How to Be a Truly Caring Manager
Caring managers are compassionate, challenging, and tough. But do we really understand these important words?
Two Workgroup members said that Sam was their best boss ever. Sam is both an engineer and a pastor who gives everyone his full attention and helps all his employees find their best path. He once gave up his own bonus because he felt a teammate deserved it more.
Sue is another great boss: raw in her emotions, yet still empathetic. She cares “how you’re doing as a human.” Russ’s standout ability as a manager is how he listens. He brings out the best in everyone; everyone wants to shine for him. John had been the boss of another Workgroup member. “Not an easy guy, but always respectful and candid. He was more interested in my success than his achievements.”
Great bosses have different styles, but they are always caring. To understand them, we must understand this simple-sounding word.
Semantics Matter: Caring is Compassion in Action
“Love…a four-letter word that is easy to spell yet impossible to define.” ― E.S. Carter
The language of human relationships is tangled, but it can be revelatory to study the definitions. Semantics makes us smarter.
These comparisons were created by Google AI and checked against the definitions and sample sentences in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. This is just what AI’s large language models are for. These definitions are solid, if subtle.
Caring vs. Compassion: “Caring is an action that involves showing kindness and concern for others, while compassion is an emotional connection that involves sharing and understanding another person’s feelings.”
Empathy vs. Sympathy: “Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, while sympathy is feeling sorry for someone else’s misfortune without necessarily sharing their emotions.”
Compassion vs. Empathy: “Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone else’s emotions, while compassion is the desire to help someone who is suffering.”
“Caring” is the word that contains all these other words when we’re discussing management. You can’t be caring without being compassionate, and you can’t be compassionate unless you’re sympathetic and empathetic.
The 3 Characteristics of Caring Managers
Compassionate: See the definitions above. Being genuinely compassionate requires really knowing about the other person’s life and attitudes and feelings—in short, it first means being an active and patient listener and observer.
Challenging: Meaning, they set challenges that keep you moving toward your goal. This also takes a clear understanding of your knowledge, skills, and attitudes as well as those of the organization and its customers and vendors, people with whom you’ll need to work.
Tough: Here, “tough” means that they don’t shrink from difficult personnel issues, and they can make difficult management decisions, which always entail risk. Society seems to think “caring” is different for men and women: women who are tough in the workplace risk getting labelled badly. This is another reason understanding the semantics of “tough” is important.
A Moment of Transformation: In our interviews, we discovered that caring managers have one other critical thing in common: they all had an experience that taught them the moral importance of putting others first. We’ll share some of those stories in a later post.
How Can You Teach People to Care for One Another?
By example: Even a first-time manager has enormous influence over their staff. Everyone is alert not only to what their boss says and does, but also to what they don’t say and do. One word of kindness can radiate for months.
By study: For many people, scripture is the best first instruction about compassion. I’ve lamented the lack of serious reading among businesspeople: the great works of fiction, history, science, and philosophy are hard to read but worthwhile to read. Bang your head against Aristotle’s Ethics; you’ll be a better person for it.
Through discussion (3 good questions):
- Who taught you about caring for others?
- Why can caring for others be difficult?
- How have you atoned for accidentally hurting someone?
With work, we can awaken caring in ourselves and others—and then make everyone’s world better.
