13 - The People at Work are People

5 minutes

You’ve probably felt it.

You’re invisible until they need something from you.
They refer to you as headcount, FTEs, or a human resource.
They expect you to sacrifice for them but terminate you with an impersonal email.

They treat you like a tool to be used instead of a person.

Sometimes, we do it too.

Someone starts talking and, before they even finish, we’re already thinking:
Can this person help me?
Are they worth my time?
How do I get them to do what I want?

At home, we try to treat each other with love—wanting and doing what is best for each other.

At work, we tend to treat each other as things engaged in a purely transactional relationship.

Most of us don’t actually believe people should be treated as things. But society and work have trained us to act like it. After a while, it starts to feel like gravity — just the way work is.

Treating people as things in a transactional relationship does real damage to us. It also causes us—as individuals and organizations—to underperform our potential.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

People are people wherever they are. That doesn’t change when they walk into the workplace.

Practicing love for people in all areas of life—home, work, and community—has big benefits.

Let’s start with two things we misunderstand: love at work is not soft, and transactions are not bad by themselves.

Love at Work Is Not Soft

Love gets a bad rap at work. We don’t define or understand it, so the word comes to mean whatever. Usually, love is misunderstood as being soft, touchy-feely, and vague.

Treating people like things at work is often easier.
Things don’t require trust, commitment, or coaching.
Things can be replaced if they become a problem.

Things don’t require you to Become better to lead them better.

Loving people well is harder.

Love at work doesn't mean making everyone comfortable. It doesn't mean coddling, avoiding conflict, or lowering standards.

Love means wanting and doing what's best.

That requires wisdom. Commitment. Listening. Knowing the person and what they need to Become their best.

It means coaching them up. Telling them a hard truth when it helps them grow. Sometimes love says, “This isn’t good enough. I know you can do better.”

Love challenges you to Become your best so you can help your people to Become their best.

Love is hard.

Transaction Is Necessary. It Is Not Enough.

Work involves transactions. You do the work, you get paid. A client pays for a product or service. There are deadlines, expectations, results.

None of that is the problem. Getting these things right builds trust between those involved in the transaction.

What matters is how you treat the people engaged in the transaction. Are you wanting and doing what is best for them—or using them as nothing more than the means to get what you want?

Many of our daily transactions are quick—like getting food at a drive-through. Even in these minimal transactions, we have a choice. How will I treat the fast-food worker?

I don’t even think about them. I just take my food.
I treat them as an hourly wage worker.
Or I recognize an opportunity to practice love by smiling, asking how their day is going, and thanking them.

A Split Life Forms a Split Person

You Become what you repeatedly think and do.

When you treat people as people, you get reps practicing love, and that’s who you Become.

When you treat people as things, you get reps practicing purely transactional relationships, and that’s who you Become against love.

Those are not just two different styles of relationships.
They are contradictory ways of Becoming.

Practice both and you Become divided against yourself.

When you see that split in someone else, you trust them less. When you see it in yourself, you respect yourself less — because you know you are not living as one whole person.

Every time you treat a person as a thing, that division inside you gets deeper and wider.

No longer whole. Fragmented. Opposing versions of yourself occupying the same body. That doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It means you’ve been practicing something without knowing it.

That fragmentation breaks the most important relationship. The relationship that’s the foundation for all your relationships—for how you understand yourself and life.

It breaks the relationship you have with yourself.

Same Three Habits. Different Relationship.

The rules for good human relationships don't change when you go to work.

Seek Wisdom — What's true, what's best, what does this person actually need?

Practice Love — Want and do what's best for the person, the client, yourself, and what you're trying to accomplish together.

Get Results — Make it real. Deliver. Help people Become. Build trust.

Then do it intensely in the Now. This person. This conversation. This rep.

What Happens

Trust. When people repeatedly experience your wisdom, love, and follow-through, they trust you more. They go out of their way to help you.

That creates a relationship and culture where they are confident making decisions and taking appropriate risks. They tell you what’s really going on. Less CYA. They own mistakes and don’t let problems fester.

Becoming. They practice Becoming more capable, more confident, and more courageous. You practice patience, honesty, listening. Those habits don't stay at work.

Outcome. Better decisions are made faster. Teamwork, culture, commitment, and performance grow.

Wisdom and love don't compete with performance. They drive it.

The person you Become at work goes home with you.

Practice impatience and using people all day, and those habits come home.

Practice listening, honesty, and love, and you Become those in all areas of your life.

One life. One person, Becoming through all of it.

One Person in the Now

Pick someone you usually deal with as a role, not a person.

Ask a question you actually want the answer to:
How are things really going?
What are you working through right now?

Put your phone away. No distractions.

Then actively listen.
All attention on them.

Don't rehearse your response while they're talking.
Don't start thinking about what you need from them.

Let them be the only person in the room.

Afterward, reflect:
What happened?
Who did I Become through it?
Did trust grow or weaken?

One rep.

The rules were never different at work. We just learned to act as though they were.

Same person. Same habits. Different relationship. One life.

Next week, we move into another relationship where wanting what's best matters enormously — and where love is often misunderstood: what your kids actually need.

Seek Wisdom. Practice Love. Get Results.

Make what is best real.

— Pete

  Get one short piece each week—practical, direct, built to help your life actually work.