Compassion as a Foundation for Effective Service

Early in my career, I built an application for processing insurance waivers. I built it with very little input from the staff who would actually use it. It was a long form, and I placed the submit button at the top of the page. To use it, a staff member had to scroll all the way down, read the whole form, enter their information, then scroll all the way back up to hit submit. I never noticed the problem. I had only used the form myself while building and testing it, a handful of times, never once the way the people who relied on it did.

Then I visited the staff who used it every day. They processed these waivers hundreds of times a day, they told me, and one of them had developed carpal tunnel syndrome. A design choice I had made without a second thought was contributing to someone’s daily physical pain. I have never forgotten it. That form taught me the principle that has shaped how I build and how I lead ever since: the people using what I make are not an abstraction. Their experience is the whole point.

The word I use for that principle is compassion. And I mean something specific by it: empathy joined to a willingness to help. You cannot have either one from a distance. You are only compassionate when you understand the people you serve, when you put yourself in their place, in the actual conditions they work in.

The best IT professionals I have worked with understand this. They do not see themselves as maintaining systems or closing tickets. They see themselves as serving the human beings on the other end of those systems. I have seen the opposite, too. Years ago, a staff member told me, to my surprise, that policies were his customers and people got in the way. He did not last long in the role. Over the years I have come to believe this is exactly what separates good service from great service.

It is also why I spend so much time out of my office. Proximity is not a nice extra. It is the only way compassion stays real. I walk around campus to remind myself why the work matters. I join campus tours to hear what parents and students are actually asking. I sit in on classes to see the rooms my systems serve. I have lunch with a student most weeks, and I take walks with colleagues and staff. The same instinct runs through the other things I do around the university: teaching a course, advising student organizations, mentoring students and staff, volunteering at convocations and commencement. People are often surprised to see me in those spaces. More than once, someone has essentially asked, “What are you doing here, Joe?” I do not think of these as things I do on the side. They are the job. If I want my decisions to help the people I serve, I have to understand them, and that means showing up where they are.

Because the work lands on human beings. Take financial aid. On paper it is about money: funding, disbursements, forms, and policies. But when you watch a student walk out of the financial aid office in tears, maybe because the money they were counting on was delayed or never came through, you understand something the forms cannot tell you. The people we serve are not processes. They are not policies. They are people, often at their most vulnerable.

I am reminded of it even as I write this. I am sitting in a medical facility, waiting for an appointment, watching: patients moving through, families waiting for them, staff doing their work, and the technology holding all of it together. The systems we build and support are never just systems. They carry people through some of the hardest moments of their lives.

The people on the other end of our work are not the only ones who need this from us. So do the people beside us. One of the most dependable people I have worked with came in one week and was not himself. The work slipped a little. The energy was off. From the outside, anyone could have read it as a performance problem. I did not, because over the years we had built enough trust that he could tell me the truth. He was carrying something heavy at home. Once I understood where he was coming from, I could do what the moment called for. I adjusted expectations. I advocated for him. And he came through the season and went right back to being the person I already knew.

That is the quiet requirement underneath compassion for colleagues: trust. Trust is what earns you the truth about where someone is coming from, and you cannot extend grace to a story you never hear. Without it, a good person having a hard month just looks like a slipping employee, and the instinct is to manage the performance. With it, you see the whole person. Grace is not lowering the bar. It is understanding that people are not machines, and that a colleague who has been dependable for years has earned the benefit of the doubt when a hard season comes.

And it goes both ways. There have been times when I was the one carrying something personal, when I had to step back and could not be fully present at work. Colleagues covered for me. They picked up what I could not and asked for nothing in return. I have been on both sides of this now, the one extending grace and the one receiving it, and the second is humbling in a way that changes how you lead. It is easy to think of yourself as the one who helps. It is harder, and more honest, to let yourself be helped.

This is what a team actually is. Not a set of roles that happen to sit near each other, but people who have built enough trust to carry each other when carrying is needed.

So whether it is a student walking out of the financial aid office in tears, a staff member processing the hundredth waiver of the day, or a colleague across the hall having a month that has nothing to do with work, there is a real person on the other end. When we take the time to understand them, and we are willing to help, we stop completing tasks and start caring for people.

The staff member who thought policies were his customers had it backwards. The policy is never the customer. The person is. Whether we serve them or serve beside them, that has always been the whole job.