Mark Colvard, a United Parcel manager in San Ramon, California, recently faced a difficult decision. One of his drivers asked for two weeks off to help an ailing family member. But company rules said this driver wasn’t eligible. If Colvard went by the book, the driver would probably take the days off anyway and be fired. On the other hand, Colvard was likely to be criticized by other drivers if he bent the rules. Colvard chose to give the driver the time off. While he took some heat for the decision, he also kept a valuable employee. Had Colvard been faced with this decision six months earlier, he says he would have gone the other way. What changed his thinking was a month he spent living in McAllen, Texas. It was part of a UPS management training experience called the Community Internship Program (CIP). During his month in McAllen, Colvard built housing for the poor, collected clothing for the Salvation Army, and worked in a drug rehab center. Colvard gives the program credit for helping him empathize with employees facing crises back home. And he says that CIP has made him a better manager. “My goal was to make the numbers, and in some cases that meant not looking at the individual but looking at the bottom line. After that one-month stay, I immediately started reaching out to people in a different way.â€
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Answer 1 :
Of course they can. They don't have to change their basic moral code, just their perspective. The manager probably had empathy all along, he just thought it was inappropriate to use it in the workplace. In the case cited, the ethic of personal responsibility to the company's prosperity remained unchanged. What changed was the realization that including the human side of the equation was not mutually exclusive of or detrimental to the bottom line, but rather, actually helped employee morale and thus increased long-term productivity.
Answer 2 :
I will hazard a guess that the seeds of empathy already sprouting within him when Colvard signed up for the program are what inspired him to sign up in the first place. A month of exposure to other empathatic individuals is more than enough time to fertilize the sprouted seeds and to give him tips on how to expand the garden of empathy to a culturally functional level. What you feed is what grows.
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