makes the world so interesting, we are all so different.

But for me, I’m much more about setting myself up for success and to think that I am actually going to succeed at this, rather than expecting to fail and then having to do something about it.

I’d much rather get my ducks in a row first, and then go out and do it knowing that I am going to succeed.

Advantages to Putting People First

When we put people first the advantage from an employee standpoint, is we are going to stand above our peers because we’re able to grow trust with people and have relationships that others can’t get. Because we have that trust and those relationships, we’re able to deliver the projects that others can’t. Which gives us a huge amount of value and help us grow our careers. And because we’re able to do that, we’re able to get that repeat business.

Which is good for us as an employee. It’s good for the company because repeat business means more income, and income means job security and promotion and growth.

It’s also good for us as consultants those running their own business. Repeat business is what we want to get.

In life, when we put people first we’re a good person. We’re someone that others want to be around, we help people, we make people smile, we
make them laugh. Wherever we go we lite up the room. We’re somebody that people want to be around because we make their worlds better.