This Is the Only Thing That Really Counts

I have horrible sinuses, and I live in Northern California, which means a lot of pollen and agricultural pollution. Not a great combination.

It got so bad that about 15 years ago I had surgery to go in and scrape away all the tissue, giving them a kind of fresh start.

It was better, but I still suffer through several miserable sinus infections each year. Over the last few months, it became one every few weeks, which won me a golden ticket to a new ENT.

The first time I saw him, he took a look with a scope up my nostrils, told me what he saw, showed me what he saw, and offered a treatment plan, and it has been a lot better.

I was back last week for a follow-up.

He could have run the whole appointment in four minutes. Look at my records, look up the nose, ask the perfunctory “How are you doing?” question. Tell me what to do, move on to the next patient.

Instead we talked through what was actually going on, what my options were, what he’d recommend and why. Then we ended up talking about something else entirely, how he’s been using AI in his own work. He is, right now, my favorite doctor. Not because he agreed with me about anything. Because he treated the ten minutes he had with me as an opportunity instead of a transaction.

That is the whole idea of people-first, and almost nobody actually means it when they say it.

To most people, “people first” means employee first. This is a big problem. First, most companies that say “people first” or “employee first” don’t mean it. Second, the real test, the bigger test, is that “people first” has to mean everyone. Employees, customers, prospects, the world around the organization, everyone that organization, that leader touches.

That’s a tall order, a huge challenge, and it will never be perfect.

Being people-first is not simply saying “yes” to people. Saying yes is easy; if someone asks me for something and I just say yes, I have made them happy for exactly as long as it takes for consequences to show up.

Sometimes people ask for things that are genuinely short-sighted for them, for the organization, for other people they care about. Too often they can’t see the future, that a “no” or a “how about this instead” would be better for them and everyone.

In fact, a leader who says yes is not a people-first leader; they are simply a people pleaser, and over time being a people pleaser always blows up.

I understand this is a slightly paternalistic idea. But the alternative, treating every request as equally wise simply because a person made it, is not respect. It’s dumb. It is abdication.

I like the idea that every human interaction is a kind of product you deliver. But the word that fits better for me is opportunity. Every conversation, every phone call, every five-minute exchange at a nurses station or a checkout counter is a chance to leave someone slightly better off than you found them, or to waste it.

Which gets to the only test I think actually matters, and it is uncomfortably simple: How did I make the people I came into contact with today feel?

Not what did I accomplish. Not what did I get done. But how did the people on the other side of my day feel after I was done being their leader, their doctor, their employee, their vendor?

The problem with this test is that it is almost impossible to measure, and almost impossible to say, “If you do these things, have this attitude, it will make you more money.”

You cannot put “how did people feel around me today” into a quarterly report. There is no dashboard for it. Which might be exactly why so few organizations actually build around it. We measure what is measurable, and what is measurable quietly becomes what matters, even when everyone agrees, out loud, that the unmeasurable thing is more important.

Some companies have tried anyway. Southwest built its entire early identity on Herb Kelleher’s idea that employees come before customers, on the theory that a well-treated employee treats the customer the same way. It worked for decades.

And it’s worth pointing out that Southwest’s culture is being tested right now in a very public way, under pressure from activist investors demanding better financial returns, including the company’s first layoffs in its history. I bring it up not as a clean example anymore, but as proof of how fragile people-first becomes the moment it collides with a spreadsheet.

Costco’s Jim Sinegal made a similar bet, paying and treating frontline workers in ways that made Wall Street nervous, on the theory that the math works out over a longer arc than any one quarter can see.

I don’t have a tidy answer for how you build an organization around something this hard to measure. I know the test I want to run on myself more often. Not whether I said yes to the people around me today. Whether I helped them see something bigger than what they walked in already believing, and whether they left the conversation feeling like more was possible for them than they thought an hour before.

I failed that test more than once this week. I’d like to think I’m getting better at noticing when I do.