Everything is People

One of my earliest, lasting lessons about the world didn’t come from any classroom or TV screen. Instead, I can thank hands free technology and childhood sports for it.

I was a really active kid, playing hockey, basketball, football, lacrosse, and a handful of other things, meaning I had games and practices throughout most of the year which were usually at least a few towns away. Nine times out of 10 it was my dad who would drive me to and from these things, so we spent a ton of time in the car together back in those days. He would always get work calls on these drives, which would play over the car speakers since he was driving. I can’t remember exactly how this went down, considering it was close to 15 years ago, but I know I used to tease him about subjecting me to such torture. He eventually replied with something along the lines of “why don’t you listen, knucklehead; you might learn something.”

A few weeks of listening later, “Dad, I haven’t really learned anything about how insurance works, you’re just talking to people about random stuff most of the time.” “That is how insurance works, stupid. The technical stuff about how to literally file paper work or analyze a spread sheet is easy, everyone knows how to do the nitty gritty. People are what make it hard.” He went on to explain that, as a (back then) mid-level manager, his job mostly revolved around settling disputes between people. Two people have wildly different opinions about a decision, or someone feels like they aren’t getting enough credit for their work, or someone is demanding some unreasonable accommodation for a business trip, or a whole department is jockeying for a promotion, or someone is going through issues at home and is bringing it into the work place, or, or, or, the examples could go on forever. The point is that issues very rarely involved the product, and always involved the people working on it; relationships between people run the entire workplace. “Everything is people, buddy, if you can figure out the people you can solve any problem.”

I didn’t really get it back then; by the time I got my license and started driving myself to sports I had absorbed more about the technical aspects of insurance (anybody else know what an underwriter is?) than I had of this message, despite him repeating it for years afterwards. There are countless situations that have helped me to understand since, but I’ll just focus on one: my internship this summer.

The internship was out in Utah, and it was my first, making it my official introduction to corporate America. The circumstances were wildly different, but the very careful, mask wearing road trip me and my Dad went on to get out there (since I needed a car, and flying at the beginning of June didn’t seem like a great idea this year) felt a lot like those childhood sports commutes. We talked about politics, about the virus we were trying desperately to avoid, about the protests that were appearing in cities seemingly as we arrived in them (we left maybe two days after the killing of George Floyd), about the election, the craziness of it all, and about the job we were driving towards. His central message never really changed, everything is people, companies, political movements, presidential administrations, the response to the virus, everything.

Of course, he was right. The internship was easy from a technical perspective, my classes had prepared me well for the actual engineering work. People were the more difficult part. My landlord was absolutely insane and was threatening to kick me and the other interns out from day one (long story), I had to try and make friends 3000 miles from home while not knowing a single other soul and while most things were online, my direct team got kind of heated with each other over politics sometimes, Utah is Mormon country, the program was very new so things weren’t incredibly well organized, and I needed to know who to ask for help, etc, etc.

So he was right, but why does it matter? First because, at the risk of sounding a bit like my professors, social skills are just as important as technical ones. Stevens is largely a STEM school, we drill the technical aspects of life hard in our classes, but it won’t matter if you’re good in class if you’re bad with people. You don’t need to be a social butterfly, but you need to be able to read and understand people, and you need to know how to interact with them. Simple things like how to write a less than awful email, and more complicated ones like how to act in tough situations such as when friends are going through hard times or emotions are running high in an organization. It won’t matter if you’re an absolute expert in your major if no one wants to work with you.

Second, most of us are missing a hell of a lot of people and social interaction in general right now. Zoom and other platforms have helped us keep Stevens running, but life from home is definitely missing most of the social aspects that make classes and clubs fulfilling and fun. Everything is people, but people barely feel real when we exclusively interact with them through a screen. The rest of the semester is going to be online so there’s not much we can do to change things, but it’s important to acknowledge how much of a toll remote Stevens can take on our mental health. It’s ok to not be ok.

Third, people are always, always, always more complicated than our preconceptions lead us to believe. Every single person walking this Earth today has a story and, usually, it’s a long one. They all have years of experiences and memories that have shaped their world view and will influence the way they interact with you in the present. It’s absolutely impossible for you to know exactly what’s going on in someone else’s head, the ideals and baggage that have built their world view, and every other little thing that’s going on in their life and adding to their stress level. Keeping that in mind when fighting with someone usually makes it a lot easier to understand their point of view and come to a resolution, but when we flat out reject the opinions of entire groups of people just because of their background, political views, affiliations, or whatever else, it becomes impossible to understand each other.

Last, we, as a society, have a tendency to view organizations not as individual people, but as monolithic entities that all think and act as one. I’m not immune to it either; I’ve just come to recognize it as a bad habit over the past year or two. It happens to The Stute constantly when we make a mistake or put out something controversial; you’d think from the criticism that every single person in The Stute is involved with decision making. I don’t think the critics realize that’s its usually just 7 E-board members (5, prior to this spring) who usually aren’t CAL majors and don’t have any experience outside of The Stute trying to resolve the complicated questions that plague a newspaper almost constantly. The same goes for every other org at Stevens, the school’s administration, big companies, political parties, you name it. Every kind of organization is just a group of people, and all of those people have their own reasons for being a part of that organization, their own backgrounds, and their own decision making processes. Everything is people, and people are always more complicated than they may seem. Remembering those two facts can help us better understand our school and our world.