Gary Vee Says You Should Care About Your Employees. Here’s What That Means.
I follow a lot of successful people’s lives and stories because they inspire me to be better. One person I admire is Gary Vaynerchuk — his fans know him as “Gary Vee.” He grew up in Queens (where I now live), and worked in his family wine business. He then pioneered the use of digital marketing and social media to grow the business from $3M per year to $60M per year in the early 2000s. Over time, he founded numerous other businesses including Vayner Media which grossed over $100M by 2015. But, he doesn’t just work on building his empire — he is very intentional about helping others to find success, too. Recently, he posted a thought to LinkedIn that said, “The secret to being a good leader is to actually care about your employees.”
Gary Vee’s quote inspired many people to leave their thoughts. Most comments were positive, while some pushed back on the nuances of his post. One commenter wrote that “caring about employees” was too subjective, and you need to define your terms.
I understood the sentiment of this commenter, yet I agreed with Gary’s quote, despite its lack of specificity. Too many leaders don’t take caring into consideration. For example, Amazon’s leadership principles speak nothing of caring about the team. And while Amazon is a highly successful company, its principles don’t produce a cohesive culture, which could make it a much better company. Let’s explore Gary Vee’s thought about caring leadership and see where it takes us.
What Caring Means
When you care about someone, it generally means that you want them to achieve what you perceive to be their best interests. Parents who care about their children want them to live happy, healthy, and abundant lives. Friends, spouses, and others who care about each other want the same for one another too. And, the same can be said for employers who care about their teams. We care about people to different degrees, and that has a lot to do with what we have in common.
Why We Care About Others
The easiest way to start caring about people is by identifying things you have in common. When this happens, we recognize them as part of our community. Shared interests lead to empower others like us, which strengthens our community, which makes us more powerful as individuals. The most rudimentary foundation for caring is having a shared gene pool.
We have a biological drive to proliferate our own genes, so members of our family are elevated in importance, especially our children. It’s also natural for people to care about others who share their ethnic roots because of biological proximity. We see this across species, too. For example, bottlenose dolphins form cooperative tribes while they’re aggressive towards porpoises, other types of dolphins, and those that “don’t belong.” Humans may be unique however, because we also tend to care more about people who share our values.
Members of the same church groups and religions will connect with others in their communities. Teammates will care about each other when they work together to compete against other teams. And, soldiers will care about each other on the battlefield, which could mean the difference between life and death for the group. This form of caring as an outcome of perceived shared values can even extend to a sense of patriotism, and caring about other nations that appear to share the same ideals and rules of governance as our home nations. And of course, caring occurs between coworkers within a business.
Coworker Caring and Alliances
Often, coworkers will form bonds at work because they spend so much time together, and because they have shared interests. This works best when you have a mission-driven organization, where everyone is aligned with the company’s core values, and works towards achieving the mission and vision of the organization. Coworkers can also bond over a common enemy. This could be in a competitive environment, where other companies are seen as the enemy. It can also happen within the organization, where you have factions of workers competing for scarce resources, or where you have workers organizing against management, such as in unions.
Healthy competition can be fun, and stimulates growth and innovation. But competition for dominance and financial gain can be unhealthy when winning is more important than making the right decisions and the success of the organization. Great business leaders recognize this. So, it is their responsibility to stimulate caring and cooperation among different groups, departments, and individuals. One way to do this is by leading by example, and demonstrating that you care about your employees, contractors, and even the success of other partner organizations. This is easy when interests and values are aligned, and harder when they aren’t.
How Great Leaders Keep Team Interests Aligned
Great teams begin with good hiring practices that go beyond assessing a person’s skills and experience. Most hiring managers know to get a feel for how a candidate might fit in with the rest of the team. This is helpful, but you need to take it a step further.
Great Interview Questions
Develop some of your interview questions to get a sense of how aligned candidates are with the company’s core values and mission. For example, one of Home Depot’s core values is “excellent customer service.” With this in mind, a hiring manager might ask a candidate to describe their worst experience with a customer, and how they handled it. The answer to this direct question, as well as other spontaneous questions that might come up would show indicators on how much — or little the candidate values customer service.
Potential hires also care about companies sharing their personal values. In a recent Qualtrics survey, 56% of workers said they wouldn’t even consider a company whose values they disagreed with.
Quarterly Meetings on Core Values
When people are already on the team, you have to remind them of the company values periodically. One way to do this is by having quarterly meetings focused on this subject. Using the above example, you could ask each of your team members to bring up a customer service story during the meeting. Then, evaluate how they handled it and ask the group to give feedback on how it could have been handled even better.
It’s easy to care about your team’s interests when they’re aligned with your company’s, but what about when they’re not? For example, an employee may plan to gain experience and training with you, and to then jump ship as soon as a better opportunity arises. So what do you do?
In this scenario, you must tap into your emotional intelligence. Your interests are in training the worker so that they can produce more value for your company, and not so that they can utilize those skills elsewhere, possibly with a competitor. They want these new skills and experience, and they want higher pay.
Be Generous With Pay Increases
If you can afford it, you should give people pay increases as their skills improve. This can reduce the likelihood of someone leaving for more money elsewhere. In the long term, this will probably be a lot less costly than spending the time and money required to find an equivalent replacement.
Stay On Mission
What’s even more important than pay increases is to stay on mission. If you hired this person in part because they shared the company values, then it would be emotionally difficult for them to leave, especially if they’ve formed bonds with other people on the team.
Accept that People Will Leave, and Be Happy for Them
Sometimes, a team member will leave in part because their values are no longer in alignment with the company’s. When this happens, let them go. They’re doing you a favor and you can invest in bringing someone on board who believes in what the company is trying to accomplish. Don’t be sour, either. Be supportive of their decision and cooperative. When you really care about people on your team, you’ll still want to help them, even when your interests are no longer fully aligned.
How to Act in People’s Interests
People feel good when they know you care. They feel even better when that caring manifests in tangible ways. As a great leader, you should be intentional about acting in people’s interests. This means that you need to set time aside to help them. Build mentoring sessions into your schedule where you talk about each person’s personal and professional goals. Keep communications open and be encouraging. While you want to be approachable, you also need to be proactive about setting up regular meetings.
When you do this, people will be very likely to share their ambitions, and you won’t be caught off guard if it comes time for them to explore other opportunities. In fact, these sessions will help you plan solutions that help your team with their goals in a way that also helps the company.
Be an Amazing Listener
Most importantly, be a great listener. Ask them about their successes and challenges at work, as well as their aspirations. Get to know them too by inquiring into their personal interests without overstepping any boundaries. Additionally, don’t just take their words at face value. Pay attention to their specific word choices and expressions to gain insight into what hasn’t been said directly. And, be empathic even when their concerns may sound silly at first. If someone expresses real concern about something, you should treat it as seriously as they are, without judgment. People can feel a variety of strong emotions about their career paths, so show them that you’re receptive.
Imagine that you have a content creation team that writes for your company. One person hints that they want to take on a management position. But, there is no room for upward mobility because your management roles are already occupied. A solution would be to create special projects that this person can lead. Over time, some of those projects could mature to the point that they require entire teams dedicated to their continued growth. When this happens, new leadership positions will open up and your worker can get everything they want, without going to one of your competitors.
Give Employees Flexibility
Many people want one more thing beyond higher pay, purposeful work that’s aligned with values, and mentorship that shapes a career path abundant with the growth they desire. They want to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Some will want a better work-life balance. Others will be happy with a work hard, play hard environment. They’ll be happy with long hours, as long as the work is purposeful. They may even push off their vacation time to the point where you almost have to force them to take time off. You can help both of these groups achieve their goals by providing them with as much flexibility as is possible for your business model.
Support Vacation Time Off, and Also Workcations
For example, if your business survived for two years with a predominantly remote workforce during the pandemic lockdowns, then it can survive into the future in the same way. Give people the flexibility to choose whether to work from the office or from home, and they’ll be more loyal. In fact, it’s a great idea to encourage people not just to take their vacation time in full, but to also go on a number of workcations. These can be short trips that people take, where vacation time is not deducted. Instead, they are still expected to maintain a full-time schedule. Only, they can do their work from anywhere, and they can spread their hours out however they choose.
For example, a worker in New York might take a workcation in Boston. Let them adjust their meeting times so that they can get their work done during different pockets throughout each day, with plenty of time to enjoy leisure activities. This flexibility is not available everywhere, and it has tremendous benefits. Workers will have more opportunities to refresh throughout the year, and this means that they’ll be more effective on a consistent basis.
Gary Vee was right. Great leaders care about their teams. Their investment in people’s interests is often rewarded with loyalty and great work. So, write down the many other ways you can help people to achieve their goals in their personal and professional lives. For each of these, come up with plans where the company’s interests are also served. If you take the time to do this exercise, you’ll have happy, loyal employees who stay with you for the long term.
