Category: Heart, Mind
The president of my company and I have an on-going friendly feud. The topic is over whether or not you can teach someone to care.
He says you cannot because it is innate. People either care or they do not.
He is winning the feud because of the nature of his position. He will be making a speech and talks about how “some in the training department think you can teach people to care but I don’t think so because…” blah blah blah. I never get a chance to rebut. He is clever that way. That’s why he is the president and I am a lowly trainer. (Well, that and the fact that he is imminently qualified.)
So I will use my lofty platform here to make my case.
1. Training is done in three areas; attitude, skills and knowledge. Caring is an attitude so you can train for it.
2. We teach our children to care. It is a value we instill as we parent them. If you can’t teach someone to care we would not be able to do this.
3. Where I think we may agree is that while we may be able to teach people to care (in general), we may not be able to convince them to care about the same things we care about. People care about things for self-interested reasons. The difficulty (or impossibility) is to get them to care about what I care about. I do not claim that this is always possible.
So how do you teach people to care?
Let’s use the acronym C.A.R.E. (in no particular order):
C – Connect to their experiences and motives
In training we talk about WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). You will need to show the individual that there is a personal reason for them to be concerned. If there is no reason for them to care you can bet they won’t. The fact that you care is not enough of a reason. The fact that they get paid to care will only be a reason if they feel a high enough risk that they cannot find satisfactory employment elsewhere.
A – Awareness of the situation
Many people are unaware of the reasons to care. They are unaware of their connections to the motives and their own experiences that give them reasons to care. If you are going to teach them to care you must raise their awareness level.
R – Respond to the situation
To teach someone to care means you show them how to respond. Awareness is not enough. If I am aware of a need but do not move to meet the need I really do not care. The act of caring comes through the behavior. The behavior may only be sitting silently with a friend in need or letting someone know they are in your thoughts and prayers. Or the behavior may be spending your money to help a charity or using your time to service a client. The caring is in the response.
E – Empathize with the person
Empathy is the intellectual identification with the thoughts or feelings of a person. This is different from sympathy which is being in harmony with the thoughts or feelings of a person. You do not have to agree to empathize. But it does mean you try to put yourself in their shoes so to speak. You try to feel what they feel. To teach someone to care you will want to raise their Emotional Intelligence so that they are more in tune to the thoughts and feelings of people around them. Help them become aware that “I” am not the center of the universe.
By doing these things we can teach others to care. And we should. We don’t teach people to care about jobs. We show people how their job impacts people and we teach people to care about people.
As poet Maya Angelou said, “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.”
dm
Thoughts? Examples?