Our new starters, and the inverse law of love

Our team recently grew with the addition of Louis, Customer Success Manager, and Mia, Sales and Marketing Assistant, both of whom are under 25. It got me thinking about our culture, and how we want to support them.

Every company says it cares about its people. Equally, apparently. Same values poster, same wellbeing survey, same all-hands warmth distributed in a thin, even layer across everyone from the graduate on their first job to the executive on a six-figure package with an incentive scheme attached.

I don't believe it. I don't even think it's the right goal.

Here's what I've come to think instead: the love a company owes you moves in the opposite direction to what it pays you.

Money is a form of care. It's just the bluntest one.

When we put someone on a very high salary with a very high incentive scheme, we're not only buying their output. We're settling an account. We're saying: here is a large amount of certainty, and here is a large amount of upside, and in exchange we're going to ask you to carry risk, absorb pressure, and be substantially self-sufficient.

That's a real deal, and it's a good one for the person taking it. But it is a deal. A big chunk of what a company can offer a human being has already been handed over in cash and equity. The account is closer to square.

Which means the senior, well-paid person's relationship to love inside the business flips. They're not the recipient. They're the source. Their job is to give it downwards, to the people who haven't been paid to be self-sufficient yet.

The junior has taken none of that deal.

Someone who's twenty-three, in their first or second proper role, on a salary that lets them live but not much more, with no leverage and no cushion and no clear sense yet of what they're actually good at — that person hasn't been compensated for risk. They can't be. They don't have the surface area to absorb it.

What they need from us isn't money we haven't got. It's time. Patience. Someone senior sitting with them for an hour that could have been billed. Tolerance when they get it wrong, and the second and third go at it. Someone noticing that they've gone quiet in stand-up for a fortnight. Someone shaping their career deliberately rather than leaving it to whatever work happens to land on them.

That is enormously expensive. It's just expensive in a currency that doesn't show up in the payroll run.

So: money flows up the organisation. Love flows down. And the higher you sit on one, the less you should expect of the other, and the more you're obliged to hand out.

Why this one matters to us specifically

We build software for care organisations. Our whole proposition is that the people doing the hardest, lowest-paid, least-visible work in this country deserve better tools and more attention than they get.

A company that says that outwardly and doesn't practise it inwardly is hollow. If we lavish support on the people who already have the most protection and leave the twenty-three-year-old to sink or swim, we're running the exact pattern we're selling a fix for. The internal culture has to be the same shape as the product, or the product is just marketing.

The obvious objection, which I take seriously

This is not a licence to be cold to well-paid people, and I want to be clear about it because I can see how the idea gets misused.

Senior people burn out (I've been there a lot!). High earners get ill, get divorced, lose parents, hit the wall. None of that is means-tested. Basic human decency — checking in, giving someone room when their life falls apart, treating people like adults with lives outside the building — is really important. It doesn't go down as your salary goes up.

What scales inversely isn't decency. It's scaffolding. The structural stuff: second chances, close mentorship, career-shaping, the institution absorbing risk on your behalf. That's the thing we should be spending disproportionately on the people at the start, not the people in the middle of a good year on a good scheme.

There's also a version of this that becomes an excuse for neglect, where "they're well paid, they'll cope" is how a business rationalises never giving anyone senior any development, any honesty, any thought. That's not the principle. That's just a company being lazy and calling it philosophy.

The test I actually use

When I'm trying to work out what our company owes someone, I ask one question: if this person has a bad quarter, who is going to support them?

For a junior, the answer had better be us. There is nobody else. No savings, no reputation, no network, no incentive scheme sitting underneath them as a net. If we don't catch them, they fall.

For someone senior and well-compensated, the honest answer is: largely themselves. That's part of what the package is for. And frankly, if you're being paid to be a net for other people, you don't get to be in the net at the same time.

Different responsibility, different situation, different amount of love.

Not equal. Fair.

I wish Mia and Louis every success at Leafnotes, and hope that in six months they can look back at this post and agree they felt the love.