Just explain why

“Why won’t they just do what I tell them to do?” This was a sentence uttered in frequent frustration by my senior. For some reason it escaped his own reasoning as to why the developers under him wouldn’t do what he told them to do. It was like he expected our organisation to follow military standards where people were to follow orders from their superiors without questioning them. Did he not understand where he was working? I actually never figured out why he never figured this out. Perhaps it was culture and/or family that raised him to think this way.

The thing that baffled me though was he would almost yell at us if we asked why? He would say “why are you asking why, you don’t need to know and you should do what I tell you to do!“.

And the reason I asked why in the first place? It was because I had caught him out several times giving bad advice. “Don’t do this” or “never use this” and then finding out after actually testing it out like a kid who is testing their parents, that it wasn’t a problem like he made it out to be and sometimes it was actually better to deviate from the advised standard. This sort of behavior on my part did put me on a bit of a ‘shitlist’ with him. But it was totally worth it (for me). The lessons I learned by not always doing what I was told, experimenting on my own and actually critically thinking brought me benefits that both shape my personality and keep me sharper and more aware today.

But I’m digressing here. If he just explained to them why they should be doing what he tells them to do, they would probably agree and then actually do the right thing.

Explaining why, reveals intent and modifies people’s values. If there’s a disagreement in that discussion it becomes immediately apparent why the person wouldn’t have done what they were asked to do. Because they had conflicting beliefs and maybe they had good reasons. This discussion could’ve led to a healthy self correcting course to optimizing for the best action.

When someone doesn’t explain why in an instruction sufficiently, there’s a chain of failure that follows that extends well beyond that single interaction. Not explaining why, causes deviation in values. If people are not constantly aligned in values with their leader, they start to stray and develop their own way of thinking that might work against the group. It’s so important that a leader keeps in constant interaction with the group and bonds with them to the extent that they share values frequently and the values are checked for compatibility.

The only reason you leave them out of the loop like in a military style organization is when that kind of command structure is required because of the strategies employed that might require a need to know basis. Since getting captured and spilling secrets is part of reality, protecting against that is a very real reason. However, in the office, this is unlikely the case and people tend to work better when they know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

In fact this also leads to less micromanagement because the leader can trust that their people will do the right thing when they know their values are correctly aligned. This whole value alignment thing cascades into greater success and I’d say leadership is actually just that.

A large part of leadership is just showing people what they need to believe. You can do that by example, and you can do it by explaining why.

Which is why consistency is so important. A slight hiccup and a slight irrational move and bam, you’ve confused their value system. Their values want to go one way but they go the other way because the leader is being irrational. Huge problem. All of this is connected, isn’t it super clear when you think about it like this?

Moving on from the definition, I found that when I was faced with other people who were failing to do this I had to take matters into my own hands and do something about it.

And it was to teach them how to align other people’s values. I actually suggested one time to my manager “I think they’d really appreciate hearing how you explain it, you should do it tomorrow morning at the stand up”. Through consistent suggestions in their ear and use of my social connectivity skills, I found it was actually possible to manage my managers if I built any sort of relationship with them. And this all came about because I forced myself to talk to my managers for the reasons mentioned in the greeting co-workers article.

Don’t let me be the only person to tell you all of this though. Simon Sinek has a lot more to say about it and he goes much deeper into the question of why. He’s got a video talk here. And he wrote a book about it and that should probably be recommended reading here.