"Shoulding" is Messy

Originally Published in The Business Journal, December 2006

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received came from the pastor who married my wife and me. We met with him several times before the big day for pre-marriage counseling. I don’t recall the context of the particular session, but I remember his words clearly:

Don’t should all over yourself or others.

Spend life worrying about things you should do, should have done, shouldn’t do, shouldn’t have done, and you’re not going to be very happy. It’s important to plan ahead and establish a life code, sure, but it’s equally important to not be too rigid or beat yourself up too much. Live well, be kind and so on, and things will work out. As far as shoulding on others is concerned, do it and you risk frustrating them and quashing their potential.

Discussing this in the context of advertising and marketing makes more sense than you might think. You see, the good pastor’s words are valuable counsel for people in charge of employees, and employees are crucial to marketing success.

After all, who sells products and services? Who provides the technical and customer support that fulfills a company’s brand promise? Who solves challenges for businesses and their customers? In short, who makes or breaks a business? Employees.

Tom Duncan, founder of the Integrated Marketing Communication graduate program at the University of Colorado-Boulder and author of “IMC: Using Advertising & Promotion to Build Brands,” says this: “For marketing communication messages to have maximum impact, a company must integrate the following: employees, customers, business partners, databases, the corporate culture, corporate learning and the corporate mission.” It’s no coincidence that the first group on this expert’s list is employees.

Successful companies integrate employees into the business as much as possible. One important way to do that is through – get ready for a buzzword – empowerment.

In discussing employee empowerment, Duncan says they need to be “listened to when they have ideas how to better serve customers even when those ideas involve other areas of operations.”

Managers and owners who should on their employees miss those ideas. They cause their people to crawl back into their shells and prevent them helping the company achieve its goals. Ultimately, shoulding makes employees less satisfied with their work and jobs, and less loyal to a company and its mission.

Shoulding can be damaging even if the intention is to provide constructive guidance. Consider the following statements: You should approach the project this way… vs. You could approach the project this way…

Substituting could allows the speaker to make his/her preference known while leaving the door open to alternative, perhaps better, ideas and/or ways of doing things.

We’ve all heard the old cliché: happy employees are productive employees. Here’s another: clichés are clichés because they’re true. Shoulding not only boxes people in, it also stifles creativity and drive, two things that can be very beneficial to a business.

Obviously, there are times when the boss has to be the boss, the final word on how things will be done. But until one of those times comes, it can be advantageous to keep your should where it belongs.

Employees are your most valuable assets. Presumably you hired them for their brains and abilities. Make sure you don’t slam their potential; don’t should all over them.