Unleashing your business potential through care and compassion

A high care culture is vital for building a long-term business. Without care how can you expect loyalty from customers, suppliers, or employees? People are not stupid; they quickly work out whether a relationship is one sided or purely transactional. Those relationships don’t tend to last and are unstable. Then, if one bad thing happens the relationship can break down or one party will move on.

But with care comes stability and loyalty. Even when things are tough relationships that are genuinely caring will endure. This is just as true in business as it is in personal relationships. If you encourage all staff to treat suppliers, customers and each other with compassion and care then trusted and robust relationships form over time. These will weather the storms that life throws your way well.

This means doing the right thing over the easy thing or even the most profitable thing. There is always a temptation to make the decision that makes you a quick buck in the short term, but this is often costly in long term. A caring strategy pays off over time as people remember kindness and it is human nature to reciprocate that. Just as this is kind of mutual respect is essential for a good marriage, so it is with a business relationship.

Three ideas to unleash your business potential with a caring culture.

1 Demonstrate it first

Demonstrate that you are there for your people by giving excellent benefits and a great working place. This often means giving before receiving. If you support people when they are having a tough time outside of work, or need a bit of extra help then they will return the favour. Trust needs to be demonstrated, fancy words and mission statements are all fine and dandy but actual, tangible, demonstrations of care will almost always be returned in the future. Caring is infectious!

2 Never punish doing the right thing

Never punish people for doing the right thing even if it’s not the most profitable thing. This can be a tough call sometimes when there are targets to hit. We all have financial pressures to hit the numbers but we need to remember the bigger picture and the long term strategy. Hitting the numbers at the expense of ethics is always a long term losing strategy.

3 Don’t work with people who don’t return it!

Don’t work with people that do not return kindness! If any of your suppliers, customers, or heaven forbid, staff do not return your kindness then don’t work with them. Even if that means a loss of profit. Not everyone is nice in this world and bad apples who are unable to get with the caring program must be ejected ruthlessly whether they are suppliers, customers, or employees. The good thing about a genuine caring culture is that it tends to naturally weed out bad apples anyway. If someone comes in a disrupts the harmony of a group, then the group tends to reject them. A caring culture, in that way immunises the company from bad actors.

Conclusions and next steps

This article is one in our series on unleashing business potential through people power. We hope you found it useful. Please feel free to share it or, better still, let us know what you think with a comment. If you want to know more about how to unleash potential through people power then check out our other articles in the series.

And, if you want to know more about how our third-party logistics service can help you unleash your business potential by taking away all the hassle of logistics then please do give us a call.

Unleash your business potential series

1. CURIOSITY
2. COLLABORATION
3. CREATIVITY
4. CARING / COMPASSION
5. CALMNESS
6. ACCOUNTABILITY