Why Say Why
This morning while I was waiting for Kayla to get ready for church I was killing some free-time researching a few local stocks. I was trying to determine why they were currently trading at such low prices. I was actually researching one of our larger customers. We have done a lot of work with this company and I know they are growing and expanding and yet their common stock share price has dropped from the neighborhood of $25/share to $5/share in the past year. While doing my research, I came across what appears to be the transcript of a talk given by Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway.
This talk was filled with interesting and useful information on a variety of topics, but a portion I found particularly interesting was an example Charlie gave to illustrate a point he was making. He was talking about Carl Braun and said, “His rule (Carl Braun’s) for all the Braun Company’s communications was called the five W’s you had to tell who was going to do what, where, when and why. And if you wrote a letter or directive in the Braun Company telling somebody to do something, and you didn’t tell him why, you could get fired. In fact, you would get fired if you did it twice.”
This struck me as a simple but wonderful idea, albeit a bit harsh. As a manager I am constantly in a position where I am asking employees to do various tasks with little or no explanation. After reading this, I thought about my own experiences doing the bidding of my managers. I could recall many instances where I became upset about being asked to do something. Usually because I didn’t understand why it needed to be done or why the individual asking couldn’t do it themselves.
Over the last few years as I have transitioned into a management role I have found that this is more difficult to do than I previously thought. As a manager, my time is often spread very thin and I rarely have time to stop and explain every detail of each decision. Due to this, I am likely frustrating my employees just as my previous managers have frustrated me. This same disconnect can easily happen between two employees on the same level as well. One employee asking another to perform a task may be seen as one employee being lazy and pushing their tasks onto another. This may or may not be the case and given a proper explanation for the request the employee is more likely to happily complete the task.
Encouraging yourself, and your employees to communicate the reasoning, or “why,” behind their requests will help in a couple of ways. First, it will help others understand why they’re being asked to do something. If justifiable, they will be less like to become frustrated or disenchanted with the organization and you as a manager. Second, this will discourage employees and managers from unnecessarily passing work onto others. If someone doesn’t have a real reason or explanation of why they need to pass on a task then they will be less likely to pass the buck.
The entire transcript can be found at:
http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/art_stockpicking.html
No related posts.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment