Where do I start? This week, the beginning. Monday morning. Settling back into things. Reading the headlines. I don’t tend to click into a lot of news stories. Here and there, mostly. Scanning the news bits, toward the end, I came across this one:
A Morning read: As protests raged in Minneapolis, Charles Adams, a police officer and high school football coach, called some of the players on his team. “Before I hit the streets, I have to tell you guys something,” he said. “Just know that I care.”
Like the woman at the City Market who said, ‘Let’s call it… interesting,’ that last part caught my attention. “Just know that I care.”
So I grabbed hold of my coffee, sat back a little, and read Charles’ story. It was really good. Particularly that part, about how he told the guys on his team he cared. That’s huge, and also rare. Definitely so in the world of work. Yet, here was this ‘baritone-voiced bear of a man’ telling a bunch of young high school men he cared about them.
The reason that headline caught my attention was that word, ‘care.’ As I learned to become a manager, I’d find myself asking, ‘How am I showing I care?’ Charles chose the direct approach. That always works. There are of course lots of ways. Why did it matter that the folks who worked for me knew I cared about them? The same reason it did for Coach Adams.
Adams proved himself early on by showing that he cared more about how the players were doing off the field than anything else. “That way, he could drive them hard on the field, and they would listen.”
For me, I discovered caring was what being a boss was all about.
