Exploring Human Behaviors That Drive Success in Business  

“Empathy, gratitude and self-awareness are real, and an actual operator uses these things to their advantage.” Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia

Gratitude, empathy, self-awareness, and vulnerability were things I was never expected to pay attention to, or rely on, in my career. And yet for the last fifteen years I have, every day, relied on the following four human behaviors to create positive results in every facet of my life:

Gratitude

“I hate how many people think ‘glass half-empty’ when their glass is really four-fifths full. I’m grateful when I have one drop in the glass, because I know exactly what to do with it.” – Gary Vaynerchuk 

When I set out to start my company there was only one metric in mind: referable clients. Without clients who are willing to refer my work to others, the business wasn’t worth the effort. For a client to vouch for the work produced, and for them to believe the product or service they received was worth their time means two things: they are grateful for the work completed, and they found value in it. In turn, the business must respect the work being done for its customers and be grateful for their investment in the business.

The same holds true for employees. Staff have to want to work for the company they are a part of, and be grateful for their opportunity, just as managers have to be grateful that their employees are investing their time to work for them. Expressing gratitude by small acts is an easy way to remember to be grateful.  Here are some ways to do that:

• Send thank-you gifts and cards. When a project is completed for a client, send a small thank-you gift to thank them for their business. If a team member has put in a lot of extra effort over time, a small gift card can go a long way.
• Give some unexpected (and well-deserved) time off. At the conclusion of a hard effort or a long project that requires many extra hours’ work by your team members, grant them a little time off in exchange for that overtime they just put in. Even if this is just allowing them to leaving at 2:00 p.m. on a Friday.
• Feed the people. Over time our work colleagues can become like family and, in stressful situations, a family meal is always nice. It shows appreciation for their efforts and mindfulness about their effort. Bring in a treat or a lunch when possible to thank them for their time and support. 

Empathy

“Empathy creates human connection at scale.” – Frank Cooper, CMO of Buzzfeed 

People management is not about giving someone a task and waiting to see when it gets done. People management is about understanding the individuals with whom you work, and aiding them to become as successful as possible. Empathy is required for this. To understand a person’s actions is to understand their reasoning and the emotion behind their actions.  It is also to understand that their emotions (feelings) drive every action they take — with either a negative or positive outcome. As a business owner or leader, it is critical to understand the feelings of other people and to rely on a few simple practices:

• Ask about their dog. Over time we see people in a workplace setting and can tend to forget about their home, family, pets, kids, etc. When managing or working with clients or team members, remember that there are other factors in their life, and ask about them. It will support a personal connection and help you understand their situation.
• Don’t ever say “it’s just business.” Everything we do is driven by emotion and, while a business decision may truly be a business decision, someone invested their emotions in the situation. Keep in mind the emotional investment people have made, and don’t dismiss those emotions when giving feedback or changing direction.
• Remember when you were their “age.” Everyone has had to grow and learn in their careers and we didn’t all know everything we do now. When mentoring or working with others, remember the feelings you may have been experiencing at a similar time, and engage as you would have wanted to be engaged with.

Self-Awareness

“Self-awareness allows people to recognize what things they do best so they can then go hard on those aspects of their life. It also helps you accept your weaknesses.” – Gary Vaynerchuck 

To be self-aware is to both accept one’s own weaknesses, and to use one’s own strengths in the right way. Self-awareness doesn’t have to be a deep, meaningful understanding of your every move and interaction – it merely has to be enough understanding around what makes you tick and work the way you do, so that you recognize your own behaviors.

There are two aspects of leveraging self-awareness for success in business. The first is being self-aware of yourself, and the second is having clients and employees who are self-aware, also. These two aspects go hand-in-hand. If you are self-aware of your actions and your mistakes, and respond to them properly, you teach your colleagues how to do the same, thus gaining respect through honesty. If you have self-aware clients and employees, you can mentor and support them through challenges, and they will recognize through their own introspection the opportunities for improvement and drive a successful end-result to potentially negative situations.

While self-awareness, in many cases, cannot be taught, there are some actions that can encourage more self-knowledge throughout your organization and engagements:

• Accept your mistake, fix it, and move on. After all, we all make them, and people will, inherently, be more forgiving if you are willing to be honest, correct the situation, and forge ahead. Adding defensiveness or justification into a situation will only create barriers in professional relationships.
• Acknowledge your triggers, and don’t respond. Everyone says things they may, or may not, mean. Conduct a self-assessment to understand what actions or situations trigger negative responses, and avoid engaging in those scenarios immediately. Allow yourself a little time to breathe, center, reassess, and then reply in a meaningful and valuable way.
• Analyze what you could have done differently. There are always three truths to a situation – yours, theirs, and somewhere in the middle, where the actual truth lies. After a stressful situation, evaluate what you could have done differently that might have changed the situation. Learn from that and leverage it in a future scenario. 

Vulnerability

“Vulnerability is our best measure of courage.” – Dr. Brené Brown, Ph.D 

Few things can hurt more, professionally, than having our work criticized. Our time, heart, and soul go into the work we produce and it is an extension of who we are. The moment that we release that work out into the “world,” it is susceptible to critique and we are susceptible to feelings of humiliation, pain, and stress. There is no easy way to overcome those feelings. We have the ability to recognize that, and we are courageous by putting our work out there — and our colleagues are courageous when they create work, and offer it to us for review and feedback.

• Foster an open, collaborative environment. Set a standard in your community that requires open and collaborative communications. Create situations for clients or team members to provide suggestions and thoughts in a safe way. This will encourage them to speak up more frequently, share their ideas, and create great work.
• Recognize their work is important. Along with having empathy about this, it is important to remember that by sharing their work, they are sharing a part of themselves. Build processes within your organization that support a strong review and feedback loop to ensure that work produced by your clients or team members is always, at a minimum, acknowledged. The scariest thing for someone is to put their work out and never hear back about it.
• Criticize kindly and constructively. To be a successful leader you must encourage kindness, professionalism and constructive behaviors and also provide feedback and thoughts to improve work product. Aggressiveness, condescension, and other negative actions should not be condoned within the organization. Distribute a series of guidelines for providing feedback that encourage constructive feedback.

Human behaviors in business are present every day. To embrace them and leverage them is to recognize that we are simply humans doing business together. The above are just a few examples that can be exercised to build successful teams and businesses with a small amount of effort.