It’s difficult to know whether someone has your interests at heart until those interests stop aligning with theirs.
When incentives point the same way, everything looks like kindness or goodwill. Vendors respond quickly because retention matters to their bottom line. The team next to yours helps you because they need a favor next quarter. The plumber texts you back within minutes because he knows you have a kitchen rehab coming up. None of that tells you much – it’s just alignment.
Benevolence only comes into play when everyone’s alignment begins to shift.
Earlier in my career, I remember talking with an outside vendor about doing some wireless runs and getting our data closets under control. He came on-site and we did a quick walkthrough together. As we were walking back to our offices, he stopped me and told me he probably wasn’t the best fit. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work, but he wanted to make sure we got the help we needed at a price we could afford.
He pulled out his phone and texted me the number of a colleague who had recently started doing similar work. It was a career-shift for him, and since he was still getting it off the ground, his rates were more in-line with our budget.
We went with his colleague, but I never forgot it – and later in my career, as budgets and needs shifted, we got him 5X the business we discussed in that first meeting.
Most of the time, you don’t get a clean test of a person’s character like that. So when it happens, you notice.
Benevolence answers a different question than competence does. Competence asks whether you can do it, while benevolence asks what you’ll do if interests stop pointing the same direction.
- “Customer-first” is a passive value statement. Walking away from a deal that isn’t the right fit is an active decision.
- High customer satisfaction in a good year tells you the product works. A renewal conversation in a tight budget year tells you how important the relationship really is.
- “We’re a team” is just positioning until somebody has to absorb something that isn’t strictly theirs to absorb.
In practice, benevolence rarely fails through a single dramatic betrayal. It ebbs through small revealed preferences — the incident writeup that was accurate but incomplete, the default setting that quietly served the platform’s interests more than the user’s, the continued deflection that specific problems belong to “someone else.” None of these are scandals. They’re just moments where caring would have cost something, and somebody chose not to pay.
Stated intent is the cheapest thing in any relationship. What I look for is a decision somebody can point to where caring about the outcome cost them something. If nobody can name one, the relationship is transactional. That’s a fine thing to be – but it shouldn’t be confused with trust.