WHY was the Problem

A few weeks ago, I was coaching a young and upcoming executive who was having all he could do to get his subordinates to react to his requests in a timely manner. It seems everything was late from everyone. His boss had received complaints about this executive’s lack of patience with direct reports and his new-found propensity for yelling and threatening them. Understandably (although not excusably), he would yell at his direct reports whenever they delivered an expectation late.

After digging a little bit, I found that his problem was WHY - actually his lack of using it. It seems that the executive would dole out assignments and not explain why it needed to be done by a specific date or why it needed to be done in a particular way. He did say when he needed it and he would elaborate on how it needed to be done, yet never went into WHY. When I asked him why he didn’t explain why, he calmly told me that he didn’t need to tell people why - he was the boss and people should just simply deliver as asked. There are other ways to think about this.

Old Thinking

Sadly, not only have I heard that before, I’ve heard it from way too many leaders. To a certain extent, there is some legitimacy in feeling that way. After all, you are the boss and people should follow your instructions. The question needs to be whether or not you want people to “own” it enough to not let obstacles get in the way of delivering what is expected and when it’s expected. Otherwise, they will do as told - they’ll dutifully comply versus being committed. If what you want is compliance, then by all means don’t bother with WHY. On the other hand, if what you’d like is people as committed to getting things done as you, then seriously consider incorporating WHY into your instructions.

Newer Thinking

When you take a couple of minutes to explain why (and mind you, you don’t have to), you accomplish several things that will ultimately pay off for you - and pay off well.

First, as people tasked to accomplish a particular task gain insights into the possible costs of failure to meet deadlines, accuracy, or costs, and assuming they are committed to the mission of the organization, they’ll place the proper priority on delivering and preventing lesser priorities from overriding their efforts. This would prevent obstacles from interfering with delivering the expectations. It would also remove your need to yell at them or having to suffer the consequences on the relationships that yelling brings.

Secondly, you take away people’s capacity to misread your tactical or strategic intentions. In the absence of relevant information, many people tend to assign motive to others’ actions or positions. Unfortunately, these assignments are often negative, selfish, &/or self-serving.

Third, you are enacting a key role of a leader: imparting business literacy. You’re teaching a subordinate how to process information and think, how to assign priorities that serve the interests of the organization, and how to avoid the usual traps that distract or deviate us from our intended course of action.

The Power of WHY

WHY is one mighty powerful word when it comes to interaction skills, influencing skills, and as you’ve seen, leadership skills. WHY can help you inspire others, prevent others from misreading your intentions, dig into problems to uncover its root causes, gain commitment vs. compliance, and a lot more. WHY is such a multipurpose word, it’s even the name of a town in Arizona!

Why WHY?

Imagine if at the start of this column I had just simply suggested you use the word why when assigning work, delegating tasks, or simply asking someone to do something, and left it at that. Would you have seriously considered it? What I essentially did in this column is explain why WHY is crucial to effective leadership and management. By explaining why you should consider using WHY more often, I was hoping you would assign it the right priority and do it.