Help Everybody Everyday

As I was interviewing with one of the owner's of my current firm, he posed this question.

“There is often a adversarial relationship between marketing and the technical staff. How will you deal with that?”

The question took me by surprise. I had never experienced that. In my world, your veins don't have an adversarial relationship with your heart. My answer was simply that the relationship between marketing and the technical staff doesn't have to be like that. The problem lies within the mindset of the marketer. Many of them do not see their moral obligation. The best way for me to explain this is with a personal example.

The Story of Wing

Sometimes a co-worker can have such a dramatic impact on your professional and personal life that it changes your outlook on life and work. Wing was that person for me. Wing was the Lead Mechanical Designer for an engineering firm I worked for. He had been there for many years and personified the definition of “company guy.’ He was the first one at the office in the morning and the last one to leave at night. Wing’s commitment to the firm could not be shaken. If you were unlucky enough to go in over the weekend, you would probably see Wing there. He was one of the most well-respected people in a 600+-person firm. Everybody loved Wing, including me. Even the President of the firm had at one point served under Wing’s direction. Wing proudly displayed various pictures of his son and daughter throughout his office. Despite his success at work, these were his two crowning achievements.


Wing’s sense of humor and outlook on life was legendary. As a young marketer, I was tasked with conducting a marketing presentation for our office every quarter. Public speaking has never been my forte. So although I felt comfortable in everybody’s presence, once I stood in front of the office, I became a bundle of nerves. My quivering voice and shaking hands made it quite apparent. From the audience, Wing spouted, “Remember, you still on probation!” I had been with the firm for three years! But that was Wing’s way of telling me, “Hey, you are among family, this is no big deal.” Its funny, but to this day once someone cracks a joke at me, my nervousness goes away.

A couple months from that day, Wing developed brain cancer. As I said, Wing’s commitment was unshakable. He would still come into work. He was still the first one in and the last one out. But we were seeing Wing slowly lose his battle against cancer. He lost weight. He underwent surgery but would still walk into the office with a giant scar around his head. Chemotherapy was adding to the attack against his body. The admins would bring him food, but Wing was unable to eat. Before our eyes, Wing slowly died. There was nothing we could do about it.

Practically everybody at the office attended Wing’s funeral. During the funeral, Wing’s teenage daughter walked up to the podium. She was clearly distraught and inconsolable. With tears streaming down her eyes she said, “My father spent so much time at work, that I never got a chance to know him. Many of you people here know my father better than I do. So all I can feel is robbed.”

Among the rough and tumble engineers and construction professionals, there was not a dry eye in the crowd. As we walked back into work, my office cohorts looked like zombies. Reality had slapped everybody in the face, including me.

On that day something became quite apparent to me as I questioned why I decide to come into work every day. The reason we work has less to do with us and more to do about the people we care about. Some marketers proclaim to “love what they do.” But if you question them, they are most likely to admit that there is something that they would rather be doing with the ones they love that doesn’t involve marketing construction-related services.

Why is this important? Because your job is to keep people employed. And just like you, they work to support their families and the people they love. That’s a heavy burden to bear. Heavier if you ever witnessed or conducted layoffs. And although it’s sometimes tough to put in the extra effort or get out of our comfort zone, we must not forget why it is we do what we do.

What Wing's daughter said was true. I saw Wing from 9am to 6:30pm every day. So I spent 9.5 hours with him. If Wing slept 8 hours a night and spent an hour driving to and from work, that only left 5.5 hours per day to spend with his family. So why would I view Wing as any less important as any other member of my family? What I tell my directs is this, “look around at the people you work with. You'll spend more time with them then you will with your family and loved ones. These people are members of our family.”