Justin L. Daniels

I heard a story today.

A young man's daughter finally spoke her first word. He was worried because she had reached the age where she should've been articulating more and she finally came up with her first word, "why?"

This was not an accidental word or a sound. She was actually posing a question in response to external stimuli, "why?"

It made me think about management. How do you motivate workers if they don't understand why they're doing something? It's very difficult for them to be invested in a goal, when the big picture has not been revealed to them. Workers are much less likely to be devoted to what it is you want them to do when there is no rationale behind it.

This simple example brought home for me the importance of inclusion when managing.

We as a species utter our first word and it is "why?"

Why am I doing this? Everyone knows that, "because I said so," doesn't cut it with a child, who's brain is not even 1/10th developed, it stands to reason that it won't work on a fully cognizant adult.

Managers need to get people involved, to let them know why they're doing what they're doing, the importance of it, the rationale of how their piece of the puzzle fits in, to make a whole picture. With this simple idea, a manager can get a team of people working towards a common goal.

Without this, long-term managerial success is more reliant on luck than it is on cogent business acumen.