Rule 1 of 21 · Chapter I — Show Up as Yourself
Learn every person's name and one thing they care about outside the work before you ask them for anything.
Why this rule exists
People decide how much truth to give you based on whether you seem to see them as a person or a function. Asking for effort before you have shown any interest reads as extraction, and it sets the price of future requests higher. The information also has practical value: you cannot tell when someone is struggling if you never knew what normal looked like for them.
In practice
In your first week, work through the roster deliberately — names, pronunciations, and one real detail each: a kid's football club, a night class, a sick parent, a band. Write them down if your memory is unreliable; nobody is offended by notes, everybody is offended by being called the wrong name in month four. Then reference the detail once, later, without making a performance of it.
When it doesn't apply
In a genuine emergency you ask for the work first and learn the names afterward. And with very large groups, this applies to the people you deal with directly — faking intimacy at scale is worse than admitting the limit.