Happy Friday! Here’s your weekly tip on how to be more human at work

Pretend you’re talking to a child

Now hold on. Hold on. Not so fast.

I don’t mean: talk down to people.
I don’t mean: assume people you work with don’t know anything.
I don’t mean: ask coworkers who’ve come out of the bathroom whether they wiped.

I do mean: assume that your coworkers will be more focused on their reality than yours.
I do mean: learn to read the signals they put out — whether they’re using their words or not.
I do mean: explain why, don’t just issue orders.

Children live in a world where giants (that’s you and me) tell them what to do and what not to do all the time. They want to be good. But they don’t know or understand the rules. So they try to figure out how things work and why, so that they can extrapolate to other similar situations.

Adults are not that different. (Let’s be honest, we’ve all worked with some people we wished would grow up!) We don’t just want to do what you tell us. We want to understand why. We want to see the pattern. We want to experiment and learn.

So take the time to enable that for people. It might seem slower at first; but it’s a lot faster over the long run.

This message was brought to you by the humans of Rule No. 1.