Thanks for your additional comments. I agree completely with your thoughts and they give greater context to the story I shared. After reading your comments, it starts to sound like an issue of trust – not just of value. If I trust you, I don’t have to control you.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of extolling ideas and vision at the expense of people. Ideas are easy to talk about. We can own them. We can develop them. We can share them. We can implement then. We can generally form opinions about them without repercussion. And when we get tired of them, we can discard them and move on to the next one.

People require a lot more finesse. I suspect it’s not so much that we consciously devalue people. Most managers I know would quickly acknowledge that people are more valuable than ideas. The problem is that we just don’t know how to relate to the people around us. We can’t control them as easily as ideas. We can’t talk about them as easily as ideas. So by default, we end up ignoring them.

Your dad had it right. The best way to value your people is to show them love, respect, and dignity. He conveyed all that in one simple act. Kudos to him. And thanks to you for a timely reminder.