dummied

The importance of why

At a glance

This entry was written on March 14, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled You already are a blog ....

The entry following this is entitled Fork in the road.

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After spending some of last week interviewing for a management position in my current employer's internet department, I've been giving a lot of thought to management styles over the past couple of days.

That might be because I haven't thought a lot about it in the past, or maybe because, from the interviews, I could tell that a lack of management experience was my biggest weakness.

Whatever the reason, something struck me the other day: I find myself more motivated when I know "why" something needs to be done, not just that it needs to be done. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most people are affected in a similar way.

Often, especially in the newspaper business, we do things because, "That's how we've always done things," or "That's just the way its done." Whenever I hear these phrases at work, a little voice in the back of my head says, "Why?"

Now, usually that voice, which I suspect is an astral version of the six-year-old me, just stays in the back of my head or as a grumbled mutter. However, when I manage to actually ask the question, the quality of the answer has a lot to do with my satisfaction with my work, the quality of my work and the motivation behind my work.

I'm generally a worker that will do something even without a good reason for it; but knowing, in detail, the reasons behind doing it make a big difference.

In the end, I think a good manager needs to not only provide a sense of priority (or what needs done) but a sense of context (why it needs done).

In other news

While I wait to hear anything following my job interview, I'm also going to be away for a week to visit family. Pam and I are loading up the dog in the back of my Toyota Matrix and trying desperately to pack light enough that we can fit four cases of Southern Style Iced Tea in the back for the trip home (you'd be surprised, or perhaps not, at just how hard it is to find a good glass of sweet tea in the Great American Northeast).

I'll be in and out for a couple of days while I try to decompress and readjust my eyes to the real world instead of a computer screen.

In NCAA tournament news, and as a public service for those of you still filling out brackets, my upset picks this year are: Kent State over Pittsburgh, Pacific over Boston College and, in a rarity, 15th-seed Winthrop over two-seed Tennessee.

Happy picking and may your bracket make it into the weekend.